You don’t have to be great all the time. Frankly, you only have to be great a few times per week. The mistake everyone else makes is they’re giving all tasks equal attention. They’re trying to be great at everything all the time, thus end up mediocre at most everything, and stressed out, overwhelmed, and exhausted in the process.
But in reality, only very few instances each week matter a lot. Everything else matters little. There are always a few instances throughout your week that can produce huge payoffs in results, reputation, recognition, influence, impact, and long-term value. It could be a key presentation, an important sales call, a staff meeting, a difficult conversation with partner or employees, or contract negotiation. Whatever your performance in those few instances will make up 90 percent plus of the success and outcome of your entire week.
Nearly every weekday morning for a year and a half, I got up at 5:30, brushed my teeth, made a cup of coffee, and sat down to write about how some of the greatest minds of the past four hundred years approached this exact same task–that is, how they made the time each day to do their best work, how they organized their schedules in order to be creative and productive. By writing about the admittedly mundane details of my subjects’ daily lives–when they slept and ate and worked and worried–I hoped to provide a novel angle on their personalities and careers, to sketch entertaining, small-bore portraits of the artist as a creature of habit. “Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are,” the French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin once wrote. I say, tell me what time you eat, and whether you take a nap afterward.
The novelist and short-story writer was, in the words of his biographer, Philip Davis, a “time-haunted man.” Malamud’s daughter remembers him being “absolutely, compulsively prompt” throughout his life, and notes that he could become extremely agitated when made late. This obsessive punctuality served him well as a writer. Although he made his living as a teacher for most of his life, Malamud always found time to write and apparently never lacked for discipline. “Discipline is an ideal for the self,” he once said. “If you have to discipline yourself to achieve art, you discipline yourself.”
“I work all the time,” the evolutionary biologist and writer told an interviewer in 1991.
I work every day. I work weekends, I work nights…. [S]ome people looking at that from the outside might use that modern term “workaholic,” or might see this as obsessive or destructive. But it’s not work to me, it’s just what I do, that’s my life. I also spend a lot of time with my family, and I sing, and go to ball games, and you can find me in my season seat at Fenway Park as often as–well, I don’t mean I have a one-dimensional life. But I basically do work all the time. I don’t watch television. But it’s not work, it’s not work, it’s my life. It’s what I do. It’s what I like to do.
The New York illustrator, artist, and designer wakes up early, about 6:00 A.M., makes the bed, and reads the obituaries. Then she goes for a walk with a friend, returns home to eat breakfast, and–if she’s on deadline–heads to her studio, in the same building as her apartment. “I have no phone, or email, no food or anything to distract [in the studio],” she said in a recent e-mail. “I have music and work. There is a green chaise there if a nap is needed. And in the late afternoon it is often needed.”
Richter wakes at 6:15 every morning, makes breakfast for his family, and takes his daughter to school at 7:20. He’s in his backyard studio by 8:00, and he stays there until 1:00. Then he eats the lunch laid out for him in the dining room by the housekeeper: yogurt, tomatoes, bread, olive oil, and chamomile tea. After lunch, he goes back to the studio and works into the evening–although he admits that it’s not all focused work. “I go to the studio every day, but I don’t paint every day,” he told a reporter in 2002.
