Why I think like an athlete
Creative work as a sport. You can just do hard things.
This is the first edition of the Why series. This is a series I’ve been thinking about since I started collecting ideas in my are.na channel about why I like kitsch, why I’m interested in textiles or why I use certain words, like artifacts. ‘Why I think as an athlete’ is the opening essay because it is something that has been in my mind after the world cup and my unofficial retirement from roller derby. Becoming and athlete shaped me in many ways, gave me discipline, love, grit, commitment. Made me a better communicator and leader. I’m really grateful for everything I learned and I want to share more about how this relates to my creative practice and my approach to design.
There's a sentence going around the internet that says ‘you can just do things.’ I propose an alternative: ‘you can just do hard things.’ Being an athlete, or a creative, is hard, being a good one is even harder. It is not impossible, it is just really hard. But that's okay, because the more you understand how to do hard things, the more you can do them repeatedly.
There’s a famous talk about closing the gap by Ira Glass that reminds me a lot of the experience of becoming a better athlete. He says that when you begin making things, there is a gap between what you want the final result to be and what the actual result is. And in order to get there, you need to do a lot of work. But between doing a lot of work and actually getting better, you have to go through the very uncomfortable phase of producing ‘bad’ work. I’ve been following his advice, most of the concepts and ideas I’ve been publishing online are a part of a project called Gap work, and some of the skills I’ve been using to tackle this project come from what I learned from playing sports.
In the process of becoming a better athlete, there's a huge gap between what your body can physically do and what you dream of doing. I've been a roller derby skater for twelve years yet only became a good skater after four or five years of practicing with an almost religious devotion. The experience with the process of becoming a better skater and team player inspired me in the process of getting better in my creative work because I'm not focusing on winning or losing, but on doing my best at all times. In order to do my best at all times, there are four main things I keep in mind: being intentional (know why), practicing (devote a lot of time), building endurance (keep going despite being bad at it) and resting (recover so you can keep going).
Being intentional (know why)
The only way to get better as an athlete is going through the grueling process of improving your shape, your fitness level, your technique, your mentality. There is no shortcut. That process may take years, normally takes years. And there is no one else that can do it besides you. There is no quantity of research, books, videos, and podcasts that can replace getting up and doing it.
At some point, your own conversation with yourself becomes the big differentiator. ‘Why am I doing this?; is a common question when you're in the middle of a really hard workout and your body wants to stop; ‘I can't’, one of the most dangerous assertions. How you answer when these thoughts arise is different for everyone. No one can tell you what the answer is, or what the right thing to say is. Knowing yourself, your motivations, your strengths and weaknesses is key, and makes the difference between becoming good or not; between quitting when it gets hard or keeping going despite it being one of the hardest things you've ever done. All of this can be applied to the creative process as well.
Motivation is a tricky thing, it’s so personal. And there’s a lot of bad advice on the internet about motivation but nothing replaces real talk with yourself and understanding why you do things. There is a lot of harmful motivational speech, normally involving negativity and being hard on yourself. It’s rooted in fear and it gets conflated with the concept of motivation in general. That may work for some people but my hunch is that this isn’t good long-term. And if you are really serious about getting good, it’s important to think about what you can do and sustain long-term. Using negative talk to convince yourself to go to the gym everyday at 5 a.m. may work for a month or two, but does it for an entire year? Not sure.
No one can tell you what your best motivation is, because it’s deeply personal, but I can talk about mine. My motivation is time. I think about it a lot. And two things are true about time: it is inevitable and, intentionally or not, I'm choosing what I do with it. There's a certain number of hours/days/months in your life and a lot of weight into whatever you decide to allocate those hours into. I take the inevitability of time as an opportunity to shape my life, decide what is more important to me and allocate hours everyday to it. Every day, I ask myself: ‘what am I doing with my precious time on earth?’ Knowing my why and having it clear in my head is fuel in the low-energy days. I know I want to do many things. I know I want to be a great designer. Not because of ego, awards, recognition or lots and lots of money (although I'm open to lots and lots of money) but because I deeply care about everything I make. My career is a big part of what I do with my precious time on earth, of course I want it to be good, I want to be proud of my output. I can be intentional because my motivation is clear: my time and energy is limited, and the things I consciously chose to do are meaningful, no matter how big or small. There’s intentionality in every small step I take because I know they compound to better results. I would be doing a disservice to myself, my time, and my creative inner life if I didn’t tried to always do my best.
