And I’m not talking about coffee! 🙂
Not long ago my husband and I had a conversation about the benefits of grinding away at something. We probably sounded like a pair of old geezers touting the best celebrations only come after the greatest challenges—a line of thought young people might not appreciate, at least in a day when everyone on the pee-wee team gets a trophy and everyone is a winner. We agree it’s important to nurture self-confidence, but what better way is there to achieve lasting self-confidence than to find success after grinding away at something difficult?
Both my husband and I are blessed with jobs that allow creativity, albeit with different results. At the end of our individual grind toward success, my husband will have a working robot, electric car, or new avenue of curriculum making physics more visual and easier understood. When I’m finished, I have a new story, filled with research I enjoyed along the way, different characters I came to know during the course of telling their tale.
But the finished product rarely represents the grind it took to get there. The best athletes, the best teachers, the best leaders and storytellers are the ones that make their task seem easy. That’s because they’ve explored the many avenues of failure; they know the pitfalls firsthand. Success may be achieved via more than one route, but discovering the many dead ends comes with time, effort, repetition, consideration, contemplation—in short, through the grinding experience.
When I start a new story, I know my research into the setting will tempt me into all kinds of tangents and rabbit trails that aren’t essential to the plot I loosely envision when I begin. Still, some of those tangents might be worthwhile to explore, even if it isn’t immediately apparent how they can be successfully used. I do hate to waste time researching something unnecessary, but if there is a promise of deepening my plot or characters, following a new line of research may be invaluable.
Or it may be a complete waste of time.
And yet, I always say no writing is ever wasted, just as my husband says exploring possibilities always teaches him something.
So next time the grind starts to get to you, just remember that’s part of what makes success more likely.
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