Daily Rituals
How Artists Work
Big Ideas
- Rituals and routinesCall it what you will; do the work.
- Routine, in an intelligent personAnd routines in an intelligent person.
- Carl Jung: The Bimodal Deep WorkerCarl Jung = bimodal.
- “I work all the time, but it’s not work!”“But it’s not work!”
- The real mystery to crack is youIs YOU.
“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 the 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. …
My underlying concerns in this book are issues that I struggle with in my own life: How do you do meaningful creative work while also earning a living? Is it better to devote yourself wholly to a project or to set aside a small portion of each day? And when there doesn’t seem to be enough time for all you hope to accomplish, must you give things up (sleep, income, a clean house), or can you learn to condense activities, to do more in less time, to ‘work smarter, not harder,’ as my dad is always telling me? More broadly, are comfort and creativity incompatible or is the opposite true: Is finding a basic level of daily comfort a prerequisite for sustained creative work?
I don’t pretend to answer these question in the following pages—probably some of them can’t be answered, or can be resolved only individually, in shaky personal compromises—but I have tried to provide examples of how a variety of brilliant and successful people have confronted many of the same challenges. I wanted to show how grand creative visions translate to small daily increments; how one’s working habits influence the work itself, and vice versa.”
~ Mason Currey from Daily Rituals
I’ve had this book for years. Then, one day, it just sort of starting screaming at me from the shelf so I picked it up and started reading it.
One word: WOW.
If you’ve ever wondered how some of the greatest mind’s in history—from poets, painters, and philosophers to playwrights, scientists and mathematicians—structured their lives to get their great work done then this may just be the book for you.
Mason Currey has done a brilliant job of providing super concise and equally fascinating portraits of the idiosyncratic habits of 161 (!) iconoclasts ranging from W.H. Auden, Charles Darwin and Carl Jung to Stephen King, Benjamin Franklin and Mozart.
The variety of approaches is inspiring and, more than anything (for me), feels like a permission slip to *really* (unapologetically!) own my own idiosyncratic style. If that sounds like fun, I think you’ll love the book as much as I do. It’s a great, leave it on your coffee table and open-it-on-any-page kinda classic. (Get a copy of here.)
I’m excited to share a few of my favorite snippets from my favorite vignettes so let’s jump in!
Download MP3
Download PDF
Get the BookRituals and routines
“The book’s title is Daily Rituals, but my focus in writing it was really people’s routines. The word connotes ordinariness and even a lack of thought; to follow a routine is to be on autopilot. But one’s daily routine is also a choice, or a whole series of choices. In the right hands, it can be a finely calibrated mechanism for taking advantage of a range of limited resources: time (the most limited resource of all) as well as willpower, self-discipline, optimism. A solid routine fosters a well-worn groove for one’s mental energies and helps stave off the tyranny of moods. This was one of William James’s favorite subjects. He thought you wanted to put part of your life on autopilot; by forming good habits, he said, we can ‘free our minds to advance to really interesting fields of action.’ Ironically, James himself was a chronic procrastinator and could never stick to a regular schedule.”
That’s from the introduction.
We can call them routines or rituals but we need to know that what we do on a daily basis matters. (And, for the record, I prefer the word ritual as I think it gives the power of these apparently mundane habits the sanctity they deserve but I love the idea of making them so regular that they become routine.)
The wisest among use our finite willpower wisely to, as we discuss in Habits 101 (and Willpower 101), install habits that run on autopilot—creating the structures for their best work to most consistently and powerfully show up.
We hit on this theme a LOT. I’m reminded of Ray Dalio’s wisdom from Principles that we talk about in our +1 on How to 100,000x your Performance. Short story: Make friends with your basal ganglia. Program yourself through consistent behavior. Make it easy to win. (And, see: Masterpiece Days 101. Creativity 101. Productivity 101.)
Before we jump in and have some fun with some genius’s rituals: How are YOUR rituals? And, as always, most importantly: What’s one little thing you KNOW you can do to Optimize?!
