Why Effortlessness Takes Effort
The Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi once told the story of a masterful cook who butchered an ox with just a few cuts. Instead of chopping without aim, he made a few incisions until
“Flop! The whole thing comes apart like a clod of earth crumbling to the ground.”
My grandfather told me that story once when I was too stupid to understand it, but then I reread it in Byung-Chul Han’s book Vita Contemplativa two decades later and became obsessed with Han’s books.
His books, for me, demonstrated the same effortlessness as Zhuangzi’s cook. Unlike those yawn-worthy philosophy papers I’ve read in college, Han brought complex ideas down to earth in just a few sentences. And instead of banging my head against Hegel for the fifth time of the week, flop! The concept falls apart under Han’s writing and I finally understood them.
I started stalking Han after reading through his oeuvre and found an interview in EL PAÍS where he explained his writing process:
“I’m extremely lazy. I work in the garden most of the time and play the piano. And then, maybe I sit at my desk for an hour. Maybe I write three sentences a day, which then becomes a book.”
Feeling inspired, I crawled out of bed the next morning and tried to practice this laziness.
At the time, I was working on my honour’s thesis and I tried with all my might to sleep, drink, walk and (sometimes) wipe my ass like a philosopher. So naturally, Han’s philosophy of doing nothing was an attractive alternative to hating myself into writing during library hours. After all, the former looked a lot sexier and more felt like less work.
Everything was great on the first day. I got up and made a coffee, then another one, then I dusted the whole house, then I worked in my family’s garden, then I folded all my laundry. By the time the afternoon slump rolled around, I marvelled at how clean everything was around the house. I was practising the art of effortless being and did everything right.
The only problem? The word count on my thesis remained exactly where it was the day before:
ZERO.
This laziness stint took care of everything else but the work. So, after thinking about it for a while, I realised that this whole effortlessness thing might be a giant sham.
The reality behind that effortless façade
My girlfriend and I met through a mutual friend who connected us via Instagram. I remembered looking at her Instagram feed while thinking to myself: gee, her life looks absolutely amazing.
There was an effortless elegance to her photos. The feed looked like a backlog of a floating camera documenting every second of her life, and “sprazzatura” would’ve been the perfect word to describe her work… Until I hopped on the other side of the feed and started my shifts as her photographer.
Here’s her process. She would pick a location, pose and ask me to take 50+ burst shots. Multiply that by 3-5 locations, that’s around 200 photos in her camera roll every day. Sometimes the phone would overheat so much that we had to use mine as a backup, but that’s only the start…
The real work lies in sifting through the 500+ photos she had collected throughout the week. The shot couldn’t be too composed or too spontaneous. The lighting had to be optimised for lightroom editing and all that work easily turned into a 20+ hours-a-week gig. So, behind every photo on her feed, there were hours of overheating phones, tearing her hair out over colour correction and painstakingly removing imperfections in Lightroom.
I’m not naturally good at doing what I do
My girlfriend’s militant photo editing regime got me thinking about my own creative process. A lot of people say that I’m just naturally gifted at creating videos, but the real process looks a lot more like this:
Before I hit record, I would always spend over a month writing the video up as an article. I believe that writing about an idea is the true test of its maturity because a weak idea would usually sound stupid when jotted down on the page.
Then I would put the article out on a blog (Medium, and now Substack) to test its flow and relevance. And if one of the articles took off, I would convert it into a video script and practice it five times before hitting record.
Of course, all this looks rather effortless when it’s packaged into a finished video. And if I were an asshole, I could certainly tell people: yeah man, the whole thing came to me in the shower and I just hit record. I could certainly pull a Byung-Chul Han and pretend that I sit around and do nothing until inspiration strikes.
But the reality is that my talent is a loaded gun and only work ethic can pull that trigger. Nothing I produced throughout my career flowed out of me in a fit of inspiration. Most of the time it looks like making careful incisions and adjustments until flop! All the drudgery falls apart, leaving that polished voice that always seems so effortless.
Like Miles Davis once said:
“It takes a long time to play like yourself.”
Until next week
Robin
