Of No Importance Whatsoever

Todd Henry [00:00:02]:

In 1946, Richard Feynman was sure that he was finished. He was 28 years old. He had spent the war at Los Alamos working on the Manhattan Project, doing some of the most consequential physics of the century. Some would even argue of human existence. And when it was over, he arrived at Cornell to teach and discovered that he couldn't work. He would sit down to do research and nothing would come. He became convinced that he was burned out, that whatever gift he had was gone, and that the university had essentially hired a fraud. So he made a strange decision.

Todd Henry [00:00:36]:

He decided that since he was washed up anyway, since nothing he did was going to matter, he was going to stop trying to do important physics altogether. He would just play with it the way he did when he was a kid, working out the curve of water coming out of a water faucet. Not because it mattered, but because it was interesting. About a week later, he was sitting in the Cornell cafeteria when some student was goofing around, throwing a plate into the air, and Feynman watched it wobble. He noticed the red Cornell medallion on the plate spinning as it flew, and something about the relationship between the spin and the wobble caught his eye. He had nothing better to do, so he started working out the equations of a wobbling plate. A colleague asked him about the importance of what it was, and Vinmin said, there's no importance. I'm just doing it for the fun of it.

Todd Henry [00:01:22]:

But the wobbling plate got him thinking about rotation. Rotation got him thinking about how electrons spin. That led him back to the deep problems in quantum electrodynamics that he had abandoned before the war. And that work, the diagrams that now carry his name, won him the Nobel Prize in physics almost two decades later. In his memoir, Feynman traced the whole thing back to that plate, that cafeteria. His words. The whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from piddling around with a wobbling plate. So think about this for a minute.

Todd Henry [00:01:57]:

The most important work of Richard Feynman's life began at the exact moment he stopped trying to do important work. It began when he gave himself permission to just enjoy the thing in front of him. With no agenda, no outcome, no importance whatsoever. Most of us have been taught to live the other way around. Grind now, enjoy later, eat the bitterness. And someday, someday, at the summit of some mountain we haven't reached yet, we can finally taste the reward. In the meantime, the actual substance of our lives, the moment to moment experience of the work itself, it just passes by unnoticed. Today's episode is about reclaiming it.

Todd Henry [00:02:37]:

My first guest is Ian Bogost. He is an award winning game designer, a contributing writer for the Atlantic, and a professor at Washington University in St. Louis where he teaches everything from computer science to film to design. His new book is called the Small Stuff and it's built around an idea that he calls gratification, the sensory enchantment of everyday life. Ian argues that while we chase the big stuff, the promotions, the milestones, the someday, we are surrounded at every moment by small, physical, available pleasure that we simply fail to take in. Then after the break, we'll be joined by a returning guest, Jia Jiang. You may know him from his viral 100 days of rejection experiment. His new book is called Easy Discipline and it makes a case that you often don't hear from someone as ambitious as Ja.

Todd Henry [00:03:23]:

The path to your biggest goals runs directly through enjoyment, not around it. A physicist, a plate, and the fun of it. Let's get into it. This is Daily Creative. Since 2005, we've served up weekly tips to help you be brave, focused and brilliant every day. My name is Todd Henry. Welcome to the show.

Ian Bogost [00:03:48]:

So the idea here is that we have been trained in our lives to focus on big stuff.

Todd Henry [00:03:54]:

That's Ian Bogost, professor and author of the new book the Small Stuff.

Ian Bogost [00:03:58]:

Now, like career progress, relationships, getting married, having children, achieving your next promotion, going on a big Hawaiian vacation, big stuff, big goals. Those things are relatively rare to achieve. They're hard, they're complicated. It's not really clear when you achieve happiness through them. In fact, happiness in general is murky and mysterious to me. But in between all of that, you're missing the rest of your life. Your life is happening every moment of every day and most of us are just letting it pass us by. And that day to day, moment to moment experience is what I call gratification, the sensory enchantment of everyday life.

Ian Bogost [00:04:42]:

All of those little physical, sensory experiences from which you can derive these little tiny bits of contentment and pleasure. And if you do so over time, if you allow yourself to experience those, then over time they add up, right? You're like filling this bucket with little stuff. So that's the idea. That's the idea of small stuff and this notion of gratification at the heart of it.

Todd Henry [00:05:05]:

How do you distinguish between things we often talk about, like happiness and satisfaction with gratification? How are those different concepts?

