When is Your Creative Work Truly Ready to Share?

Wake-Up Call #17

A few years back, I found myself in conversation with Daniel Kahneman, a luminary in the field of behavioral economics, author of the iconic book, Thinking Fast and Slow, and winner of the Nobel Prize.

Reflecting on what would be his last book, Noise, he shared that he believed he wrote it too soon. Only 5 years of thought and research stood behind it, when, according to this wise human, it takes a solid 20 before you can really do a book justice.

My arrogant, knee-jerk reaction was to brush off the comment as one coming from someone who'd spent a lifetime in academia, suitably molded by the altered reality and theoretical utopia/dystopia, constrained by a culture mired in complexity, power-dynamics, and bureaucracy.

Then, I took a beat. And stepped down off my ego throne.

I started to think about books I'd written, going back over two decades. Reflected on my own process of observation, experimentation, synthesis, and expression.

As is the case with pretty much any author I know (especially, nonfiction), the longer the window between when you publish and when you reflect on the work, the more you tend to cringe.

“Wait, you think, I wrote THAT?!” Which also means, "I THOUGHT that?!"

Oy. On so many levels, in so many ways.

Why this reaction?

Was it that, like Kahneman offered, I wrote it too soon?

Maybe.

Or was it that, with enough hindsight, everything will eventually have become too soon? Especially, if the standard by which we measure our readiness is near-clairvoyant insight and supernatural competence?

Question is: When is ready really ready?

Here's my take...

Part of "oh, wow, did I really think or say that?' effect relates to the craft. And the voice.

If you're doing the work—if you treat words, ideas, sentences, bytes, brush strokes, notes, pages, rhythm, and cadence as an expressive practice—you actually want to look back and be just a bit mortified. That tells you that you've continued to develop, and refine your skill as not just an explorer, but an offerer of ideas.

The day I look at something I published 10 or 15 years ago and think I'd have been happy to have published that yesterday is the day I need to reckon with how, when, and why I swapped complacency for growth.

Another part of the look-back cringe is about the evolutionary nature of the pursuit of truth. We work hard. We toil, allocate, agitate, suffer, all in the name of figuring out the one right answer. At a certain point, the lightbulb flickers one, and we think we got it. Or, at least a part of it.

Then, over decades, the world, the facts, the knowns, data, inputs, the tools of discovery all shift, sometimes in ways that reveal flaws in what we thought was gospel, or entirely disprove what we once held sacrosanct. This is the beauty of anything resembling a scientific process. 

If we never stop kicking the tires, much of what we know as fact today will, a generation, if not a year from now, be shown to be wrong. There may well be one distinct truth or answer. But, more often than not, its pursuit is not a finish line, but rather a perpetual unfolding.

For anything resembling wisdom, “closer” is a more realistic mantra than “there.”

Painful as this revelation may be, accepting it allows us to step back from a place of ego-attachment to having been “the one who figured it out,” and forward into a place of never-ending curiosity. It also means feeling anywhere from mildly to wildly embarrassed at regular pitstops along the journey of discovery.

Still, another part of the discontent when looking back at what we've done, said and offered is much more personal. It's about our points of view, the way we take in, understand, and translate information, and how the march of time changes us. A year, a decade, a season from now, we're not entirely who we used to be. Nor are our thoughts, lenses, filters, and the litany of experiences and models through which we come to see and assemble our world. We look at the very past we once inhabited in a profoundly different way.

Identities, and all that spring from them, evolve.

And, that’s a good thing. We want that potential for revelation in our intellectual paths. In our emotional and spiritual paths. In our creative journeys. In our lives.

Without it, we become static.

Stasis is not just boring. It is, in a thousand tiny ways over a thousand dimming days, the unwitting death-march of possibility.

As Dylan reminds us, those not busy being born are busy dying.

They just don't know it. Yet.

So, when I think back to Kahneman’s words, proclaiming 20 years is what's needed to write a seminal book on an important topic, maybe he was right. That's what it takes, at the very least, to get to a level of truth that feels like it’s actually settled in your mind, and create the clarity needed to do the work justice. To have a sense that, even as you change over time, the work won’t. At least when we’re talking about putting it into the enduring and immutable form of a book.

Or, maybe, the perfect day to write, to breathe, to paint, code, play, or speak your truth in a public way is, in fact, today. Or, tomorrow. Or, the next. Or, the next.

Because for any idea to evolve, to deepen and settle into solidness, its needs to interact with not only the caverns of your psyche, but the grist mill of society. To have it batted around, maybe even battered, but, in the end, made better through discourse.

Tell me, what's your take?

With a whole lotta love & gratitude

Jonathan

PS - In that same conversation with Kahneman, he shared how an entire chapter in the original printings of Thinking, Fast and Slow, no longer appears in later versions of the book. He’d originally included a chapter on what was then a hot topic in behavioral economics, something called "primes.” The research was established, vetted and published in big, peer-reviewed journals. Smart people touted it. He’d reviewed it, and deemed it valid enough to include in his seminal book.

Then, a few years later, as the replication crisis deepened in science, that body of research was re-examined, and it fell apart. Kahneman revisited it, and came to believe it could no longer be supported. So, he deleted the entire chapter on it from later versions of the book. Part of the beauty of this was that the book was so popular, selling millions of copies, that he had a chance to turn something that, for most authors, is immutable, into something that could be changed in later print runs.

Turns out, even when you wait, even when you think something is settled in the context of your own mind, and a small, fairly insular, yet trusted community, the light of day eventually has it’s say.

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Wake-Up Call #17 | What are you holding back?

What have you been waiting to write, paint, code, compose or breathe life into, for no other reason than the feeling that it’s not quite “ready” to meet the world?

What if you just started working on it and, in whatever form feels acceptable, shared it. Even with a small number of others? Knowing, no matter how high your standard of perfection is, it’ll never meet it. And, even if it does today, you’ll be mildy-mortified by it a decade from now. And, that’s actually a beautiful thing. Indeed, it’s essential for your own growth as a creator, a thinker, a feeler, and a doer.

What would you work on, and consider sharing before it’s time…which will never come?

Noodle on it. Journal on it. And, if you’re inclined, share in the comments.