When to Set Your Passion Aside

An essay on balancing creative output with training, revision, and promotion.

Few people with a creative passion end up succeeding in it, in the traditional sense. This is mostly because the things people are passionate about are different than the tasks we need done to build and maintain society. A recent poll showed that the number one desired occupation for elementary schoolers was YouTube streamer. It's obvious why it would not be a good idea to have YouTube streamer be the number one profession in America, or possibly any civilization.

For two reasons, unattainability is central to the idea of a passion. The first is, if it's something with readily available opportunity, it stops being a passion and becomes a vocation that you love. There is an element of yearning to a passion, a gap between the recognition one desires and the recognition he achieves.

The second reason is that a part of the passion fantasy is rare acclaim. The idea of succeeding where others have failed and being recognized by many for one's output is a central component. It differentiates and validates. It provides reassurance. It promises status, which is definitionally hierarchical. One cannot be high status without others beneath him.

This fantasy of status through one's passion is attainable. Of course it is. Just like winning the lottery, a fantasy needs to be in some way attainable to be arresting. Unlike with the lottery, however, there are significant things one can do to improve his individual chances of succeeding.

In a centrally planned or strictly caste-based world, there are some things you just can't do no matter how good you are. If your passion is to be the English monarch, good luck. There are also some things that in theory anyone can do, but in practice require specialized and expensive training to achieve proficiency, like driving a Formula 1 car.

The majority of passions, however, are entirely under one's own control to study and master. Dance, writing, painting, and similar pursuits are essentially free, as long as you possess the necessary time, mental faculties, and physical health. Your success or failure in such passions, as painful as it might be to hear, is in your control.

We can forget the idea of total success. Human beings have an unlimited capacity to generate desires and regrets in the face of achievement. Masters in their late periods, from Coppola to Picasso, almost always lament what they never got to do. However, there's certainly a point at which we consider one's passions reasonably fulfilled. For most, financial security through free creative expression would more than qualify.

Almost no one with an unfulfilled passion spends enough concentrated time on it to have a shot at achieving success. That's not to say that spending concentrated time is sufficient, but it is necessary. Concentrated time is the limiting factor for many, whatever the reason. For them, success will forever be a daydream.

I stress the idea of ‘concentrated’ time because there are ways to spend countless hours on a passion without getting anywhere. We all know at least one person who is guilty of this. The process is imprecise, chaotic, flailing. The work does not improve over time.

My passion is writing fiction. I've been successful in that I've discovered a rhythm to continuously improve and produce work that I'm proud of. I have made some sales, and I have won some awards. I have not been successful in the sense of generating a self-sustaining livelihood, which is always in the back of one's mind for artistically-minded artists, and the front of one's mind for hacks. If your passion lies in a different domain, I hope you will have the sense to retain the parts of this essay that are cross-applicable and discard the parts that aren't.

In part, I've succeeded at completing creative work because my inclination is to pound relentlessly at the passion until I've seen something through. Just finishing things will put you in the top fifth percentile for success. The vast majority of people cannot even get this far.

Completing work is not the same as spending concentrated time, because it does not have an inherent component of improvement. Improvement is something I've had to learn by submitting myself to uncomfortable feedback, reading broadly, and (most critically) thinking with meaningful reflection about what I've already produced and where it lacks. This becomes a cycle of progress. One iterates, analyzes the results, and iterates again. A machine learning algorithm can afford to do this trillions of times. We carbon beings don't get as many chances, so we really have to make each one count.

When I reflect on my own work, my passion, I feel both proud and limited. I've produced expressive pieces that satisfied a desire otherwise incurable. I've also built up a war chest of three novels and five screenplays that have never seen the light of day outside of the hands of my loved ones. If you were appraising this as a business, you would say it has an excess of product and is badly sales-constrained.

There are two possibilities for why that might be the case. Either the product is unsellable, or insufficient work has been put into finding a buyer.

Writing is particularly difficult to sell because it takes time to assess, more so than a painting or sculpture. You can't immediately look at it and decide that it's very good, although writing that is very bad is clear at only a glance. Unfortunately, most writing is neither very good nor very bad. It falls in the middle of a bell curve where many perfectly fine novels and screenplays have doubtlessly been written and then left to rot, unpurchased and largely unread, because they haven't had either the spark of genius or the right social connection to break through.

All this means that the market for good writing suffers from imperfect information availability. Good writing goes unbought because buyers, either readers or publishers, have not adequately assessed it. They themselves are capacity-constrained in their ability to assess works for purchase.