Ian Bogost [00:05:13]:

I thought about this a lot when I was working in the book. I've always had a lot of trouble with kind of happiness science or with Happiness as a concept. I don't think the people who know me wouldn't consider me a happy person exactly. Or someone who, who's pursued that. So it's always been a struggle for me to understand what does that even mean. And I think what it means, you know, there's a lot of writing and a lot of research on this topic and often it's self identified. It's if you someone, are you happy? Then do you say yes or no or how happy are you? Which doesn't really define the concept, does it? So I think of it as this kind of overarching big picture. How good is my life going by my account of it? That's the idea.

Ian Bogost [00:05:52]:

And it's often best associated with purpose. I think that's the most generous interpretation of happiness. And you have the Arthur Brooks's of the world who make that argument that if you feel like the work that you do and the relationships that you have are meaningful and deliberate and you're engaged in your community and those are the things that make you happy long term, not necessarily acquiring wealth or goods or what have you, that's all fine. I don't need to do anything to that in order to add this notion of gratification to it. But it didn't seem to capture the full picture to me. Then you've got satisfaction. And satisfaction is like pride in accomplishment. So you have a big project at work or at home, you're building an addition, you're cleaning up your basement, you're finishing a presentation for a big client, you're helping your kid get into school or finish a big essay.

Ian Bogost [00:06:43]:

And then you look at, you look back on what you did and you think, I really accomplished something. That's satisfaction. And it's also, it's much more clear and concrete than happiness. But it's still big, it's still hard. It plays out over time. You have to plan for it, you have to come back to it over and over again. And then gratification sits in all those spaces in between. So this phrase that I've been using to describe it, the sensory enchantment of everyday life, it's what it suggests is that it's gratification is easy and it's happening to you all the time.

Ian Bogost [00:07:19]:

You just have to allow your senses to take it in. So your listeners are hearing us, they're hearing our voices resonate through their headphones right now, and that's gratifying. Or I have a cup of coffee here in my hand and the warmth of it against my palms that's gratification, too. And one interesting feature of gratification is that it burns up right away. You can't store it. It's like solar energy in that way. If you allow yourself to be in touch with your senses in the moment, then you can experience gratification. But if you let it pass you by, you can't get it back again.

Todd Henry [00:07:58]:

One word that seems. That was coming to mind as you were describing that is the word presence. That. Yeah, it seems like presence is such an important part of how you describe gratification because we live in our heads. Many of us who are listening totally do.

Jia Jiang [00:08:13]:

Yeah.

Todd Henry [00:08:13]:

We're never really here. We're always time traveling. We're always living at some point in the future or we're reflecting on something in the past. We're very rarely here in the moment.

Ian Bogost [00:08:23]:

Yeah.

Todd Henry [00:08:24]:

And you. Did you describe this concept, you call it dematerialization or becoming dematerialized. And I think, yeah, that's a great way of describing it, because so much of our work and our lives and our. All that we do is in our heads and it's somewhere else. It's not here.

Ian Bogost [00:08:37]:

Yeah, everything is.

Todd Henry [00:08:38]:

How do we deal with that?

Ian Bogost [00:08:39]:

Everything has been made more abstract. Some of that's happened through digital technologies. And this is the first thing people think of. They think of their smartphone or their computer or their email job or whatever it is. And that's part of the dematerialization story, that. That experience of becoming disconnected or decoupled from your sensory life. So maybe instead of going to visit a client, now you zoom with them or email them or text them or slack with them, and that's one example. But it's also everywhere else, too.

Ian Bogost [00:09:10]:

So you're at work or you're on a business trip, and you go into the restroom and you try to wash your hands or flush the toilet, and you can't, and you're not allowed to. There's a sensor that decides when and how and if you should be given water or towels. So I track in the book, like, all of these examples of that experience of dematerialization, many of which we did not choose. They're not your fault. There's nothing you can really do about them. Not individually anyway. It's harder to own things, a home or an automobile even. And when you own something, you have a reason to work with it and upgrade it and tend to it.

Ian Bogost [00:09:46]:

And as that falls away, dematerialization increases, too. Even in what used to be like really concrete sensory professions where you were, you needed to be physically present. That has devolved as well. So I look at medicine, for example, doctors. You're right there physically present with your patient or with. With another person treating their actual literal body. Except nowadays you're mostly typing into a health management system, and you spend eight minutes with. With your patient, and they get to spend eight minutes with their doctor because they're trying to make the whole process as efficient and billable as you can.

