Write? Write. Sleep? Sleep. Read? Read. Don't fight it.
sivers.org
sivers.org
Putting creativity on a pedestal can also be an excuse for laziness. There is a lot of cultural belief that creativity comes from inspiration, and can't be rushed. Not true. Inspiration is just your subconscious putting things together, and that can be made into an active process with a little introspection.
Focused, hard work is the real key to success. Keep your eyes on the goal, and just keep taking the next step towards completing it. If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better.
His game ideas can be summarized thusly: DOOM.
The best id game, the original Quake, had both John Romero and American McGee as designers, among others, AND Trent Reznor on sound effects.
Without them, id did... DOOM 3.
What Carmack is really referring to is the gruntwork of things like writing multiple rendering pipelines to support the nightmare hodgepodge of consumer 3D hardware, trying out WELL-KNOWN rendering techniques (invented for film) in games as hardware improves, and so forth, which sometimes is just tedium and sometimes requires hackery like fast stencil shadows/sqrt/bit-twiddling tricks. Trying a bunch of methods to see what works on limited hardware is a process of discovery.
You cannot brute-force creative ideas in general in that manner.
I wonder if you would accuse an artist who spends lots of time exploring dead end ideas of doing grunt work? Would you dismiss an artist as adapting WELL-KNOWN ideas if they allowed you to view someone else's work in a brand new, unexpected light?
You have to work, every day, whether you are too tired or not. You must push yourself, every day, and have discipline.
Extraordinary results require extraordinary efforts.
I will say that in my own life, I am often tempted by immediate action or inaction that suddenly becomes unattractive when I remember my longer-term goals.
That said, I DID build something while also working at a gruelling day job. So I know a bit about how to do this.
"The proneness of human Nature to a life of ease, of freedom from care and labour appear strongly in the heretofore little success that has attended every attempt to civilize our American Indians. . . . They visit us frequently and see the advantages that Arts, Science and compact Society procure us; they are not deficient in natural understanding and yet they have never strewn any inclination to change their manner of life for ours, or to learn any of our Arts.
"When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian Ramble with them, there is no perswading him ever to return. And that this is not natural [only to Indians], but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived awhile among them, tho' ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet within a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of Life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them."
http://www.summerhillschool.co.uk/
Some kids that go there spend periods of years doing no work, going to no classes, and aren't punished. The idea is that when the kid is ready to learn, he will learn without provocation.
Oh, and in case you think this is merely a phase, he's been doing this for over a year now.
When at work, I use a timer to time the time spent in actual productive programming. I find that if I start to go over 20 hours of productive work a week, I start to become miserable and my body reacts by bringing on colds or allergies.
Perhaps your friend chooses to work at a grocery store because he can't find a job in his field where he would have the opportunity to only work 15 hours.
A 25 real-hours-of-work week ends up being a pretty productive and intense one for me. I feel lazy with such a low number, but I bet most office workers do far less.
Only one thing makes me deliver: deadline
Without deadlines, nothing gets done in my world, as I always get these ideas of how to do something better using the new shiny thing X and there is no end to it.
Deadline enforces discipline and requires me to do a good job of planning to allocate the precious time. Makes me say no to pleasant distractions that I would otherwise agree to...
Once I have something delivered (or during my consulting work), then I allow myself to go on a "sabbatical": read the books and lurk on HN and LTU. However, the sabbatical must have a scheduled end-date too, otherwise nothing will ever get done.
Deadlines must be concrete. Here are mine: my current sabbatical ends in 2 weeks (coincides with the end of my consulting engagement and loss of golden handcuffs http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=763743). Real work starts on October 4 with a clear deliverable by October 23...
I'm an illustrator, though, not a programmer. But it's nice to be able to tell new clients that I haven't missed a deadline in 15 years. No illness or injury or real-life event can change that.
I used to feel guilty for sometimes waiting till the last minute to finish a job, until I watched a documentary about Frank Frazetta. He would get a new painting project and wait till the night before the deadline before even starting on it.
He'd stay up all night and get it done on time, then go back to what he was doing--which was usually baseball or (as he got older) golf. :)
You have to show up to work everyday and if your muse doesn't then you did your part.
Just get one thing done. Even if it's an easy, small thing. Get started and do it now. Especially if you don't want to. Having done it, try to do another; it'll be a great deal easier.
Some people need to do that. Others are workaholics, and need to take a break to inspire creativity. Others work because they're doing what they love, and do not need discipline because they're passionate about something. Others are usually passionate, but need momentary discipline to work through a tedious spot. Everyone is different. One size does not fit all.
