Chipping away at the monolith

You can get this result from stone if you have enough people, enough time, and a clear vision. (Dey.sandip, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

I don’t know if Savage Steve Holland’s Better Off Dead, starring a teenage John Cusack, qualifies as a cult classic, but it’s one of my favorite ‘80s movies.

In one memorable scene (featuring the late, great Vincent Schiavelli as the geometry teacher), Lane Meyer, played by Cusack, experiences that nightmare scenario of being unwittingly unprepared for class:

Lane made it difficult for himself from the start, because all he wrote down was “do homework.” And this lack of specificity is a mistake I see my middle school students make all the time. It’s also a mistake many adult professionals make, including me.

For many years, I wanted to write a piano method. I spent many hours on the project and its various iterations without a finished product to show for it. Eventually, I would lose momentum and get distracted by something more urgent.

Why was I unable to finish the thing? I think a big part of the problem is that, like Lane Meyer, I confused the project with a task. I simply labeled it, “Write piano method” in my mind. It’s a giant monolith — no doors, no windows, no way in. 

“Write piano method” isn’t a task that I can complete in one go. There are many steps that must be taken in order to finish such a project. But for a long time, I couldn’t find the steps. I was just feeling blindly along an endless wall.

This happens a lot with creative projects. When you’re trying to make something new, you don’t always know what the finished product is even going to look like. You might have elements of it, but the details are missing and you can’t see a path from here to there.

That’s okay! You can still make progress. There are a few different ways to approach this.

You might start by spending a certain amount of time working on any aspect of the project that you can see, even if it’s not the part that’s supposed to come first.

You can also set aside time expressly for project planning. You can list as many aspects of the project you know of and put them in order based on what needs to be done first. Doing this, you might spot missing pieces that suggest more steps of the project. You might also find yourself staring off into space, feeling stuck. That’s okay. That’s part of the process, too.

Another thing you can do — and this is what I ultimately had to do to move forward on my piano method — is simply choose what the parameters of the project are going to be, and then work backward from there.

I used all three of these approaches in order to move forward on my piano method. First, I just set aside time to “do the project” for an hour today, an hour tomorrow, and so on. I met with Anna, a key team member at Eclectic Music who has championed this project, and we worked sharpen the vision and plan.

Then, after feeling stuck for awhile, I took the next step of imposing more structure on the project. I chose its shape and scope: I decided that I was going to finish a first draft of Book One. I listed all of the concepts and skills that needed to be included. When I had checked all of those things off of the list, draft one was done. I was able to accomplish that in just a few hours focused hours on a sunny Saturday. Was it “correct”? My team and I will find out as we test it. Does it match the beautiful, idealized version in my mind? No. But it exists, and the perfect one doesn’t.

As I revisit these old projects that have been in hibernation, I realize that they aren’t any harder than the ones I’ve been doing more recently. I just have better tools, more time, and more help these days, so projects don’t have to languish forever in a netherworld of perfectionism and creative torment. Thus, my newer projects are more likely to get done without a lot of angst or procrastination. Now I see that I can made decisions about these old, dormant projects and either schedule time to do them or cross them off my list forever.

True, I still encounter monoliths from time to time. But I know that the facade I see at first is not reality. If I chip away consistently enough at that stone face, I will discover clues about where to go and what to do to resolve even my biggest challenges. Sometimes, that means doing the work I already know I have to do. Sometimes, it means making choices even if I’m not sure what the right answer is. And almost always, it means asking for help. Together, we’ll figure it out.

Is there a monolith on your to-do list? What will you do to make progress on it? What has worked for you in the past? I’d love to hear.