In his Masterclass on screenwriting, Aaron Sorkin contrasts writing to painting a fence. He says that writing requires you to be in a good mood, but your mood doesn’t matter when it comes to painting a fence. Sorkin's point is that to do our best work, we must be in the right frame of mind. Mindless work, such as painting a fence, only requires we go through the motions. Painting fences is my specialty.
I often find myself choosing to do mindless work when I know that I should be doing something else. I do this all the time. In fact, I did it 30 seconds ago while writing this blog post. I saw an email come in that I knew I could deal with immediately and I shifted my attention to address that, rather than focus on the more challenging task of writing. I didn’t judge the email to be a higher priority, my subconscious recognized it as an easy opportunity for victory, so I took it. Of course, this...
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