Ian Bogost [00:10:22]:

So everywhere you look, this kind of dematerialization effect is at work. And rather than try to fight it, it's worth fighting against in certain ways. But rather than try to fight it, my answer is, let's look for those opportunities for gratification that are always around you all the time. Because we still live in the physical world in our actual human bodies. So to your point about we're stuck in our heads. That's true. But sometimes people are so stuck in their heads that they think they. They think that's the answer to feeling this thing that I call gratification, that, oh, I just need to be more mindful about what I do.

Ian Bogost [00:11:02]:

But that's exactly the wrong answer. The problem is that you're in your mind and not in your body. And if you allow the things that are happening to your body just to happen to you, if you just take them in, if you allow them to happen to you, then you can feel them again. And that's a very different exercise from tying your brain in knots, thinking, oh, my gosh, like, I have to remember to when I put the dishes away from the dishwasher to hear the tink of the plates against one another, because that would be really gratifying. It's. No, just let it happen. And as you do that more and more, you'll find it, like, literally everywhere, all the time, waiting for you.

Todd Henry [00:11:39]:

I want to talk about a concrete example that I experienced in my life, so I would love to get your perspective on this. I have been for my entire adult life, a journaler, at least for the last 25, 30 years, been a journaler and much of my life. I have found tremendous joy in identifying the notebook, the journal, the physical thing, and the pen that I'm using and writing and all of these things. And over the last handful of years, I transitioned over to journaling digitally. And the main reason was this pull that I felt towards Word. But I can search everything. But, yeah, I can ask AI to analyze my journal entries, which is true.

Ian Bogost [00:12:16]:

You can do those things.

Todd Henry [00:12:17]:

Totally true.

Ian Bogost [00:12:17]:

Yeah.

Todd Henry [00:12:18]:

100 true. And so it's like the utility of the work I've done outweighs the pleasure of doing.

Ian Bogost [00:12:25]:

Yeah. In my journal, you're trying to store it up for later. Yeah.

Todd Henry [00:12:29]:

Yes. And so I wanted to ask your perspective on that, because it does. It's not only there, it's also in the tools that. Let's say you're a designer. And maybe, like, early in my career, when I went to university, when I first went to school, the question was, do you bring a typewriter or a word processor? There was no, like. And we were doing. Taking our notes on these big notebooks, and artists were, like, sketching on paper before they would. And many of us remember what it felt like when it was analog first and then we would transition to digital.

Todd Henry [00:13:00]:

But I think many people feel the pull of these digital tools, but they really enjoy the pleasure of being in their analog environment. So I would just be curious to get your perspective on that.

Ian Bogost [00:13:11]:

Yeah, no, it's totally true. And I think you've outlined the problem really well. And the problem is that the digital tools are useful. They're really super useful. And they allow you to be not just more efficient, but also to do things that you can't easily do without them, without these powerful computers, like searching your journal. But then if you stop and you ask yourself, wait, like, why would that be a drive of mine to search my journal? What is it that journaling really is? And if it's, I need to record all these thoughts so I can harness them later, then, okay, then it starts to make sense to store them somewhere. But if instead it's an exercise in being, in using the pen, in feeling the paper and having a reason to choose a new notebook with a different cover or with the same cover, or even just to complain about the fact that they changed the COVID and now it's soft instead of hard. Whatever it is, all of that, maybe that's why you're journaling in the first place, or at least a large part of it.

Ian Bogost [00:14:10]:

Not just getting your thoughts down from your head onto paper, but also just experiencing the ink flowing out of the tip of your pen. And in the context of creative work like you described, the gratifying experience of the work itself has been de. Emphasized or even, in some cases, lost. And there's certainly some professions, some creative professions, that have naturally held on to gratifying experience more than others. If you're a glassblower or you throw pots or something like that, like at a production level, making the same cup or the same stemware, moment after moment, you're living in a physical, gratifying experience. If you draw, even if you write like I do, it's not so much that I've been only writing on type on typewriters or computers for my whole career. Right. I don't write longhand and then copy it in.

Ian Bogost [00:15:03]:

But I'm in the machine with all of the other stuff that's happening. And slack is coming off and my Amazon orders are coming in and text messages from my kids or my friends are popping up. And so it's. It's hard to, like, melted into that environment. But even there, I can still feel the smooth Chiclet tapping of my keyboard. So it's still there. It's still there. But there is a reason why you feel that loss and why many professionals feel that loss because they used to have this very specific, concrete connectivity to the medium of their engagement.

