Reduce Stress by Separating Effort from Earning
In a recent TED talk entitled A different way to think about creative genius, Elizabeth Gilbert “shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person ‘being’ a genius, all of us ‘have’ a genius.”
Back before the Renaissance, all of the great artists and thinkers were believed to have some sort of spirit that helped give them insight:
If your work was brilliant, couldn’t take all the credit for it. [...] If your work bombed, not entirely your fault.
This rings true with a recent personal struggle I’ve had of seperating the outcome of my work from the actual work itself.
Separating effort from earning.
Think through a few scenarios where assuming we’ve earned something causes problems:
- I’ve been at this company for 15 years, I deserved that promotion
- I’ve been schlepping at meaningless jobs for years trying to be an artist. I’ve paid my dues.
- Why is that guy getting clients over me? I’m better than he is!
I’m sure you can come up with a few more.
However, if you begin to realize that your effort is far from the only thing that effects the outcome, the stress begins to melt away. You’re relieved of a large portion of the responsibility and can therefore easily move on with the rest of your life.
You put in the effort but you don’t earn anything.
But you’re also not completely off the hook.
When I think of “effort” I think of the work you put into pushing an incredibily large boulder up a hill.
Kind of mindless.
However the definition of “effort” from dictionary.com is:
exertion of physical or mental power
The mental power here is what I want to focus on.
Your effort needs to be thought through, studied, focused and so on. Merely pushing really hard against a brick wall isn’t good enough.
The kind of effort you put in matters.
My opinion seems to land on a kind of threshhold. You have to put in the right kind of effort that will get you to a certain threshold of success and then from there it is no longer your responsibility.
Maybe the book you wrote was just as well researched and written, however it collects dust without ever getting a publishing deal.
Could be your ‘genius’ bombed.
My encouragement would be to do the sorts of things that will allow your ‘genius’ to act. Put effort into becoming a conduit so when your creativity shows up, you’re ready to act instead of wasting all of your time watching TV.
Put the effort in, then detach yourself from the outcome. You’ll live a longer more fulfilling life.
