When I began this exciting new project - which I had no idea about at the time, my friends gifted me a notebook and a fountain pen. While fountain pens are delightful as long as you don't turn them into actual ink-fountains, it was the notebook that held my attention for the longest time. Its cover:
I'm writing again now, my third full-length novel. I'm starting a Sports-Tech company. (I will talk about these, in detail, some other time.) But both artistic and entrepreneurial pursuits have one thing in common: work-definition. There are, in fact, two reasons why you don't feel like it is work.
One popular understanding of 'work' is that it is something you don't enjoy very much - something you provide so as to earn a monthly salary. I think the notebook talks about this idea of work. By this definition, of course, you don't work when you're enjoying yourself.
The more interesting part about creative pursuits, however, is the idea of creating tasks. Nothing exists until you first put it there. And when you define tasks, you are not only defining inputs and processes, you are also trying to understand the possible outputs - how to measure it, do they follow a pattern, are they as expected, are they in line with inputs?
When I still had an engineering-management job, tasks had zeros and ones. There was a process to go from zero to one. When you finished a task, you marked it 'done'. As opposed to this, I now had a burgeoning number of unfinished tasks; I am not quite sure what is the beginning, what is the end. Discrete states - beginning and end - have been replaced by a slope; it goes on and on, perhaps to places I haven't even dreamed about.
I have an idea. I don't know how I will get there. I can only believe I will get there somehow. I can only be sure of my effort.
