One, two…1,000. After stealing some time before work and making solid use of my breaks I managed to craft 800 hopefully enjoyable words before the end of the workday. Then, in a flash of brilliance I wandered home without emailing my quasi-completed work home with me to finish before the clock strikes midnight and my little dream turns into a pumpkin. I thought about heading back, but I’m hopeful that only 3 days in there may be an extra 1,000 running around somewhere in the mind. I was considering at some point allowing myself the occasional hiatus, for both my sanity and the quality of the words that spill forth, but it’s waaayyy too early to begin tinkering with the rules. Besides, working under a deadline, no matter how self imposed seems to be a skill worth cultivating any time, and I guess now might be a good time to step up to work with what I believe. I wish I could say that this second edition was an inspirational moment of triumph for the endurance of the human spirit , but when I think that way all I see is “Deadline: The Movie” and wonder if I couldn’t slap together a decent enough screenplay for some exec to purchase and put in the vault for when they consider making “Stretch Armstrong 2” or “Girls Gone Mild: Utah edition”.
How would someone even consider what deadline would be the antagonist? Would it be a decision about a marriage proposal? Would the other decision be to stop cheating on this deadline with the application for the protagonist’s dream job? Who then would be the comic relief? How about the insider knowledge that buying 30 subscriptions to Sports Illustrated would ensure victory in the Publisher’s Clearing House? Very Hollywood yes, but I then foresee the plot twist being a night out in Vegas that derails every deadline and leaves our hero naked but for shoes about 100 miles outside of Tijuana and the delusion that deadlines are just optional and he should run off with his new hippy wife to make special bread out of Quinoa and Love.
Now that I reread that, I’ve no doubt that this could easily be better than “Van Helsing” but is the story above really that different from any of real life, literature or film? Perhaps the book should come first, so that Hollywood could really take it and run – I would love to see just how thin a concept could evolve. Then my little series could join the ranks of the Adaptations, Covers and Reworks, and we would have one more thing to talk about besides the weather and just how dumb our world seems to get. Even better, I could only hope it would join the ranks of Fight Club or Requiem for a Dream – books so savagely depressing that a standard movie goer would leave in a bit of shock. Just think of the crushing deadlines, “a true investigation of the human spirit caught in a world that fights to tether it from the infinity and the heights that it is capable of soaring.”
On the level though, that review (sorry New York Times Book Review, those words in that order are mine copyright 2010) does actually speak to a truth that has become more and more clear as time passes: we truly are tethered to and are shaped and defined by the deadlines that we set. I would even argue that they seem to provide the structure to our experience and existence. Deadlines that we fulfill allow us to set another deadline for a project that is more in line with our goals, those that we miss either become renewed motivation to reset and try again, or to find another area that we can set new deadlines in order to progress, leaving the goals of those projects as “learning experiences” (or ideally, learning what we don’t like).
The longer I sit with the idea, the more that I see the before hidden deadlines that accompany all of our motivations, be they craft mastery, bringing pleasure, relaxation, money, etc. In fact, as long as we have expectations we have deadlines set both for ourselves and for others: we get angry at a loved one when they are late, or do not follow through on what they say (and implicitly, by the time they say they will it), we get down on ourselves when we don’t master a skill or get the answer to trivia (in the appropriate amount of time), or more obviously when we get that sneaking suspicion that we are not the people that we are supposed to be, which also says “I should have been by now”. Even the act of forgetting – there are few things more frustrating to me than when I’ve forgotten that perfect word to polish off the idea or that perfect melody to go with the song I’ve written. Given a long enough timeline I know I would get it back, but I needed it be there now, damn it!
So then is the trick to being kinder to with our world and is to realize that 1. We are always setting these timeframes for people, objects and skills without acknowledging that in many circumstances we simply don’t have the raw materials necessary for success and 2. Others are setting these timeframes for us. I’ve argued earlier that we know the difference between a poor effort and an impossible project, yet we fail to distinguish between what is practically possible and what would happen in an ideal world. I know it’s absolutely the basis of me perfectionism – I expect all 8 cylinders to work when I need them to, and to give the quality that I expect from my top work. Of course this is a mindset that just begs for unhappiness, because the minute you need other resources (people, learning, money) you move out of that ideal space and into the realm where success is dependent on having the right tools at that time, tools which simply may not be available.
From there the question becomes one of understanding just what deadlines we’ve set for ourselves that we may not have realized. Unfortunately for my fellow frustrated doers and I out there we do not have what we need until the exact moment that we have it, and not a second before. They say (and one day I will figure out and expose who they actually are) that it takes 30 consecutive days to make a habit, and of course 10,000 hours to master a skill. Luckily, we seem to pick up skills that we aren’t aware we’re acquiring (see the idea of the “Head fake” from Randy Pausch’s “The Last Lecture”), ones which will come to aid when we need them most. The only thing we can really do then is keep doing trying to add new tools to our kit so the next time we’re up against a deadline that perhaps we have not seen we will achieve it with skills we didn’t know we had. Good luck.
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