Ian Bogost [00:15:38]:

This is, by the way, true in almost every walk of life. If you used to work in sales, then you'd have a Rolodex that your fingers would flip through. And then you'd pick up the delightful heavy handset to your phone and put it to your ear and you would feel like, remember the presence or the echo of that handset. And then you'd dial the rotary number and hear it flip back. Or even pressing the touch tone buttons was gratifying. And then you'd go out to lunch with your clients and experience the whole. Now you're just like, I guess I'll just send an email or maybe we'll meet on Zoom. So it really isn't just people who make stuff for a living.

Ian Bogost [00:16:15]:

I think we felt it acutely. Everyone has been dematerialized like that.

Todd Henry [00:16:22]:

Yeah. And I. So. And to your point, there are tremendous advantages to that. There are tremendous advantages to us. Listen, Ian Bogost and Todd Henry would not probably be doing this interview if we had to physically get in a room together. As much as I would love to travel to you, the reality is the economies just don't work.

Ian Bogost [00:16:40]:

Yeah.

Todd Henry [00:16:41]:

To make something like that happen. So there are tremendous advantages to it. And it's almost. There's almost a trading off of a. Almost a kind of dehumanization trade off that we make in order to have these efficiencies, you know, Efficiency.

Ian Bogost [00:16:54]:

Yeah, that's right. Efficiency and bureaucracy were never humane drives. They were drivers of capitalism. And they've been effective. They've worked. They've also made our lives enormously better overall. Overall, things are easier and better than they used to be. You mentioned something earlier, though, that I think is really common, which is this idea that we live in the digital world and that what we want is a sort of return to.

Ian Bogost [00:17:19]:

You called it analog. A lot of people have different names for it. A kind of an escape from that world. And that's a very precious now. Right. That's become almost like a. This sort of twee drive for nostalgia or something. Like I'm gonna get really into vinyl records or I'm gonna get like a weird phone that doesn't go on Instagram and I'm gonna somehow resist this world.

Ian Bogost [00:17:40]:

And you absolutely. You just can't do that. It's not practical. You can't live in the contemporary world if you have friends who have like, who are unreachable. Cause they have a light phone instead of an iPhone or an Android phone. You know how like irritating it is to try to coordinate with them. And at the same time it's also. It's not the wrong drive because you're like, you're looking for that.

Ian Bogost [00:18:00]:

I just want to feel the gratification of the Walkman buttons when instead of the smooth screen. That's work one moment and Spotify the next. I get that. But also the answer is that the gratification is still everywhere. It's still all around you all the time. Because you live a fundamentally sensory, bodily life. So we haven't lost it. Exactly.

Ian Bogost [00:18:24]:

We've lost aspects of it that were really central to our lives and that are going to be very hard to recuperate. So trying to do that isn't necessarily the best way forward. From the perspective of feeling more gratified, of living a more gratifying life. You still have to eat, you still have to get to work. If you go into work, you have the opportunity to just. It rains and you live in the desert and you go outside and you smell that petrichor scent of the earth and mineral rain in the desert or you hold the coffee cup. Like I mentioned, it's about participating in these momentary encounters that are always happening to you instead of trying to go back in time to an era that just won't exist ever again.

Todd Henry [00:19:05]:

Can you share a little bit about some advice that you give in the book? You talk about orthogonality.

Ian Bogost [00:19:10]:

Yeah, I love this idea. Yeah, it's a little bit of like a five dollar word. But orthogonality is a concept that comes out of. Out of engineering and mathematics in some print, some sectors of design. It's really common, commonly used in game design where I've also worked. And a line is orthogonal to another one if it's essentially perpendicular if it crosses itself. And if you think about orthogonality, it's like, what is something that's different from the way that the system already works? So in game design, we sometimes talk about chess pieces as being orthogonal. So you have.

Ian Bogost [00:19:44]:

And they're literally orthogonal. You have some pieces that move like a rook does, and then you have others that move like a bishop does across, across from one another. But if you think about that more abstractly, your life is full of all of these moment to moment experiences based on your home life, your work life, and those make up the preponderance of your moment to moment interaction. So if you go to work and you're always typing on a keyboard and looking at a computer, or if you go to work and you're laying tile or digging in the dirt because you're a gardener or landscape designer, then when you think about how to seek out more gratification, you may want to look for something that's orthogonal to that experience. So journaling is an interesting example. If you're always typing on the keyboard, then maybe writing longhand is your orthogonal experience. I think a lot of the reasons that people want to bake sourdough bread or they want to grow an herb garden is not so much that they want digital detox, it's that they're looking for a sensory experience that's different from the one that they encounter day to day, moment to moment. That also means that those hobbies or those activities that are outside of normal life, they don't have to be productive, they don't have to lead to a side hustle, or you don't have to have an Etsy shop, or you don't even have to be good at it.

