Waiting on the Genie

The software industry has given me a good career, but I have to admit that I have found aspects of the work personally draining. However, it is not the deadlines or the pressure or some particularly intense series of meetings which I find draining. Those times tend to provide me with a sense of clear purpose and direction. Those are times when survival is the simple matter of preparation and execution with a clear head and a healthy sense of humor.

The times I really dread are when nothing is happening – the times when I am stricken with writer’s block, and I am left staring down an infinite tube of tangled processes and tools and data, unsure of which piece of the system to rewrite to make it flow smoothly again. I know from experience that if I can manage to fit the whole thing in my head and let it just percolate there for a while, a new path forward will likely make itself clear. However, there’s no telling just how long this process will take. It could be days or weeks or months. During this time, I have to provide time estimates and progress reports and diagrams of proposed solutions. The only thing I can really estimate with any hope of accuracy, though, is the amount of time it takes to shove the original system information into my head. Even those time estimates are often wildly off, since there’s no telling how much of the system I have to absorb before I have enough to brew a solution. Worse, some critical piece of information or understanding could just leak out of my head unnoticed, falling back into the pile of presentations and emails sitting in my computer.

The bridge to the future is never easy

One of the more successful process improvement projects I worked on was codenamed “Capilano”, after a perilous footbridge near the office. Its success masks the difficulty we had deriving it. At one point, during the peak of the “brew cycle”, I found an isolated meeting room and just lay on my back, staring silently at the ceiling for something like 30 minutes, trying to line up the “flow” in my head. Another time, my frustrated boss said to me and two other colleagues, “I’m just going to lock you in this meeting room and shove pizza under the door until a solution comes out.” I sometimes think it would be far better for me if I simply weren’t paid during these times. The paycheques begin to accumulate like some type of cash advance on an upcoming idea, and the more time passes the more I am daunted by the feeling that the idea had better be a damn good one.

When the solution does finally present itself, it comes tentatively, like a new day; and it has to be teased forward into the light. Fortunately, though, this is the best part of the process, because once a new path forward can be articulated, it can be shared with friends and colleagues. Every time it is shared, the solution achieves more form and colour, becoming more self-evident with each iteration. I deeply enjoy this collaborative, social phase of the process. We even call it “socializing” an idea. The really good ideas jump into reality while others need more coaxing; but once they emerge I can start to feel OK again.

Until then, though, it’s rough; which is why I was greatly encouraged on my train ride yesterday while watching a recent talk by Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of “Eat Pray Love”. Gilbert was attempting to reconcile the success of her book with the fact that the creative writing process is a delicate, fickle thing, unlikely to ever perform the same way again. The pressure which this places on an individual explains why our best creative writers are often tormented by their works.

To relieve the pressure which she herself was experiencing following “Eat Pray Love”, Gilbert revives the ancient Greek and Roman concept that creative inspiration does not come from within, but rather from an external source, called “daemons” by the Greeks and “genius” by the Romans – from whence we also get the word “genie”. In this view, creativity was an external consciousness, literally living in the walls of the artist’s studio, which had to be consulted as an external source of inspiration.

The beauty of this idea is that it accepts the fact that creativity is not rational. It makes just as much sense for me to blame my lack of progress on my lame-ass invisible genie as it does to declare, “well, the system hasn’t really brewed long enough for the solution to present itself to me”. This feels like a cop-out, but in fact it does not imply any lack of effort or personal responsibility. In particular, one has to establish a good working relationship with the creative consciousness living in the walls. It has to be listened to, and this listening process takes effort and patience. In many ways, Gilbert is just personifying the “brew” process I have been talking about.

So as my morning train rolls into work, I replay the last few minutes of Gilbert’s talk, in which she says, “What I have to keep telling myself is... don’t be afraid; don’t be daunted. Just do your job. Continue to show up for your piece of it, whatever that might be.” And wait patiently for inspiration to speak again.