This is a good place to apply the Paul Bucheit quote: "Limited life experience + Overgeneralization = ADVICE"
If you want to make the the world march to your beat, you need to start with your body/self.
Even passionate people go through periods when they don't feel like working, or they're working on some boring task, or whatever. The answer is not always to self-immolate, but to be self-aware, and to figure out why you're not motivated. Sometimes discipline is appropriate; sometimes rest is the better prescription.
The world marches to your beat because your beat is inspiring, not because you beat your drum harder than everyone else.
Others are lazier by nature, and would spend the majority of their lives doing little or nothing -- and that might include traveling, gardening, reading, playing video games -- and they do need to push themselves if they're going to accomplish anything ... if they want to accomplish anything.
Winston Churchill was a lazy, lazy man who succeeded because he was capable of brilliance for the short bursts of time he worked. Brian Wilson spent the infamous three years high in his bedroom, then returned with a series of masterpiece albums. Ricky Gervais was a disc jockey until he was 39, then made possibly the best television show of all time despite being lazy and disruptive both while writing and directing it. Marcel Duchamp spent how long making his fountain? It became the most famous piece of art of the century.
While I don't disagree that extraordinary efforts are required to produce things, I don't agree that "extraordinary" means hard work. Sometimes it means a willingness not to work unless the work means something.
(I think of myself as very lazy as well; I tend to grind on ideas for months or years until they are simple enough.)
Do you have a reference for that? My impression was that Churchill had a fairly intense work schedule. For example, http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-cohen061802.as... :
"Churchill, far from being an aristocratic lounger, was a glutton for work ... His working hours were, it is true, hard on his subordinates, extending as they frequently did into the small hours of the morning."
So he wasn't lazy in that he did nothing—he wrote a series of histories and was one of Britain's most influential prime ministers—but he worked a unique schedule.
Now, of course, I push myself for various reasons: I want income, I want to make the world a better place, I want to learn, etc... but in the end are those reasons for working hard any better than the person who says they want to have a happy life and thus don't work hard or push themselves?
You have work to do. Do it.
Sitting at the terminal, but not sure what to type? Turn off the terminal, grab your source listings, scratch pad, and red and black pens and go to the other room. Or the library, Or starbucks. Work the problem that way and soon enough, you'll be dying to get back to the terminal.
Sitting on the sofa and analyzing that function with pencil and paper until you've worked yourself into a logic freeze? Get up and turn on your computer and code the simplest case. Before you're done, you'll find some enlightenment.
Have trouble doing either? Review old code, examine apps written by others, refactor something (you always have something to refactor, right?).
But do what you feel like? No.
Oh, come on. Says who? You only "have work to do" to the extent that you need to survive. Beyond that, it's optional. It's equally bad advice to suggest people should force themselves to work when they don't want to, simply because they "have work to do."
The only insightful comment you can make here is that one-size advice doesn't fit everyone. Some people are workaholics, and should try harder to take breaks. Others are complete daydreamers, and maybe need more discipline. There's no one right recipe. The world is not binary.
The master replied, "When hungry, eat. When tired, sleep."
"Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water."
There are plenty of things you just have to do if you want them to get done, enlightened being or not.
"There are two ways to wash the dishes. You can wash the dishes so the dishes or clean. You can also wash the dishes to watch the dishes."
The moral I got from your koan when I first read it is what the difference is not in reality, but in the mind. That doesn't mean working when you don't feel like working. It means feel like working, or don't work.
But if you're tired, don't fight it. Sleep.
This worked out to be an absolute disaster for me (if you take it to its logical conclusion, if you're not tired, don't go to sleep, etc). I ended up free wheeling around the clock, sometimes getting up at 7pm, sometimes 2am, sometimes 11am.. it was nuts. And that sort of sleep pattern really messes with your head after a while.
It's a sort of built-in automatic circadian rhythm reset mechanism which kicks in after just one late night coding session.
It's like (a + b) is still the same thing as (b + a). But because 'a' is the first letter of the alphabet (for most of us) it's more natural to put it first.
And another short thought that I think is relevant: discipline is not about forcing yourself to work when you don't want to, but it's about managing the time and finding the best spots for your work to be done. Of course, self-employment is best for this.
This isn't to say that there is no merit in working with your mind and being productive when your mind is ready, but the notion that you must not bring willpower to bear on any task is taking things a bit too far.