Diving In

I just read this amazing piece by Steven Pressfield (thanks to Anne Jackson’s tweet last week). It made my heart beat fast reading it.

‘…None of us asks for this. There’s no chain of intention or rational choice. The thing grabs us. We can run as far as we like, like Jonah did into the belly of the whale, but in the end we either surrender to this force or it kills us. I am not employing hyperbole.

What specifically is depth of work? We know it when we see it, don’t we? Julia Child had it, and so does Meryl Streep. Sam Maloof had it; Steve Jobs does and so does Elmore Leonard. So do thousands of writers and artists and entrepreneurs whom nobody but their own friends and fans have ever heard of.

Tweeting is the opposite of depth of work; so is gossip and reality TV and Facebook and 99.9% of blogging. Mainstream TV news is the definition of shallowness of work; if a journalist at NBC or CBS ever dared to go deep, she’d be fired on the spot. The Daily Show does go deep, and so does the Colbert Report.

Depth of work comes from immersion. A thousand physicists worked on the same problems that Einstein did. There’s something unbalanced about going that deep. It isn’t normal; it isn’t regular. But that’s what we’re looking for. That’s why we have to find within ourselves.

The guts to get to that place….’

Most of my blog posts these days are lingering on the surface. I’m not proud of that, but it’s just the way it has to be right now. But one of these days............