P.S. Here’s a fun blurb from the section on William James: “James argued that the ‘great thing’ in education is to ‘make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.’
The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable human being than the one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation.
James was writing from personal experience—the hypothetical sufferer is, in fact, a thinly disguised description of himself. For James kept no regular schedule, was chronically indecisive, and lived a disorderly, unsettled life. As Robert D. Richardson wrote in his 2006 biography, ‘James on habit, then, is not the smug advice of some martinet, but the too-late-learned too-little-self-knowing, pathetically earnest, hard-won crumbs of practical advice offered by a man who really had no habits—or who lacked the habits he most needed, having only the habit of having no habits—and whose life was itself a ‘buzzing blooming confusion’ that was never really under control.’”
Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition.
The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.
Routine, in an intelligent person
“‘Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition,’ Auden wrote in 1958. If that’s true, then Auden himself was one of the most ambitious men of his generation. The poet was obsessively punctual and lived by an exacting timetable throughout his life. ‘He checks his watch over and over again,’ a guest of Auden’s once noted. ‘Eating, drinking, writing, shopping, crossword puzzles, even the mailman’s arrival—all are timed to the minute and with accompanying routines.’ Auden believed that a life of such military precision was essential to his creativity, a way of taming the muse to his own schedule. ‘A modern stoic,’ he observed, ‘knows that the surest way to discipline passion is to discipline time: decide what you want or ought to do during the day, then always do it exactly the same moment every day, and passion will give you no trouble.’”
Meet the first genius featured: W.H. Auden. Gotta love a book that starts with this line: “Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition.” (<- Hah!)
When I read that, I immediately thought of Robin Sharma’s reflection that greatness is consistency on the fundamentals. The specifics of your routine, he says, will differ depending on whether the domain you want to master is business or sports or philosophy, but your disciplined CONSISTENCY on your chosen fundamentals will be astonishing—in proportion to your ambition, to use Auden’s words.
So… Again… How’re your routines? What do they say about your ambition to do great things as you Optimize and actualize in service to the world?
And, going back to Auden, for aspiring modern Stoics out there, recall that “A modern stoic knows that the surest way to discipline passion is to discipline time: decide what you want or ought to do during the day, then always do it exactly the same moment every day, and passion will give you no trouble.”
Perhaps you can take a moment to bust out a blank piece of paper and decide what you want (or ought) to be doing during your version of a Masterpiece Day?
P.S. Note: To be clear, the book features a SUPER (!) broad range of styles. In fact, Currey tells us that although all of his subjects “made the time to get their work done… there is infinite variation in how they structured their lives to do so.”
Some got up super early. Some stayed up all night. Some lived a simple, structured almost militaristic life (like Auden) while others embraced chaos.
Infinite variety. But they all made the time. (Are you?)
P.P.S. Speaking of Stoics. Check out Stoicism 101 and our collection of Notes. :)
During his most fertile years, from the late 1920s through the early 1940s, Faulkner worked at an astonishing pace, often completing three thousand words a day and occasionally twice that amount. (He once wrote to his mother that he had managed ten thousand words in one day, working between 10:00 A.M. and midnight—a personal record.) ‘I write when the spirit moves me,’ Faulkner said, ‘and the spirit moves me every day.’
‘I must write every day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine.’ This is Tolstoy in one of the relatively few diary entries he made during the mid-1860s, when he was deep into the writing of War and Peace.
Carl Jung: The Bimodal Deep Worker
“In 1922, [Carl] Jung bought a parcel of land near the small village of Bollingen, Switzerland, and began construction on a simple two-story stone house along the shore of the upper basin of Lake Zurich. Over the next dozen years he modified and expanded the Bollingen Tower, as it became known, adding a pair of smaller, auxiliary towers and a walled-in courtyard with a large outdoor fire pit. Even with these additions, it remained a primitive dwelling. No floorboards or carpets covered the uneven stone floor. There was no electricity and no telephone. Heat came from chopped wood, cooking was done on an oil stove, and the only artificial light came from oil lamps. Water had to be brought up from the lake and boiled (eventually, a hand pump was installed). ‘If a man of the sixteenth century were to move into the house, only the kerosene lamps and the matches would be new to him,’ Jung wrote; ‘otherwise, he would know his way about without difficulty.’