As for me, let's hope for my sake that at least the majority of my work falls into the buyer-discovery category, not the unsellable category.

So, why haven't I put more effort into putting my work in front of buyers, pitching them and laying out a value proposition that might convince them to read? Well, it’s not my passion. Yet, at the same time, it's the path that will lead my passion to being fulfilled. There's a lot more to a passion than just doing the work. For most people, getting up the momentum to do the work is the constraint. For them, I would say to ignore everything else and focus on producing. However, if you're like me and you produce almost ceaselessly, it's worth being reminded that you need to set passion aside to succeed.

Set passion aside to think about your reader.

People are the path to success. You want money, and they have it. You want praise, and they are the ones to give it to you. They are the counterparty to your bid for fortune and glory. David Mamet says a story is a psychological transaction. William Zinssner also says that writing is a transaction with your reader. Both of these men, in saying this, are mostly trying to get the writer to stop being so self-indulgent and consider his audience. They want him to consider whether his reader will derive value from the reading experience.

This does not mean that the author and his wants are unimportant. If you develop a style that delivers value to your reader at no personal spiritual gain, you've created a transaction in which you no longer benefit, unless you're being rewarded handsomely enough in other ways to make up for the lack of writing pleasure. However, let's be honest. If you're not deriving any joy from what you write, there are many more lucrative ways than penning words to spend your time. The satisfaction of writing what we enjoy is what keeps us going in this field.

In simple terms, we can think of the literary transaction like this:

The author receives money and is heard. Being heard is an intrinsic human need, because being heard is one of the best ways to be understood. The author also gets the pleasure of knowing that he has provided value, that he has positively changed someone else's life in some way. To create, he expends some mental energy, but the real cost for the author is time. He is paying opportunity cost with all the things he could have done that he didn't do because he was writing instead.

The reader, on the other hand, derives pleasure and knowledge. Like the author, she pays in time, time which could have been spent doing other things if she hadn't decided to read. She also pays in risk, in vulnerability, because reading bad ideas can be harmful. It's certainly possible to read something of low quality, especially if it deceptively appears at first to be of high quality, that leaves you worse off than if you had never even seen it.

Paul Graham and many others stress the value of writing simply. Perhaps Graham should really say that one should write clearly. ‘Clearly,’ meaning that it takes little effort to understand the text. This is not the same as writing simply, because a reader with a high vocabulary has a powerful arsenal of understanding in the form of a wide array of words. If you want to interface with her more efficiently, you want to use words that are the most specific while still being present in your and her mutual arsenal. You also want to use sentence structures that are complex enough to convey your ideas without being unusual to the point where she has trouble following.

This is part of the reason why norms in writing styles are so important. We've all had the experience of reading an eighteenth century American treatise and feeling woefully inadequate in our ability to quickly parse the sentence structure. It's unlikely that the colonial men reading these texts were considerably more intelligent than us. At most, they were modestly more intelligent, and even that is doubtful. However, they had been acculturated into a style of writing that was common and a vocabulary that was expected. Their subconscious minds were primed to read each other's work in a way that to us is alien.

Any approach to clarity begins with conceptualizing one's reader. This is what Mamet and Zinssner are getting at, and what Graham is getting at as well. Once you understand your reader, you can understand how to make yourself clear to her. The clarity of your work, thankfully, can be improved through revision.

Set passion aside to revise.

Revision costs additional time and much more mental exertion than writing in a single draft. In exchange, it offers the reader a smoother read, which means she has more mental bandwidth left to absorb your meaning. It also means there's a good chance that she'll be reading better ideas, because bad ones have a way of lending themselves to expulsion in the revision process.

Lengthy revision is not always worth the time and effort. The more readers you expect to have, though, the more important it becomes. The combined man-hours of 100,000 people reading a short essay are considerably lengthier in total than the time it took the writer to author it. If the author has left in a typo or a logical contortion, it will cumulatively waste hours and hours of readers’ time. It will also dampen the author's credibility at a broad scale. The same cannot be said of something like a personal email or text message, which can usually get away with a few awkward phrases unless the stakes are inordinately high.

We can think of the effect of total readership on the calculus of revision like traffic down a public thoroughfare. A high-traffic highway is paved and held to strict engineering standards. A country road can be dirt and still get a few trucks where they need to go. Building the dirt road to autobahn levels of quality, like revising an innocuous text message ten times, is over-engineering.

Because the anticipated readership of the work is so key to calculating the value of revision, the amount of revision you do becomes an implicit statement on how widely you believe your work will be read, which is a good correlate for how important you believe your work will be.

