Resting on Laurels

and, how to push off from there to get better

This past week, I finished a big writing project that put me face to face with prose I’ve written over the last few years. Though some of what I was working with was older text I’d decided to keep, most of the manuscript was new writing. In the near-twelve months that I was engaged in this rewrite, I started to notice certain habits. When I began a chapter, or was fashioning a certain kind of moment in a story, I’d settle into a particular image or I’d take a certain way into an episode, repeating an image or approach I’d already done before. And then I’d catch myself doing that and change it.

Thankfully—I think!—I caught these lazy passages in time to keep them out of the manuscript. But the experience got me thinking, this fall, about habits. I thought about the temptation to accept from ourselves what’s perfectly fine instead of pushing just a little bit more to reach something that makes us feel proud and excited.

Since I was doing this thinking during the fall, it was the height of rowing season ahead of the Head of the Charles. I was out on the river in my single shell three times a week—a paltry number, really, compared to the six or seven I used to do before I brought running back into my life—and I spent a lot of time in a heightened awareness of my physical state. I’m a fan of sports data, so I was always poring over the stats recorded by my watch: heart race, watts, distance, speed, you name it. I kept noticing that my heart rate wasn’t ever getting very high and (a more trustworthy piece of data) my own feeling of breathlessness was pretty, well, absent. In other words, I was doing the workouts perfectly fine, but my cardio wasn’t being particularly taxed.

I chalked this up to the fact that I’d been training all spring and summer for a big trail race and that I probably did have awesome lung power (for someone my age and size). Which I think was true. But!

But what that meant was that I should be pushing harder. Surely, the truth was I could go faster in the workouts if I pushed that awesome cardio ability to really be tested. Surely, I had to go—as one friend said on the water one day—balls to the wall.

That was when I thought about the writing I was doing, (just a little bit every weekday morning while co-founding and co-running Galiot Press). I thought about all the places in my manuscript where I had slipped into a lazy moment, writing perfectly fine narrative, but not really aiming for and reaching something better, more interesting, more compelling.

I think this panda looks like the epitome of complacency (Photo by Yosuke Ota on Unsplash)

For me, this became a lesson and reminder: just because something that’s moderately challenging has started to come easy, that doesn’t mean, hey, you’re amazing and you can now rest on your laurels. It means the bar has just been raised. The best part?

You’re the one who’s raised it.

Now you need to push more, to find breathlessness again, or to find new words, new narrative approaches, to write an even better book. And that’s just the start. Because once you spend time at that new level of writing/rowing skill, that will get easy again, and then you’ll need to raise the bar once more.

I find this whole concept really exciting. Because there’s nothing punitive in it. There’s no sense of hey, look at you, you slacker you’re not pushing hard enough. In fact, this approach begins with recognition of your own good work. You’ve reached a point of mastery, so good job! And then, without judgment or scorn or scolding, you say, ok now push a little harder.

We don’t need to punish ourselves. It’s hard enough to make stories up out of thin air; hard enough to put your body on the line in sports. Weirdly, this particular way of pushing yourself gives you a little bit of ease. Acknowledge that you’ve won some laurels, just don’t stop there.