Personal thoughts; the death of an icon.

In light of the recent death of Robin Williams I felt a great need to address the burden that anyone who relies on their creativity as their meal ticket must bare. If you’re reading this, I’m sure Mr. Williams’s art affected your life in some way. I know he affected mine.

            Growing up, I had two major role models other than my parents: Bill Cosby and Robin Williams. My mother will tell you, aside from wanting to be Indiana Jones, growing up I wanted to be a comedian. As a family, we took long road trips. I would use that time to test the comedic waters with my parents, who have always been my captive audience. I would make a joke then turn to my mom, “Was that funny?” and for a long time the answer was no. We listened to old Bill Cosby records and one day it dawned on me. He just told stories and they were funny! He never laughed at his own jokes, something I always did, and the people did the laughing for him. Slowly, I started to get laughs from my mom and ever since then she has told everyone that she gave birth to her entertainment system.

            The first time I heard Mr. Williams’s comedy was through my Uncle Bill. He was completely different from Cosby, but all together the same. I devoured his movies; first Disney’s Aladdin then Mrs.Doubtfire. I couldn’t wait for Hook’s release. Finally I was allowed to watch his HBO special (I think it was just on at some point and I didn’t bother to ask if it was okay that I was watching it). Granted I didn’t get most of the jokes but I didn’t have to – the man was a riot to watch regardless of what he said.

            My parents and I used to watch Mork and Mindy on Nick at Night. The man was so weird, but he was the in demand outcast and I related. Weird was normal and the normal world was weird.

            In grade school I learned to stifle my funny face around my peers. There was a lot of criticism that, as a child, I didn’t know how to deal with. It wasn’t until High School I felt I could be myself. My friends didn’t really understand my humor then either, but they loved me by then, so they were stuck with the weird kid who made self-deprecating jokes.

            Through it all I continued to tell stories to my family, modeling them after my comedic mentors. I gravitated towards music and some of the finer points of form made their way into my stories. Finding that after I had my audience hooked, I needed to take them to a new place with a climactic arrival then set them free. A particular story I remember telling, one family vacation, about a certain Life Skills teacher is still quoted to this day.

            Being a performer is hard. It’s easily, simultaneously, the most painful/joyous experience of your life being on stage. To bare your soul at the risk of utter rejection. It’s why so many of us turn to drugs and alcohol. I know for me, my alcohol addiction stemmed from needing a way to make other people’s feelings not matter to me. Drunk, I didn’t need anyone’s permission to be myself. Mr. Williams’s addiction may have been different from mine but we both relied on a substance to make us feel better about our lives. In an odd way, having a substance addiction makes me feel like I shared something with him. That makes me feel closer to humanity. It also makes his loss more personal.

            I loved the Crazy Ones, the show Mr. Williams most recently starred in. The chemistry among the cast was great and Robin was the star they all revolved around. His role showed vulnerability that I imagine was very real and personal. A wonderfully successful, brilliant mind that is simultaneously panicked and driven by his ever present self-doubt. I don’t know if the show’s cancellation added to his mental state but I assume it did.

            It’s a miracle anything gets green lit today. Studios spend so much money financing projects, they want to make sure they’ll not only get their money back but get a return on their investment as well. Let’s face it, not every show is as successful as Friends. The high of starting a show like The Crazy Ones and the crash of its cancellation after one season is something I don’t know if I could have bared but this is an everyday occurrence in Hollywood. Television and cinema are the free market at work and network ratings don’t account for good taste.

            So what’s the point? No matter how successful someone is, no matter how many movies they’ve stared in, no matter how many lives they’ve touched we’re all still human. The older I get, the more I realize that self-doubt is a part of everybody’s daily life. The first two movies I wrote with my partner David Stewart were comedies. We wrote a sitcom together. My story, Immortal Fear, has comedy elements entwined into it. I’m still that little boy who looks up at his mom and asks if he’s funny. Every day I question it and I’m constantly reminded of the old showbiz saying, “You’re only as good as your last gig.” I don’t know the answer. If your goal is to be funny, your only source of value is external. Does any of this make me like Robin Williams? I don’t know that either. If we’re to be happy at all though, we have to find value of our selves within ourselves. Then no one can take it away, maybe that’s a part of growing up.

