Why Does My Best Work Come Out When I Stop Trying?
The Pattern
You labor for weeks. You produce competent, professional, slightly hollow work. Then one afternoon, when you are not trying, the real thing arrives. The paragraph. The melody. The solution. You wonder why the gift requires you to be looking the other way. The gift is not capricious. The gift cannot come through the version of you who is performing for the gift. The performance is the closed door. The not-trying is the door opening.
Origins & Context
The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, whose research defined the concept of flow, found that peak creative performance arises in states of relaxed concentration, not in states of effortful straining. The harder one tries, in the white-knuckle sense, the further from flow one becomes. The original work emerges from a particular blend of skill and surrender, neither alone.
The neuroscientist Marcus Raichle's work on the default mode network has shown that the brain's most creative connections happen when the attentional executive relaxes its grip. The walk, the shower, the drive: these are not interruptions to creative work. They are the conditions under which creative work integrates. The trying-too-hard recruits the wrong network for the job.
The gift cannot come through the version of you who is performing for the gift.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
You notice it in the way the best line of the paragraph arrived while you were brushing your teeth. You notice the way the answer to the impossible problem came in the dream. You notice the way the studio session you forced produced nothing and the unstructured Sunday morning produced everything.
You notice it in the smaller pattern. The conversation goes flat when you are managing it. The conversation opens when you let it breathe. You notice that the rule extends past your work into your living. The over-tried life produces a competent, hollow shape. The let-be life produces the original you.
Named in the Literature As
The pattern is named in the literature as Flow State (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi), the optimal experience of creative engagement that requires relaxed concentration rather than effortful straining. It is also named in neuroscience as Default Mode Network Activation (Marcus Raichle), the brain state of unfocused inner activity in which creative integration happens. The contemplative version is named as Wu Wei (the Taoist principle of effortless action) and, in Western psychology, as the Surrender Required for Creation (Lewis Hyde in The Gift).
Related entries in this library: Authentic Desire, Adaptive Self vs Original Self, Nervous System Regulation.
Nikita's Note
The trying is not bad. The trying is just the wrong tool for the part of you that makes the real work. You need both. You need the trying to build the skill and you need the surrender to let the skill speak.
The practice is to build both into the week. The discipline of showing up. The space of not forcing. The original work lives in the conversation between them. You are not lazy when you stop trying. You are creating the conditions for what cannot arrive any other way.
From the work
The gift cannot come through the version of you who is performing for the gift.From When You're Ready, This Is How You Choose Yourself by Nikita DatarAbout this book
Related Concepts
More in The Pattern Atlas
See all in The Pattern Atlas →I wrote about this in When You're Ready, This Is How You Choose Yourself — available on Amazon.