Ian Bogost [00:20:58]:

You just need to have some reason to experience those different sensory moments than you're used to.

Todd Henry [00:21:04]:

It's interesting that so many leaders I've worked with have backed their way into that. Whether it's gardening or it's woodworking or it's some other hobby that is completely antithetical to what they do all day, they're dealing with numbers and systems and they're in there. But then when it comes to their weekends, they try to carve out time to do something. And I don't know that it was purposeful, but they gravitated toward it and they realized, oh, this is deeply gratifying to use that word.

Ian Bogost [00:21:30]:

That's right, yeah, yeah. And I think the trick there, the tightrope walk, is to let it. You can let it be gratifying and not have to transform it into something more, something that's like producing that efficiency of now. This is a job too. But also, even if you feel satisfaction or happiness in the process of doing so, maybe that's not why you seek it out. You're just looking to reconnect with your body and with the sensory world that has all these gifts to give us if we will just accept them. I think a lot of us who again are creative by profession or by drive have that sensation because we're used to producing output. I talked to this woman who knit as a hobby and was struggling with the drive to turn it into a side hustle or a profession and realized, wait, it's the stitching.

Ian Bogost [00:22:14]:

It's that moment to moment experience that I'm interested in and eventually sought it out in computer programming rather than knitting because like it's. It has some of the same DNA, that sort of like gratifying sense of seeing something happen immediately or in my own life. I felt it too, like with woodworking is a hobby of mine where I make like fancy Italian ice creams. And it was a real struggle for me to get over the idea that this is just for the experience of making and then tasting and sharing these gelati that I had made. It wasn't going anywhere and it didn't need to. That's definitely a lesson that's harder for creative professionals to learn. I think

Todd Henry [00:22:51]:

the Small Stuff by Ian Bogost is available now wherever books are sold. What I love about Ian's idea of gratification is how democratic it is. You don't have to earn it, you don't have to plan for for it. It's the warmth of a coffee cup. It's the tink of the plates as you put them away. It's the sound of a voice in your headphones right now. It's happening to you constantly. The only question is whether you'll let yourself take it in.

Todd Henry [00:23:15]:

Because as Ian says, it burns up the moment you don't. You can't store it for later. But maybe you're thinking the same question that I was thinking. This is beautiful for a walk in the rain. But what about work? What about the book you're trying to finish, the business you're trying to build? The goal that actually requires sustained, difficult eff effort over years. Doesn't somebody eventually have to eat the bitterness? Well, my next guest spent most of his life believing the answer was yes. He grew up wanting to be the next Bill Gates and he ground himself down trying. And then he discovered something that Changed everything.

Todd Henry [00:23:52]:

The moment he stopped trying to suffer his way to success and started engineering enjoyment into the work itself, the results took off. When we come back, why Xia Jiang thinks Sisyphus might be the luckiest man in Greek mythology. How a broken mechanical shark saved jaws and what a hundred straight days of rejection taught him about turning hard things into fun ones. This is daily creative. Don't go anywhere. We'll be right back.

Jia Jiang [00:24:28]:

I'm always the person who's very ambitious. I grew up wanting to be the next Bill Gates.

Todd Henry [00:24:34]:

That's Jia Jiang, author of Easy Discipline.

Jia Jiang [00:24:37]:

And I had this high ambition, but I don't have the ability to execute. I get distracted all the time. I'm really disorganized and in China. I grew up in China and came into the United States when I was 16. There's this phrase called high eyes, low hands disease. I had that meaning my side is very high, my hand is very low. I couldn't get to where I was. And that's a curse because every time I feel like I can't do the thing, my New Year resolutions always fail.

Jia Jiang [00:25:09]:

My goals always fail because I get distracted with something else. And I just feel life is so hard. It was so grinding. And the turning point of my life is I stopped trying hard. I stopped trying to do the things have a long time. I think I need to work hard. I need to in this philosophy called eating bitterness. But supposedly, if you have a big goal, you eat a lot of bitterness.