            To me, Robin will always be Peter Pan. I pray that one day someone can find all the lost boys in Nevernever Land.

R.I.P. Robin Williams.

O Captain, My Captain.

Image: http://tinyurl.com/o2m66mo

Productivity, Impulse and the Sloth Demon

Productivity

I’m not sure about the rest of you, but I know I’ve got a big problem dealing with my impulses: especially when I’m trying to be productive. Writing, music, painting – they’re all creative endeavors that require a steely amount of self-motivation but our reservoirs only run so deep. You obviously don’t just need to be a creative type to have a desire for productivity it could be a work to-do list; it’s summer vacation and it’s cram, cram, cram all the stuff in that couldn’t get done during the school year; or you could, very simply, be like me and my friends and want to juggle the demands of a job, a blog, a book or two, a screenplay, lifting weights,  and an album into your life all the while trying to maintain a healthy relationship with your family, friends, and spouse.

I don’t get something from each of these categories done every day, mind you. When would I sleep? But it brings up the first good point about being Productive:

• Know your priorities.

Priorities are everything. We examine and adjust them every day, but we don’t always take into account our priorities when it comes to the tasks we tackle every day. If you’ve ever had a deadline looming over your head, you know what it’s like to take a hard look at your priorities and start throwing things out the window that are just not important.

David and I once wrote two drafts of a screenplay, five drafts of a teleplay and one start to finish screenplay in three weeks. We actually had a deadline of four weeks, but we finished early and had time to get a lot of feedback before submitting them. In that case our priorities were pretty clear: we wanted a job and it was do or die to us. You understand really quickly what you have to do and what you simply want to do when these kinds of deadlines come around. If you don’t have the “luxury” of having a deadline imposed upon you here’s a couple tips for listing your priorities:

• Figure out your necessities vs your wants.

Necessities are simple, but obviously essential. You need to eat; you need to sleep (a little); you need shelter. To have food and shelter most of us need to have a job. So with those things in mind, list To-Dos for each of those things you may have in a day. Groceries, pay rent, go to work etc. These are things you have to do to survive and you accomplish them very early on  your to-do list. Our wants are most often the things that we want to be more productive with, but we can’t discount the things we do as part of our necessities as productive. Remember, if you’re dead you can’t be productive at all.

Next comes our wants. For me, I’ve got a novel I want to finish before I go back to work in the fall. It consumes the majority of my productive time (that and the blog). The problem with wants is they aren’t really dangerous to our survival if you don’t complete them to the extent we’d like. This is why it’s hard to write books and make records and beautiful paintings – it’s not imminent to our survival and let’s face it, we all want to have leisure time (we’ll have to talk more about leisure).

• Focus on one project at a time. Don’t stop until you’ve completed it.

It’s hard, if you’re like me, and your brain is full of big projects you’re dying to complete and you feel like no matter what you do you’ll be dead before you could ever finish them all (let alone get people to see and appreciate them). The reality is no one will ever see anything you do if it never gets finished. When I was younger I worked on hundreds of projects that never saw the light of day because I had split my attention among too many things or I wasn’t ready to release them out into the world yet.

That fear will kill you. I don’t care how perfect you think you can make a product if you just hang on to it for a little while longer, if you never let anybody see it you may as well have had a negative productivity (this idea deserves its own blog).

Don’t worry if it’s not the greatest thing in the history of the universe. If it’s only your first or second project chances are it won’t be that great – there’s a sense of pride that can’t be taken away from the act of completing a project. That’s the whole reason to be productive in the first place.

