Work as hard as you can on one thing and see what happens
Image by Fabio Marciano from Pixabay
Yesterday me and my wife listened to Dr Jordan Peterson’s lecture in Stockholm, with the same topic as the title of this blog post. As a person who is extremely high in openness, I find this especially interesting. People with this personality trait, creative people, can often have a problem that they keep shifting from one thing to the next without ever finishing anything. I can recognize myself in this to a certain degree. But I also know that I am not too extreme in this regard either. Raphael, a friend of mine might very well be the most creative person I have met. And he told me something that is probably only is visible to someone in the 99,9th percentile in creativity (i.e. way higher than me, even if I should be in the 99th percentile…). “Rikard, you are an artist, but you are also very practical.”
Most artists aren’t like that. A “real” artist has a burning desire to create, that is so strong that they cannot NOT be creative all the time. And that can be a huge problem in life when it comes to crucial tasks like settling down and paying the bills. Which is in no means any different than the life of a consultant or an engineer. You need to do some boring commissions to bring in the money that can finance the fun stuff, like development projects. You must start by cleaning the dishes and work your way up from there. This adaptation is usually no big deal for us engineers because we are indeed very practical. But for an artist, this is on a whole other level. To ask a hyper-creative person to delay gratification by handling a bunch of boring commissions can be near impossible. I get that now. And as I said in the introduction, I am a creative person, but I am not a hyper creative artist. Sure, I also do not enjoy those boring commissions, but I do not suffer from them in the way I could see Raphael suffered from similar tasks. Consequently, I can tell from personal experience and grit, that by charging headfirst through those boring commissions for years on end, you will indeed do fewer and fewer of them. And more and more of the fun stuff. But remember, I am looking at a time horizon measured in a two-digit number of years.
Anyway, it was an interesting coincidence that Dr Peterson chose this topic on his lecture, because I have had some serious internal debates with myself during the past months about whether I am focusing enough currently or if I am too diverse. I am working 80% in an acoustical consultancy firm called Acouwood and 20% as an adjunct associate professor at Umeå University. Anyone who has had two or more jobs simultaneously knows that the sum is never 100%. It is always more, and that drains your energy faster because of the lack of focus. So, I tried to figure out what my life it would look like if I would quit one of these jobs and focus 100% on the remaining one. Conventional wisdom would surely propose that it would be the best for me. But either way I looked at it, here’s what I concluded. Should I focus completely on my role as an acoustician I would need to sacrifice teaching, which is something I love. It would be like selling a part of my soul. So why not focus entirely on teaching then? Because I want to put my money where my mouth is. I believe that the best teaching is achieved when I teach real life lessons that I have learned myself. In my role as an acoustician, I gain tons of experience from the “real world” and real building projects. I can tell anecdotes, stories and I can present data I have acquired in big field measurement series. I have access to the latest and greatest measurement equipment from Norsonic and all the relevant engineering software. These are things I could only dream about if I would have been a full-time teacher. And consequently, my teaching would become more theoretical and lose most of its practical aspects. It would lose the spark in the same way that my consultancy would suffer in communication training. To spend hundreds of hours in front of an audience (i.e. your students) will grant you invaluable skills with people, that I frankly do not know how else you could acquire? Certainly not by working 100% as an acoustician, which is a job that is more focused on things. Teaching is focused on people.
On one of my recent lectures in acoustics, I improvised a couple of practice calculations from a school project and presented them to the class. Real problems that clients have paid us money to solve. And then something great happened. The room went silent. I could see that I had captured the students’ attention in a way I had never achieved before. You could hear a needle fall. It was one of those cases when you are in the right place at the right time, doing the right thing. And that’s when I realized what will happen when you work as hard as you can on one thing. I hope you have or will experience the same thing too. It is life-changing stuff. It is the same kind of magic that can happen when a troubadour chooses the perfect song, and the dance floor explodes. You try various songs out, iterate and finally after a lot of practice and iterations…BAM!
So, what I learned from all of this is that apparently, is that I am working as hard as I can on teaching – even if it is only 20% on paper. But those 20% are dependent on the other 80%.