My One Word for 2021
Since 2014, I’ve picked a One Word theme for the year. (Last year was 2 words, but you get the idea.)
This year’s word relates to a question I’m obsessed with:
Where does sustained success come from?
To put it another way:
Where does creativity come from? How can creativity be sustained? What does it take to make something of value? What does it take to get things done?
Jerry Seinfeld on Work
Tim Ferriss’s podcast is hit or miss for me, with more misses than hits. His best interviews are when he doesn’t know his guest personally and is somewhat intimidated by him or her. In those cases he postures and shows off a lot less than at other times, and tends to ask genuinely curious, perceptive questions. This brings to mind what one of Jim Collins’s mentors had to say to him one time: “you need to spend less time trying to be interesting and more time trying to be interested.” (I think one of the best interviews Mr. Ferriss has ever done was with Frank Blake of Home Depot—a good example of being interested, especially in his probing and curious questions about prayer.)
The recent Tim Ferriss interview with Jerry Seinfeld was one of his better ones, probably because they spent a lot of time talking about a subject that both men are interested in: what it takes to get work done.
Jerry Seinfeld is a disciplined writer, which is the only reason he’s been able to thrive as a stand-up comic decade after decade. Here’s Jerry talking about the process:
“But my writing sessions used to be very arduous, very painful, like pushing against the wind in soft, muddy ground with a wheelbarrow full of bricks. And I did it. I had to do it because there’s just, as I mentioned in the book, you either learn to do that or you will die in the ecosystem. I learned that really fast and really young, and that saved my life and made my career, that I grasped the essential principle of survival in comedy really young. That principle is: you learn to be a writer. It’s really the profession of writing, that’s what standup comedy is. However you do it, anybody, you can do it any way you want, but if you don’t learn to do it in some form, you will not survive.”
“If you don’t learn to do it in some form, you will not survive.”
—Jerry Seinfeld, talking about the discipline of hard work
Putting Your Work In
You see this same principle in the lives of all professional athletes who make it. Sure, there are some people with talent who light up the highlight reels for a season or two, but there are no examples of athletes who stay on top for a career who don’t put in the work every day. There will always be Johnny Manziel types whose natural talent bring them fleeting success, but unless they learn to work, they will never be anything other than fleeting successes.
Recently I came across an interview with NFL quarterback Russell Wilson in which he said this:
“I gotta earn my career, you know, and how you earn it is by the approach that you take every day. There’s no such thing as days off.
“Someone asked me the other day….“How many days a year do you [work]”? The question is, How many days I don’t. That’s the real question. To me, it’s a 365 day lifestyle—it’s a lifestyle choice. I may take 2 days off a year…. That lifestyle allows you to play for a long time….
“Pretty much every day I wake up around 5….I always pray first and then I’m going to the facility or the gym and putting my work in.”
I don’t know of any professional athletes who have made it a career who wouldn’t say the same thing. Natural talent is what gets you in the door, but it’s hard work that allows you to stay.
My Life As an Artist
Several years ago now, I came to a conclusion about my work, and that is that my work is primarily creative. What I mean by that is that my primary task is to create something out of nothing every single week. I am—in my own peculiar way—an artist.
I know it sounds pretentious, but conceiving my job as a creative endeavor has been helpful to me. Every single week I stand up in front of a group of people—during the pandemic it’s been a much smaller group than before!—and preach. Preaching, to me, is about creating. Where there was nothing, now there is something.
I have the natural gifts to be a preacher—I have a good memory and I’m poised in front of groups of people. But those gifts can only help you to preach a good sermon once. But preaching once isn’t the job—preaching week after week after week, year after year after year—that’s the job. It is not possible to overstate just how hard it is to do this well.
And there is no way to do it well without putting in the work.
But let me confess something to you—that kind of work does not come easy to me.
My Two Best Sermon Series Yet
In 2020 I think I preached two excellent sermon series, in my opinion the best I’ve yet preached: Genesis (in two parts) to begin the year and Revelation to end it. I feel as if I actually understand those books now, and I felt like I was able to share that understanding with others in a clear and compelling way.
When I ask myself why and where that insight came from, there is one clear answer:
I put in the work, and God blessed it.
“Just Read for One Hour, You Idiot”
The kind of books I read to support these two particular sermon series are not quick reads—they require lots of concentration. I’m normally a quick reader, but with these books 20 pages might take me well over an hour. And so I committed to getting in one hour of reading per day, no matter what.
One hour of concentrated reading may not sound like much, but for me it was about keeping a sustainable pace, and allowing the hours to accumulate. “Just sit down and focus for one hour, you idiot” was the kind of self-talk I’d use, and it worked.
Consistency Is More Important Than Intensity
One of the things I really believe is that consistency is more important than intensity. Anyone can throw himself into a problem with frenzied determination for one day, but one day’s determined work is not what most problems need. Rather, most problems are solved with sustained, relentless focus, day after day after day.
To put it another way, the tortoise always beats the hare.
When You’re More Hare Than Tortoise
The problem is that I’m not naturally a tortoise—I’m naturally a hare. And in the age of the internet, I have to fight hard to keep my rabbit-like attention from flitting from one shiny carrot to another.
Deep Work
I know that Cal Newport is right, and that in a world of distraction the ability to give focused attention to the problem in front of you will make you that much more valuable.
I know he’s right, and I know that the only way I can survive in the game is if I put in the work.
At this stage in my life, this is more true than ever, because, by the way:
I have a book manuscript due to the publisher by April 1.
Jerry Seinfeld, Russell Wilson, Robert Caro
I think it’s because I’m not naturally a tortoise that I admire tortoise-like work so much. I find people like Jerry Seinfeld and Russell Wilson to be inspiring—I want to be like that. I want to be a tortoise.
For that reason, one of the books I read over the last several years and most enjoyed was a brief autobiography from the great biographer Robert Caro entitled, appropriately enough, Working. I loved reading about his patient, relentless process of coming to really understand his subject.
I also want to stand before God one day and give an account of what I’ve done with what he’s given me. I’d much rather be someone with one talent who made ten out of it than someone with ten talents who ended up with twenty.
But, that will only happen through work.
There Are No Shortcuts
The kind of work I’m talking about is the kind of deliberate practice, putting in the hours, doing the reps, private, unglamorous work without which it is not possible to be a sustained success. I’m not talking about meetings and appointments and phone calls and emails. I’m talking about sitting alone in a room by yourself and just, through force of will, making yourself focus on a problem, and working at it until you’ve wrestled it to the floor.
That’s the kind of work that honors God, because it shows we take his gifts seriously enough to actually develop and hone them.
In fact, I often feel the greatest sense of godly satisfaction when I can look back at something I’ve made and say, “I worked hard on that.”
There is a lot that I want to accomplish in the year ahead and in the years ahead. Like Peter Drucker, I’d like to accomplish more in the second half of my life than in the first. But nothing I want to accomplish will happen if I’m not willing to put in the work, day after day after day.
My One Word for 2021
And so, my one word for 2021?
Work.
P.S.
It’s 10:00 PM on New Year’s Day, and after I post this I’m going to bed a happy man. You know why?
Because I already put in my work for the day.
First day of the new year, done.
