Making Through It

I’ve been my own boss (for better and for worse) since 2009, and I’ve been a professional maker-of-things (for readers and listeners, not employers or clients) since 2010.

Since then I’ve made all sorts of things (for both my own satisfaction and to pay the bills) through wonderful times, but also troublesome ones.

I’ve worked through illnesses (inconvenient and severe), injuries, and breakups. I’ve worked without electricity and internet access. I’ve worked without my favorite tools, I’ve worked through glitchy updates and software misconfigurations, and I’ve worked as my entire industry has collapsed (or dramatically changed shape) around me.

It’s probably obvious that the way we work when everything’s going marvelously will tend to differ from our approach when everything’s gone sideways.

It’s maybe less obvious that one’s view of one’s work, one’s preferred cadence of operation, one’s rituals around performing the requisite tasks, and even one’s philosophy of the work one does (how it should be done, ideal outcomes, etc) might also differ.

For a long time, I considered myself professionally resilient: skilled at doing the job, no matter what might be going on around me (and what that job might be).

I’ve written books from the back seats of cars, I’ve located the one square-foot of desert where I had a signal on my phone, from which I could (oh so slowly) upload my work for the week, I’ve given talks to exhausted, half-conscious crowds—and things generally turn out okay. I figure out how to make it all work.

What I didn’t realize until the last handful of years is that part of “making it work” is being flexible with one’s perception (and even definition) of the task, the output of that task, and outcome one expects as a result of generating said output.