Jia Jiang [00:25:36]:

By the end, you taste the sweetness of reward. And I couldn't handle the bitterness. But my turning point in my life is as soon as I stop eating bitterness and trying to have fun, trying to have enjoyment in the process itself, the results started just blowing up. I started achieving things that I couldn't achieve before. I started having sustained the effort I couldn't do before. So, as they say, the journey is the reward. This book is about how to turn, really turn the journey into reward and having discipline. Instead of feeling hard, I want the people to feel easy.

Jia Jiang [00:26:12]:

So that's really from my own story. But also I feel this is very timely book because in the late 2010s, early 2020s, we have this. A whole boatload of books that came out talking about, you gotta have. With Navy SEALs, with monks, talking about you really have to go to war against yourself. You have to just go hard and try all these things. And then are you. You're a better man, right? You're a better woman. And I tried that.

Jia Jiang [00:26:40]:

I. Every time I have that Mentality, I never go far because it's against my human nature. That's why you see a lot of people in the corporate world, they burn out. They can start it out on fire, they burn out. They feel that their job is grinding, they're tired. And especially now in the age of AI, to have long term success and sustainability, but also to achieve the maximum height, you gotta really use the enjoyment and use the artistry of your work to fuel you rather than just the goal itself. That's why I wrote this book.

Todd Henry [00:27:14]:

You just mentioned two of the four letters of easy. And easy doesn't just mean easy. Easy actually stands for something you mentioned. Enjoyment, artistry, and then the other two are systems and yourself. Could you talk through why those are the four elements that you think are so important in embracing easy discipline?

Jia Jiang [00:27:31]:

Absolutely. Think about that as four different characters in this, in my book, or in how to achieve easy. So first of all, how do you love the work? How do you love the work? And in this I use the analogy of Sisyphus, right? We think of the Greek mythology of Sisyphus. We always think about this guy as a tragedy. He's trying to push the rock uphill. He never get to the top. Before getting to the top, the rock rolls back down. So I was thinking, was Zeus.

Jia Jiang [00:27:59]:

So that was supposedly the curse, right? I was like, was the curse on Sisyphus or is on the rock? If it's not Sisyphus, then he's mindless, he's mind controlled. It's not a tragedy. He's dead. Practically brain dead. But if he's on the rock, that means he can never push the rock up top. The rock rose to the bottom. That means he has free agency to push the rock. And then, so he chose, he must have chosen to push the rock.

Jia Jiang [00:28:24]:

Why would he do that? He must love pushing rocks. So if you love pushing rocks, that's no longer a tragedy. That's awesome. Zeus just built Sisyphus the best exercise machine. Better than, you know, better than peloton, better than CrossFit, just his. And now his identity changed to, to become Sisyphus rock pusher. That's what we remember him for. And that's where it drove me to see, all right, what are the different ways to actually turn this into for people to actively love their work.

Jia Jiang [00:28:55]:

So how many of us can we say we love every aspect of our work every day? Very few. But if we can have a way to turn almost everything into things, we play games, gamify things and make everything enjoyable, then we can go really far. We can be like Sisyphus for the good version of Sisyphus. And so this artistry is the second piece. This is where a lot of times we feel we have a mechanic mindset, we have a goal, we have a way to achieve those goals, which is execute, right? But I found the people who really make a difference in the world and history, they have an artist mindset, meaning they're not. They have a goal, but what they want is they take all the element that's. That's given to them every day, and they lean into those elements, and then they create art in those elements. I'll give a quick example.

Jia Jiang [00:29:47]:

I used to have social anxiety. I still do, but I use this artist mindset to overcome my social anxiety. A lot of times I hate small talks, right? Meeting strangers or in the big events. And I'm just the one in the corner. I don't want to talk to anyone. But now I lean into this because I treat every moment of our interaction as a piece of art. This conversation I have with you, Todd, will never be replicated, even though we'll meet again, even though I will talk to other interviews. But this moment between you and me is unique.

Jia Jiang [00:30:18]:

And the artist's mindset is, let's make this piece, this moment piece of art, and just give the full present, lean into you and me. And by having that mindset, I no longer have social anxiety. And I welcome every talk. And I'm much better salesperson. As you know, we're authors and speakers, right? Sometimes we get on calls trying to sell ourselves to speaking at events. I used to fail at this miserably, but now I love every single one of them. I love those meetings because I'm making art with the other person, the system. I feel I'm going along, but the system is about me.