Practicing (devote a lot of time)
Figuring out your motivation goes first because without it’s impossible to do the immense amount of reps that you require to actually get better. Your motivation to get better at creative work can be similar to mine or vastly different, but once you figure it out and have it really clear you can always go back to it to refuel and keep going. Going back to Ira's video, yes, the key is to do a big amount of work to close the gap. There is no shortcut. You really have to do a big amount of work.
Athletes learn this because it’s only with practice and repetition that you can get better. Here's Kobe Bryant talking about it. Training is possibly the thing an athlete does the most, Olympic athletes are known for training every day and more than once a day at that, averaging 20 or 30 hours a week, 4-6 hours a day. They devote a lot of time to their practice because it is the only way to get better. Training is about repetitions, memory, technique, getting stronger and also about feelings, instinct, knowing your body and mind. In the creative practice as well, it is important to repeatedly do creative work so you can grasp technical aspects, how to trust your instinct, how to build the muscle to do something else that you couldn't do before.
The more time you devote to your practice the better you'll get, that's almost guaranteed, but you'll get way better results if you do it intentionally. Athletes don't get better because they're training only one part of their body, practice has to be holistic. I love the concepts of total work of art and total design because they both involve thinking of everything being created in a given moment for a piece. In the same way that a body is a system – buildings, websites, brands are systems and need to be thought of in their entirety. Intentional practice allows us to get better at the things we need to get better at. By identifying and focusing on the weaknesses, and doing a million repetitions of this one thing you're not able to do yet, it is possible to improve the overall system and the entire body of work.
Building endurance (keep going despite being bad at it)
In order to practice a lot and endure the many years of your work not being good enough, there’s a huge challenge in store. It’s to look at your work without judging yourself. This phase is one of the hardest to do. Facing the discomfort of making things that are not quite good while knowing they can be so much better can make you feel terrible, like a bad artist/designer/creative. And if you have a bad attitude, perfectionist tendencies, or a pessimistic view of life, this is where you quit. And the only way through is to fight that impulse, to get into deep conversations with yourself about why this ugly thing is ok. That’s why I like to call them process pieces.
Process pieces can be messy, but it’s better if they’re messy. Ugly. Rough. Terrible, whatever you want to call it. But they're studies. And we can learn about that from athletes when they say that training is harder than actually performing because it is in training that you need to go above and beyond. Do things that are not that good so when you're actually doing the thing you want to do, it comes easy to you.
Think of process pieces as the many mistakes that an athlete makes during training. Mistakes are sometimes good because they reveal their weaknesses and where they need to focus their efforts next. Losing games teach you more about what you actually have to work on. Treating every piece as a process piece frees you from the perfectionist-over-thinker voice and allow you to explore wildly and make every mistake you want, and studying every ‘mistake’ then becomes the most important thing, because you understand what you like and what you don’t like, and you can take action into making it better.
In Gap work, some of the first versions of an exploration are an excuse to take the idea out of my head and onto an artifact. Below there are two examples of the same idea: an exploration of visualizing excerpts from books. v1 is project #5, back then, I took that idea to an acceptable end result and I stopped, because polish wasn’t the goal, the goal was to make the thing exist first. It is visible now to me what mistakes I made in the first version. Instead of waiting for the artifact to be perfectly shaped, I moved on to different projects and ended up going back to the same idea months later. v2 is project #42, and I feel way more satisfied with the answer visually, it is not yet quite where I want it to be, I can still see many mistakes I want to fix, but I can always come back to it and explore once again. It is serious but also not serious, one of my favorite things about the web is how you can make multiple versions of the same idea, discard, repeat, improve or redo as you please.