Ultimately, if you believe in your work and you desire it to be important, it is necessary, although not sufficient, to build the work as if it will inevitably be important. Thus, it becomes worthy of significant revision, for the sake of an easy reading experience for those masses who will eventually receive it. Revising is also a sign of respect. Even a narrowly read work will garner considerably more respect from readers who interpret it as being polished for the sake of their time.

It's possible to habitually avoid revision because you don't know how to start. If you're worried about whether your second draft will be an improvement, you can always complete it and then compare the two side by side. The first, if you have the right workflow, is not destroyed.

It's also worth defining for yourself what a second draft means to you. It does not have to mean starting from the beginning and typing the entire document from scratch once more, although there are certain people who find that to be their optimal system. More likely, you'll make a copy of the document and slowly go through it, trying to embody the critical reader and locate parts where your writing is not hitting her in the way that you'd like it to.

This becomes a dance of multiple identities. Once you locate such moments, you have to switch back to the identity of the writer, or perhaps a discerning editor, and change what you've written until it has the desired effect upon your imagined reader.

There are two ways to decide when to stop revising. The most practical is to stop when you get tired or frustrated and you have an implicit sense of diminishing returns. The second way is to keep working until you've created a draft which you no longer feel is meaningfully better than the one before. If you've done that, you've reached the limits of your revision capabilities, and, barring miraculous breakthrough, you'll most likely be moving laterally if you continue to additional drafts.

Now set passion aside to absorb criticism.

Once you understand how to revise a work, you already have the general framework for improving as a whole. Your life's work, after all, is just that, a work in and of itself. It can be thought of as a single piece with consistent goals, an attempt to communicate the central idea of your creative self. Each individual work within is a variant draft of that grand attempt.

The difference between drafting revisions and attempting a career is that your audience is now real people, not the imaginary reader in your mind. This is good, as real people are much more similar to themselves than they are to your mental model of them, however sophisticated the model might be.

The reader herself is not going to have the perfect answers when it comes to revising your prose. With film, and I suspect in other creative pursuits, a rule we keep in mind is this: When somebody sees a problem in your art, they are almost always right. When they suggest a solution, they are almost always wrong.

Even if you're merely asking for critique, not suggestions, deriving useful notes from real people is not effortless. It takes some serious insight. In all cases, but especially when it comes to the negative, people will almost never tell you what they really think.

Part of the reason for this is that people are generally polite. More acute is the fact that the majority of people who are going to read your work before you are famous are people who already like you personally. This makes sense. You've spent a lot more time trying to be liked as a person than you have being liked strictly for what you produce.

The thing is, people who like you and hopefully enjoy their relationship with you have a lot to lose by alienating you with critique. Even if you swear up and down that you won't hold it against them, they're going to be trepidatious. This could be because they're afraid of misstepping and saying something incorrect, or simply because they don't like the way it feels to say something that they think might make you upset. 

Because of all this, you as a writer need to be very good at paying attention to not just what people say, but what they don't say. When you have a regular reader, or a regular audience en masse, you can establish a baseline. 

For an individual, it could be what kind of comments they usually make. “Oh, this is very good.” “Oh, this is excellent.” If these comments accompany every critique, they are not actionable, even if they make you feel good. They are the baseline. For a large group of people, the baseline could be as analytical as your typical number of views, your typical view time, the number of likes you get, the number of shares you get, et cetera.

Once you understand this baseline, you can start to get a feel for when something you've created has exceeded it. You notice when it makes someone's eyes truly sparkle. You can notice when they spend a long time to stop and praise a particular moment. You can notice when you get an unusually high amount of traffic. These moments are incredibly valuable because they illuminate not just what works, but, through their absence, what is not especially profound. They are guiding lights if you are looking to cultivate more of the exceptionally good.

So here we have a basic framework for improvement. You create a piece. You refine it. You share it with the world. You meaningfully absorb feedback. Then you take what you've learned and you begin again and again and again.

Now we come to a very practical problem. Human beings are limited, both by obligations and eventual death, in the time and effort they have to spend as creators. Even if you have developed a scheme of continuous improvement, it will not be of much use to you if you die before it leads you to success. A minimum pace of improvement, then, is needed.

Not all works are equal in terms of the time needed to complete them. There are norms that exist across different fields, and these vary wildly. For a filmmaker or a novelist, the time it takes to create one single piece can often be measured in years. The time and effort to produce one whole unit and gather feedback is quite costly. In the case of a film, there is a monetary cost as well.