Throughout the 1930s, Jung used Bollingen Tower as a retreat from city life, where he led a workaholic’s existence, seeing patients for eight or nine hours a day and delivering frequent lectures and seminars. As a result, nearly all Jung’s writing was done on holidays. (And although he had many patients who relied on him, Jung was not shy about taking time off; ‘I’ve realized that somebody who’s tired and needs a rest, and goes on working all the same is a fool,’ he said.)”
Two things here.
First, the last part about being a fool if you keep on working after you’re tired. Of course, we talk about the importance of oscillating and TRAINING your recovery all the time.
But Seneca comes to mind at the moment. In On the Shortness of Life, he tells us: “Our minds must relax: they will rise better and keener after a rest. Just as you must not force fertile farmland, as uninterrupted productivity will soon exhaust it, so constant effort will sap our mental vigour, while a short period of rest and relaxation will restore our powers. Unremitting effort leads to a kind of mental dullness and lethargy.”
(What do YOU do when you’re tired?)
Then we have that epic Tower. Cal Newport talks about it in Deep Work. In fact, he uses Carl Jung’s style of going from workaholic jam-packed busy to being hermit-checked out as a case study to describe the “bimodal” style of Deep Work.
He tells us we can’t rely on our willpower to exit Shallowville and go Deep. We need routines: “That brings me to the motivating idea behind the strategies that follow: The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration. If you suddenly decide, for example, in the middle of a distracted afternoon spent Web browsing, to switch your attention to a cognitively demanding task, you’ll draw heavily from your finite willpower to wrest your attention away from the online shininess. Such attempts will therefore frequently fail. On the other hand, if you deployed smart routines and rituals—perhaps a set time and quiet location used for your deep tasks each afternoon—you’d require much less willpower to start and keep going. In the long run, you’d therefore succeed with these deep efforts far more often.”
Cal proposes four potential approaches and encourages us to figure out which one works for us.
Carl Jung, as discussed, is the perfect example of a “bimodal” strategy. You alternate between being super plugged in and super checked out.
Then there’s the “monastic” approach in which you’ve radically simplified your life such that you can, basically, live in that Deep Work Tower all day every day.
Then we have the “rhythmic” approach which is when you find a consistent time during the day in which you can go Deep. This is my approach these days (with a strong yearning for my old hermit days :). For example, my AM1 Deep Work time block? It’s a rhythm I can rely on.
Finally, we have a “journalistic” approach in which you basically find time wherever and whenever you can.
It was fun to read the book with those styles in mind and note who did what. Here’s a highlight of a rhythmic family guy: Charles Schulz: “Over nearly fifty years, Shulz drew every one of his 17,897 Peanuts comic strips by himself, without the aid of assistants. The demands of producing six daily strips and a Sunday page required a regular schedule, and Shulz fulfilled his duties in a businesslike manner, devoting seven hours a day, five days a week, to Peanuts.”
And here’s a look at a journalistic writer-mom:“In the 1950s, as a young mother taking care of two small children, [Alice] Munro wrote in the slivers of time she could find between housekeeping and child-rearing duties.”
P.S. Back to Jung. This kinda makes me want to buy some land and build a two-story stone tower on it: “‘At Bollingen I am in the midst of my true life, I am most deeply myself,’ Jung wrote, ‘… I have done without electricity, and tend the fireplace and stove myself. Evenings, I light the lamps. There is no running water, I pump the water from the well. I chop the wood and cook the food. These simple acts make man simple; and how difficult it is to be simple!”