Jia Jiang [00:30:55]:

How do I actually develop a routine where I can be at my best, right? And I feel like nowadays so much of what we are, we think and how we act is dictated by the content we consume and the things we do. And so I have built a system, and it is called. It's called a one action goal, where I have this ADHD mind where I would just, you know, if I give me too many things, I never get there. Now I focus on just doing one thing. What is the most important thing I do every day? I do that for. I do that, the one thing, and. And set that for a period of time and make sure I just get that one thing done. I call that the doing that action is my Goal.

Jia Jiang [00:31:38]:

And so I have this one action goal where every day my goal is I will drive to this beautiful beach in the Bay Area. That's it. I don't have any other goals when I drive there. I don't have my phone, I don't have. I just have computers. Computers. So I don't have Internet. So I just can write in the best environment.

Jia Jiang [00:31:55]:

So now my productivity just went up when I started developing that one action goal. And lastly is yourself. Yourself is really about how do you find what's your main strength. And a lot of times we think we have a dream, then we contort ourselves different ways, try to achieve that goal, right? But I found after a long time, I, you know, I had this Bill Gates goal. I wanted to be this tech entrepreneur. I spent decades chasing after it. Then as soon as I stopped thinking about that, I start thinking about how do I. Who I.

Jia Jiang [00:32:29]:

Who am I? I'm not a guy who come up with crazy ideas or who understand consumer behavior. I'm the guy who write books, who do speaking. So I started using my own. What I like and who I am really. This is my inner self. I built a dream, new dream out of that. So now that's all I do. Now I do.

Jia Jiang [00:32:49]:

I write books and I'm going to write my next book. And I had a great time speaking on the idea. I have a great time talking to you. So these are, this book is about how to achieve those, what I mentioned, right? Those enjoyment, artistry, system, and yourself. How do you achieve that? How do you use tools to achieve those four letters?

Todd Henry [00:33:07]:

You said something really important I think just now, which is we so often spend our lives building out, whether it's building a business or building a career or basically building a life around the expectations that other people have of us based on what they would do if they were in our circumstance. And I totally resonate with what you just said, which is, and I like you, we're in similar businesses, so we could use that as an example. I had a lot of people giving me a lot of advice about what I should do when I first started this work 17 years ago, almost 20 years ago, and I'm grateful every day I did not follow that advice because I realized they were giving me advice based upon what they would do in my circumstance, not based upon who I am and how I'm uniquely wired to be able to operate in this business. And it just makes me think I've been saying lately that everyone's optimizing for something. Everybody in our life is Optimizing for something. And most of us are optimizing for different things. And so when we take advice from someone else who is optimizing for something, an output that maybe doesn't. Isn't as important to us, but we take their advice, we're going to be optimized around a suboptimal result for ourselves.

Todd Henry [00:34:19]:

Right? And so it made me think about your example of enjoyment, specifically. Finding enjoyment in the work is such an important thing because if you want to be successful, you're going to work, you're going to work hard. The discipline part of it is still part of the equation in your book. It's just that you should enjoy the discipline part because it's something you're doing that you find gratification in.

Jia Jiang [00:34:42]:

Absolutely. I remember I was at this event, right? This very famous motivational guy, right, People, he's a lot of social media. So people ask him, hey, how can I be you? How can I be the next you? And his answer is, I want you to ease word eat crap, right? He's, he didn't use that word. He wants you to eat excrement for the next 10 years and just do the most dirty work, do the things that no one wants to do. Then you'll become me. I was like, that's such bad advice. That person, whoever takes that advice, will get lost in those 10 years because they're not. If all they want is to go eat excrement for 10 years and then one, they're not going to be able to do it.

Jia Jiang [00:35:27]:

Two, their results will no way achieve that person, what that person achieved. But more importantly, they're going to lose themselves. They're going to lose themselves in the process. They're going to get lost. They're going to try to be someone else, trying to copy someone else's success by doing exactly what they do while forgetting who they are, forgetting what their strengths are, what their artistry is, what their inner self is. That's the most. You are the most important weapon, your strength, your, even your weakness, even the things you're bad at is your weapon because you can build. Most people just shy away from that and hate themselves.

Jia Jiang [00:36:04]:

And I used to do that. I used to just hate myself. I'm. I was like, I can't focus and. But now they're all my treasures because I built tools and I built ideas around them. Now they became my strength. So don't lose yourself when you're achieving your goals.