At first glance, it may seem like a creator who's trying to iterate and improve using time-intensive works must do one of three things:

One, he must try desperately hard to squeeze every drop of critique and reflection from each work, such that he can make a monumental leap in quality from one to the next to the next.

Two, alternatively, he must focus on producing these works very rapidly, to the point where he can iterate over and over again in a semi-brief span.

You must be cautious about taking this second approach. A novelist or a filmmaker, one would presume, is interested in the art of making one novel or film very well over a standard amount of time. If all your training involves producing one marginally acceptable novel or film with extreme haste, you may find that that's all you ever learn to do, much the way playing an instrument or learning a sport with improper form can become inescapable if you get too much practice in that fashion.

The third solution is to focus on drafting, completing, and revising shorter work that develops skills theoretically transferable to the medium of your passion. This could be short stories, or flash fiction, or, in the case of film, short films.

I will note, in truth, that making a short film is oftentimes not significantly less effort than making a low-budget feature film. You perhaps spend 40% of the work for something that's 15% as long and has absolutely zero commercial value when compared to a ninety-minute feature. You also risk training yourself to think in terms of short films, which have a very, very different narrative structure than narrative features.

I would not advise engaging only in a surrogate version of your passion. If you want to write novels, you need to at least write a couple of novels every now and then. There's no substitute for the real thing.

What then do we do about the problem of eventual death? We combine all three solutions into a balanced whole. We concentrate our efforts, at times move rapidly, and at times pause to produce shorter surrogate work. This may actually result less ‘core’ work by volume than a monomaniacal fixation on your passion, but I guarantee it will lend you greater results.

How, then, do we fill the creative well? We must set passion aside to train broadly.

I once gave myself a repetitive stress injury by repeating a boxing routine too frequently. I had just fallen into boxing, and I was training almost obsessively for weeks on end without enough variation. Of course, any real professional boxer understands that becoming top percentile in the field requires a lot more than boxing. The same is true of intellectual pursuits.

You must practice your passion, there is no alternative, but you must also surround the passion with activities that feed into it while opposing it. This is how you become rounded. This is how you gain depth. You let some muscles rest while training others. From this, the whole becomes more perfect. Athleticism and intellectual pursuit have more in common than most give them credit for. Mishima aptly (if eccentrically) compares the two.

Training can mean studying, it can mean taking a class, it can mean reading, it can even just mean thinking. When your training consists of practice, this practice requires an element of development, reflection, and iteration. Ideally, your practice also has some component of external feedback, critical feedback, that you acknowledge and truly take seriously. This is the recipe for growth.

Essays like this, for me, are part of that training regime. From a practical perspective, they also serve as a middle step for people on the journey to becoming dedicated readers. It's hard to sell someone on a novel or film when they don't know your work. When you publish intermediate-length pieces, they help build the reader’s path. This is one of the benefits of doing your training regime in public. This also ties into the very last reason to put your passion aside: You do it to promote what you've made.

Training in public is messy, and it requires bravery, but it allows even your failed or suboptimal drafts to serve as a signal encouraging others to pay attention to what you have to say. Readers can also tell when an author is being brave, and they like it. We love to see people do things that are just a little past what we typically do ourselves.

Getting back to the idea of a transaction between writer and reader, it's wrong to see this analogy as adversarial. The writer and the reader are not bartering. If the reader is sitting down to read, she’s already agreed to the transaction, at least provisionally. The understanding from both parties is that they stand to gain. The relationship is symbiotic.

Beyond that, the reader does not consume and destroy the work in reading it, not in the literal sense. Quite the contrary, the reader gains additional joy and social standing when she shares a work of value she's discovered. Readers, then, become your advocates once they like what you have to say. Artwork, titles, posts, ads, and branding can be the top of the funnel, as we say in marketing, to get people to try your work. Ultimately, however, readers are key. 

As a species, we're fairly close to solving nuclear fusion. We know how to do it, but the trick is getting the fusion process to return more energy than we must put in to sustain it. Once we solve that riddle, nuclear fusion will be a viable power source for humanity. Much the same way, an author at the beginning of his career is putting in more work than he receives in corresponding reward. He does this with the idea that he is building something that can one day become self-sustaining. The essential ingredient to this sustenance is passionate, proselytizing readers.

So, when do you put aside your passion? You do it when you need to revise. You do it when you need to increase the variety of your training. You do it when you need to spend time sharing your work instead of creating it, both to gain publicity and feedback. Then, after you've done all that, you go back to your passion and grind at eternity some more.

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