We can also learn from artists. I love finding studies from artists. Here are some Michelangelo studies. They're messy, you can barely understand what it is, but you can see that they were building memory, exploring avenues, not judging themselves for the end result. Some are more detailed than others, some are very rough, some are just lines or scratches. There are details in this study that will probably make it into a final version, but that is of no concern at this stage because this is a part of the process. Polish can be achieved later, this is the moment to explore and nail the details that will maybe make it into the final piece.
My notebook for my messy sketches is called a thinking notebook. It is a normal notebook, nothing too precious, and I use it to think, to explore without judgement and to do repetitions before going digital. I have a bad habit of deleting process parts on digital files, but that's not possible on paper. That's why I fight that habit by sketching and thinking in my notebook before going to digital. My thinking notebook is anything but precious and I always start my process by sketching in it because it helps me think, helps me get the ‘bad"’ ideas out and understand what I'm trying to achieve better. It is a key part of my process in doing things that are not so good because I know they get me closer to what I really want to achieve. They are all small wins that will compound into a bigger win.
Resting (recover so you can keep going)
This section can also be called don't quit. It’s one of Visa's main advice: show up, don't die, don't quit. The only way of getting better is to not quit and keep going. It’s perfectly okay to be exhausted. In sports there is no recovery without rest: there's an understanding that the body is not an eternal machine. Mostly because if you don't do it, it’s really easy to get injured. Even though injuries are normal, they're also avoidable by allocating time to resting, stretching, and recovering.
Rest comes in many forms. As an athlete, food and nutrition are key, as well as drinking plenty of water and getting a good night of sleep. Some professional cyclists say that bike races are won in bed, because when you're doing challenging rides everyday for multiple days. There is no other way to get really good performance than sleeping well. There is no growth, no advancement, no improvement if you don't let yourself rest. Likewise, if there’s no space for recharging the creative batteries, the results may be dull, uninspired, coming out of someone else’s playbook and not your own. Clear thinking is necessary in designing and creating in general.
Another form of rest is to try a different sport. Go swimming if you're a runner, running if you're a cyclist, knitting if you're a triathlete. For creatives, it is very satisfying to change mediums and try to apply the principles of your practice to something else. My favorite is ceramics. I've been doing ceramics for three years, and because my work is digital, I find a lot of creative relief in doing something purely material that I can manipulate with my hands. But it can be anything. I know of many great designers that have a ton of creative hobbies, precisely because there is a need for any creative to step out of their main thing to rest while also doing something else. There's also the added benefit of gathering inspiration while flexing creative muscles.
There's also rest in the form of having fun, watching good movies, going to an art museum or the theater, playing a really good video game, listening to music, dancing. I like resting in creative things because there's so much we can learn and apply in our digital practice that come from other creative practices, but there's also rest in going for a run, a hike or a long walk. There's also the rest of doing nothing, a classic one, never fails.
You can just do hard things
The goal of a good athlete is to focus on doing your best at any given moment. Thinking of winning or losing is useless. Minute to minute, point to point: focusing on technique, strengths, improving if you make a mistake, and keeping the energy going. Maybe at the end you win, but not by thinking about winning - or fearing losing - but by accumulating small wins.
The more you understand your motivations and what keeps you going, the easier it becomes to stay on track and keep moving. And with moving, new challenges arise but if you're focused and remember why you’re doing it, it’s easier to keep an active practice. And if you practice, have patience, and understand that your work not being good enough doesn't mean – you – are not good enough, the more you can continue doing it. And finally the more you understand that creativity comes in many forms, the more you can rest in them, allowing yourself to switch lanes so you can eventually keep going. In the end, the more you can get better in one area, the easier it is to apply the same principles to every new hard thing you try to do.
Thanks for reading!
– Laura
I think about the Ira Glass quote all the time, and I love the idea of a project file called, "Gap Work." Wonderful piece - felt like a sweet shot of encouragement 🙏🏻
movement is flow, same as creativity