P.P.S. The genius featured right before Jung? His early-phase mentor, Sigmund Freud. Fun fact: Freud was so focused on his work that his wife laid out his clothes, “chose his handkerchiefs, and even put toothpaste on his toothbrush.” <- Um. Wow. Really? I thought I was kinda focused. :0
Inspiration is for amateurs, the rest of us just show up and get to work.
[George Gershwin] was dismissive of inspiration, saying that if he waited for the muse he would compose at most three songs a year. It was better to work every day. ‘Like the pugilist,’ Gershwin said, ‘the songwriter must always keep in training.’
“I work all the time, but it’s not work!”
“‘I work all the time,’ the evolutionary biologist and writer [Stephen Jay Gould] 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.”
“I work all the time!! But it’s not really work. It’s just what I like to do.”
Writer James Michener comes to mind. In his autobiography he puts it this way: “The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him, he’s always doing both.”
Shortly before we learn about Gould’s rituals, we take a look at Stephen King who “writes every day of the year, including his birthday and holidays, and he almost never lets himself quit before he reaches his daily quota of two thousand words. He works in the mornings, starting around 8:00 or 8:30. Some days he finishes up as early as 11:30, but more often it takes him until 1:30 to meet his goal. Then he has his afternoons and evenings free for naps, letters, reading, family and Red Sox games on TV.” (Check out Notes on On Writing for more.)
And (literally) right before him we have fun with Twyla Tharp and her “arsenal of routines.” “Tharp admits that this schedule does not allow for a particularly sociable life. ‘It’s actively anti-social,’ she writes. ‘On the other hand, it’s pro-creative.’ And, for her, that daily creativity is sustaining: ‘When it all comes together, a creative life has the nourishing power we normally associate with food, love and faith.’” (Check out Notes on The Creative Habit for more.)
[Maya Angelou] enjoys pushing herself to the limits of her ability. ‘I have always got to be the best,’ she has said. ‘I’m absolutely compulsive, I admit it. I don’t see that as a negative.’
The real mystery to crack is you
“Although he was a creature of habit, Malamud was wary of placing too much importance on his particular work rituals. He told an interviewer:
There’s no one way—there’s too much drivel about this subject. You’re who you are, not Fitzgerald or Thomas Wolfe. You write by sitting down and writing. There’s no particular time or place—you suit yourself, your nature. How one works, assuming he’s disciplined doesn’t matter. If he or she is not disciplined, no sympathetic magic will help. The trick is to make the time—not steal it—and produce the fiction. If the stories come, you get them written, you’re on the right track. Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.”
Those are the very last words of the book.
We take a tour through the intimate, mundane, day-to-day details of 161 brilliant lives and where do we wind up? Right where we belong. With YOU and your idiosyncratic awesomeness.
I’m reminded of two geniuses (Currey didn’t cover): Nietzsche and Emerson.
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche says: “‘This is my way; where is yours?’—Thus I answered those who asked me ‘the way.’ For the way— that does not exist.”
And, in Self-Reliance, Emerson tells us: “Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. … Where is the master who could have taught Shakespeare? Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? Every great man is an unique. The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow. … Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare. Do that which is assigned thee and thou canst not hope too much or dare too much.”
So… There is no “the” way—only YOUR way.
Again… (Echo!) What is it? What works for YOU?!
And… btw: This is a REALLY important qualifier: “…assuming he’s disciplined.” Choose whatever rituals work for you but (!!!) have DISCIPLINE to consciously, deliberately figure out what works for you and then (I might be screaming a bit now) DO IT.
So, one final time (echo echo!!): What’re YOUR ideal daily rituals?
Now a good time to install the next-best version of them and Optimize #endlessly?!
[John Updike] told another interviewer that he was careful to give at least three hours a day to the writing project at hand; otherwise, he said, there was a risk he might forget what it’s about. A solid routine, he added, ‘saves you from giving up.’
About the author
