While time flies in your work day, what happens when you start spending a sizeable amount of the rest of your hours at it too? How big of a loss is the outside world... really? This is the second part, in a three-part article exploring some of my thoughts, experiences (and coping strategies) related to the dynamics involved in loving what you do.

Trying things the other way round.

When you create and invent, or build and grow, or analyse and theorise all day for a living it’s also important to find a balance with activities that fall outside these acts, or even oppose them. To simply absorb, listen and observe, instead of produce. To create, imagine and mentally meander without purpose or direction, or at least without expectation. The places you end up from there, are where the little genius-gremlin-thing writer Elizabeth Gilbert described in her excellent TED talk, probably refuels on pixie dust, even if he delivers the goods back at the desk you show up to each day. The resultant synergy between those other inputs and your professional output, is where the magic leading to inspired concepts happens.

Getting outside your head completely.

It's not just about varying input from within your world either - by say, checking out others’ work in your field or keeping up with news. It’s about varying whole modes of experience-input altogether. Sometimes the most stimulating experiences for your professional life, can actually be the ones where you shut down the usual connections you use in the brain every day, and get into the flow of something utterly different. For me, it’s snowboarding or surfing. I don’t usually come up with ideas for work on the hill or in the ocean, but instead, I find I am at last able to stop coming up with them - and just be both physically and mentally in the right-bloody-now for a while.

Photo: Mount Ruapehu last winter. Copyright © 2008 OWR Studio

Finding your perspective.

A day of physical expression and in-the-moment reactions and adaptations like a day of boarding, serves as a breath of fresh air for me, both literally and figuratively, and (like surfing) I find the experience powerfully able to wash my otherwise frenetic and overcrowded brain clean. Afterwards, I come back to reality (and work) like a fresh page on the jotter, rather than the proverbial tabula rasa. The notes and doodles I was working on obsessively before are all still there, but now I actually want to look at them again, and can do so with new eyes, a sense of perspective, and sometimes new insights to add. It’s not always that extreme of course, sometimes it’s movies, reading, music, gardening, biking, walking or cooking - and for you it may well be something different again. Whatever it is though - it’s something else. Turns out with work, even work you really love - a little absence makes the heart grow fonder.

For part three click here.

If you missed part one of this article, click here to read it.

The beast of creating (art or ideas or businesses, or anything else for that matter), brings with it a different wrangling experience for everyone - and equally varied tricks to harness it, so I’d be interested to hear yours. How obsessively immersed in what you do have you become (or caught yourself at times)? Do you ever get away completely, and how do you make the break? Just sign in to comment.

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