A couple of days ago, Creative Doing was featured in Readwise’s newsletter, Wisereads. It excerpts a passage from the introduction:

Finding my creative purpose involved letting go of every impulse and habit that made me successful at my work projects, and shifting my focus away from results into the process. Process is about consistently making time and energy to practice every day, rather than intensely pursuing a creative project and then burning out, falling out of love with it, and becoming resentful.

This passage is worth emphasizing more. (In case this made you curious, you can read the full chapter at this link.)

The world often values something different than what you do, so you’ll need to make a choice: do you want to see real-world results, or is it enough for you to just do your best with the work? 

Do you want to play a role in the success theater or do you want to decide that you’ve got enough? Do you want to be enviable, or do you want to be happy?

Or in Warren Buffett’s words (via The Snowball by Alice Schroeder):

The big question about how people behave is whether they’ve got an Inner Scorecard or an Outer Scorecard. It helps if you can be satisfied with an Inner Scorecard. I always pose it this way. I say: ‘Lookit. Would you rather be the world’s greatest lover, but have everyone think you’re the world’s worst lover? Or would you rather be the world’s worst lover but have everyone think you’re the world’s greatest lover?’ Now, that’s an interesting question.

Here’s another one. If the world couldn’t see your results, would you rather be thought of as the world’s greatest investor but in reality have the world’s worst record? Or be thought of as the world’s worst investor when you were actually the best?

There’s no overnight shift here; no silver bullet. It’s a constant practice, and you might find yourself drawn outside of the process—and into an obsession with results—again. That’s certainly the case for me; I often find myself needing to refocus on what’s at my desk, and not what it can do for me. That’s why I write daily here.

If you really want to practice this, try to make something you won’t show anyone else.