Todd Henry [00:36:20]:

I want to talk about a tool that you call the momentum loop. I describe a Pattern called the distraction death spiral. As many of us can immediately get what that means we're feeling badly. It's a procrastination. How does the momentum loop framework solve this? Is it designed to do.

Jia Jiang [00:36:37]:

Okay, so let's talk about the death spiral first, the distraction. So this is what my day is when I get distracted. So we're in the process of. We're doing work, right? Sometimes the work is hard and sometimes if there's something that's more pleasurable at that moment, we choose that thing. Because in short term that solves this hard feeling. We get distracted. Doom scrolling. What text people call whatever, right? Either YouTube and then you.

Jia Jiang [00:37:03]:

Then an hour later you feel bad. You're like, oh my gosh, I've done. Haven't done the work. So let me get back to the work. And then. But you feel worse because it just wasted another hours. How do you solve that worst, worst feeling? Let's do a little more scrolling because that solves the general problem. So the.

Jia Jiang [00:37:19]:

So that's a downward spiral. But the momentum loop is trying to feel good. And it's a virtuous cycle. Trying to feed yourself in. There are many things you can do in momentum loop. So is taking whatever thing you have right now, you celebrate, you turn that into your momentum so it can drive you forward. Right. I'll give you an example.

Jia Jiang [00:37:41]:

Many people have heard I've done this thing called a hundred days of rejection therapy. Right? There's this. And that's how I started my own journey. The thing is rejected. My goal was to get rejected every day for a hundred days. Just. That was hard. That was the idea.

Jia Jiang [00:37:56]:

Sounded like, why would people do that? Well, rejection once is hard. Why would you reject for a hundred days? What are you doing? But what I did was I found momentum in doing hard things, which is every day when I get rejected, I don't just I'm getting rejected. I'll try it again next day. No, I write down all the learnings and everything I learned everything that, that you know. And even before that day, all the knowledge I accumulated, I've started to use that on that day of rejection. Then as I started the next day, I'm going to be. I'm going to be building on yesterday's thing. So I'm going to try this new idea I got from yesterday, this new technique.

Jia Jiang [00:38:34]:

Then the next day I would build them again. So quickly I started using knowledge as a momentum loop. Now I'm doing every day, I'm having momentum every day. I feel I got new tools in my hand. And that became so much fun. Instead of just trying, hitting my head against the wall every day, right? So many times we feel like we are trying to head hit, trying to hit a head against the wall, trying to push a rock uphill, whatever analogy. Trying to achieve our goal. But if you build little momentum into your work, you get faster, you start going downhill instead of uphill.

Todd Henry [00:39:09]:

Easy Discipline by Xia Zhang is available now wherever books are sold. So let's go back to that cafeteria in Cornell for a moment. Because I don't think a wobbling plate is really about physics. I think it's a story about what becomes possible when the work in front of you stops being a means to an end. Feynman had spent years treating physics as important, and it nearly emptied him the moment it became enjoyable again. Everything flowed, he said to himself. It was like uncorking a bottle. What Ian Bow goes to tell you is that this kind of experience is not rare.

Todd Henry [00:39:43]:

It's the most available thing in your life. Gratification is waiting in every sensory moment of your day and the tools in your hands and the world against your skin. And all it asks of you is you show up in your body and take it in. Not later, now. Because it doesn't keep. What Xia Jiang would say is that this isn't a detour from your ambition, it's the engine of it. The people who go furthest are not the ones who suffer the most. They're the ones who figure out how to love pushing the rock.

Todd Henry [00:40:11]:

Enjoyment, artistry, systems, yourself, perfecting your craft. When journey becomes reward, the discipline stops feeling like discipline at all. In my book the Accidental Creative, I wrote about a practice I call unnecessary creating. It's making things nobody asked for on nobody's deadline for no outcome at all. Not for the platform, not for the portfolio, not for the side hustle. It's work that exists purely because making it brings you to life. For years, I've argued this isn't a luxury for creative pros. It's how you stay connected to the reason you started making things in the first place.

Todd Henry [00:40:44]:

So here's my challenge for you. That's why week, and I'm borrowing the words from Richard Feynman himself. Do something with no importance whatsoever. Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you'd like all of our interviews in full, you can do so@dailycreative plus.com just go there, enter your name and email address, and we'll send you a private feed with links to every full interview. Also, if you'd like more information about my speaking events and my books. You can find it@toddhenry.com until next time. May you be brave, focused and brilliant.

Todd Henry [00:41:21]:

We'll see you then.