Impulse

I can tell you from experience that there are certain impulses that are really difficult to deal with. If you didn’t know, I’m an alcoholic.  I’ve been sober for over a year and still I have urges to drink. It isn’t easy, but impulse control is the most effective way to increase your productivity.

We’ve all got impulses we need to get a better handle on. Check Facebook more than twice a day? Got your eye on those salty crackers in the break room? Maybe you’ve got writers block and you think you have to go pee again for the eighth time in an hour. Whatever it is for you, it’s distracting you from your priorities.

A good way to get a handle on our impulses is by forming better habits to begin with. A great way to do that is by creating a reward system for yourself. I found a tool recently that I use every day called HabitRPG.

I'm a powwfuw Wowwiuw!

If you’ve ever played World of Warcraft you’ll understand why I like it so much.  It game-afies your life in a way that offers you rewards for being productive and completing the goals that you set out for yourself. List making is always a great way to goal set and reward yourself for productivity.

Sloth Demon

This is where your impulses and your productivity collide in a very peculiar way. I started calling it my Sloth Demon after a character in Dragonage: Origins. Think of sloth as one of the seven deadly sins. We think of people who are lazy, don’t work, possibly hedonistic. Sloth is the sin that keeps you from producing.

Here’s the problem with the Sloth Demon: I wrote a lot of papers last minute in college. The best part about writing a paper last minute is that you’re on a tight deadline. The worst part is that you don’t have time to goof around. I remember very clearly, one deadline looming afternoon, a paper I particularly didn’t want to write. I walked into the kitchen and stared at the pile of dirty dishes in my sink and though, “I have to get these done, they’re driving me crazy. I’ll never finish this paper with these dishes in the sink.”

Now, here’s the thing: what do those two things have to do with each other… at all?! The dishes were by no means holding me back from finishing my paper. The kitchen was, admittedly, messy but it had been much worse in the past. So why did I have this intense impulsion to do the dishes when something so important as my graduation from college was at stake?

If you have a list ranking your productivity items from greatest urgency to least you’ll find that the ones at the top are likely the ones you want to do least – otherwise you would have done them before they became urgent. Now, Sloth Demon is your buddy. Sloth Demon is your pal. It doesn’t want you do have to do that terrible, nasty task you’ve been avoiding. So it convinces you to do a different task from the list – one that’s more appealing.

The really dangerous part about Sloth Demon is that you feel as though you’ve been productive after it has tricked you into doing something you shouldn’t have been doing. Did the dishes in my kitchen need cleaning? Absolutely. Could it have waited until I had finished my paper, there-by completing something tangible to show the world? You betcha. Doing the dishes could have been the second most urgent thing on my list, but in doing them before I completed my paper I was less productive than if I had waited to do them until after.

It’s a bargain we make with ourselves. I’ll do something I really don’t want to do in order to avoid doing something I want to do even less.

Always have a To-Do list and make sure you’re comparing it with your priorities. Your priorities are going to affect the order of your list. A well-ordered, organized list is a productive list.

Take care of small tasks and chores immediately before something urgent arises. If you have a messy desk and a project deadline, if you aren’t completely pulled off task by the Sloth Demon, you’ll be distracted and unable to focus on your project completely. Clear your environment, clear your head. As above, so below.

Always reward yourself for a job well done. It’s the best way to make the next day bearable. No matter how productive we are, there will always be another project around the corner, another goal to reach, another land to conquer. There’s got to be a reward at the end of the tunnel to make the grind worth it. Externalizing rewards is a great way to help yourself along, but the real prize comes from the satisfaction of a job well done.

Just to be clear, the Sloth Demon is not a real thing - physical or spiritual. It’s a concept. Designed to identify a behavior I had trouble dealing with. Please don’t run around, blessing your house in hopes of scaring the Sloth Demon away. You’ll have already been tricked away from your productivity by it. 

^_^