Pylimitics

A lot of human experience, especially the experiences we seem to choose, involves doing the same thing over and over again. It’s a dream of many people to start their own business, and whether it involves cooking, painting, installing closets, fixing cars, moving furniture, or you-name-it, a small business is often (not always) mostly about doing the same thing over and over.

There are plenty of good things to be said about repetition. Brushing your teeth every day is a well established and proven practice that improves your health and hygiene. Practicing a golf swing, a tennis serve, or any other athletic move is the way you get better at your sport.

Repetition can be a good thing at a higher level too. In Practice is Enlightenment, Gabriel Kaigen Wilson says “Anything that we repeat over and over is a practice…. practice transformed my relationship with myself and the world.

If you decide to have, as a practice, creating interesting things, you have a lot of company. Artists, musicians, programmers, authors, poets, and plenty more creators do that. The practice of creating interesting things can even be a business. Especially these days, when anyone can set up an Etsy store, a blog (this one is a good “doesn’t take any special ability” example), a podcast, or an online video channel, you can earn some money from your practice.

Then you might be face to face with a disconnect, or at least a friction, between the practice of creating interesting things and the practice of business. The disconnect is time. Business practices have come to instantiate the idea of time as regularity. The shelves are restocked at 7am every morning. You work from 9 to 5. The weekly schedule is established on Monday, and adhered to for the rest of the week. A new issue is published daily. Creative practices instantiate a quite different idea of time. It’s flexible, dynamic, and unpredictable. When you’re creating, you’re in the zone and time sort of disappears. Your creative process might be sparked by an idea at any moment. If you try to set a weekly schedule that includes “having a new idea,” you might just find that it backfires and you end up with fewer new ideas.

A business practice that relies on a creative practice, and depends on a schedule for publishing or posting or announcing, you’re likely going to run into a situation like Red Smith, a sports writer, described decades ago: According to a 1961 Time magazine article, Red Smith once said:
“Writing a column is easy. You just sit at your typewriter until little drops of blood appear on your forehead.”

The gist of the dilemma is that you can lean toward the business practice and manhandle your creative practice into operating on “rigid time,” or you can lean toward the creative practice and manhandle your business practice into operating on “dynamic time.” Neither practice is very good at operating within an alien-to-it notion of time. Creative output that’s forced into a schedule means that sometimes your column, post, or publication is going to suck. Business output that’s forced into depending on unscheduleable creativity is going to (probably) be less successful.

Eric Thomas writes in the Kansas Reflector about quitting podcasts, or trying to. Podcasts are creative works, and today’s typical podcast leans toward the business practice by posting a new edition regularly. One approach to running a business that depends on a creative practice is to distribute the creativity among as many people as possible. That way their individual creative processes will in their unscheduled ways produce creative works in time for each issue. This is why magazines like The New Yorker have a bunch of writers. Some podcast producers try something like this by designing their shows as discussions. That way the host doesn’t have to come up with a new, creative idea for every episode; hopefully the guests will do that.

As Thomas writes, though, that doesn’t seem to be working, at least not for all podcasts. You can see the same thing with online video creators — each show has a theme, and whether it’s camping, renovating an old house, working on cars, or training dogs, the host has to keep coming up with something (sometimes anything) for every episode.

And once again the business practice collides with the creative practice. What if the dog trainer wants to try potbellied pigs instead? What if the camping expert gets tired of the same old thing and wants to stay in hotels? What if the car guru wakes up one morning and decides “I want to get a horse instead?” Those are the natural results of a creative practice. But the business practice dictates a schedule, a stable theme, and regularity.

I’ve always leaned toward the creative practice. This writing platform has been through countless changes, ever since I began online writing around (believe it or not) the mid-1980s. “Online” in those days meant something quite different. You can tell that I’ve favored dynamic time over rigid time by my balance sheet from writing: I’ve never made any money at all. Part of that, of course, is that I haven’t tried very hard; I’ve always had a “regular job” that pays the bills and this is just, well, a creative practice. I don’t have any sort of schedule for posting, no particular theme, and I have no idea whether I even have an audience; there’s no tracking of visitors to this site. But as a creative practice, I think it’s true that it has “transformed my relationship with myself and the world.”