Moving on here, we have a question from Orpheus. Appreciate the Greek mythology reference there. How can you increase the intensity of your deep work sessions if you're already focused and free of distractions? Orpheus goes on to say, I'm a music composer. Can I say, by the way, as an aside, I love-- maybe this is why you chose the name, but obviously the character of Orpheus in Greek mythology is-- has this beautiful singing voice and can write this beautiful music with which he woos Persephone.

So I like the fact that the person describing himself as Orpheus is a music composer. So well done, sir. So anyways, Orpheus says, I'm a music composer who finds it takes me far too long to write music. Following your book, Deep Work, I have time blocked, gotten away from distractions, set timers, and am focused.

Is there a way to continually increase intensity work produced in a certain time frame once all tenets of deep work are in place? Or should I just accept that this is a process that will always take a long time? So Orpheus, I have three things to tell you, three additional things I want you to introduce.

One is ritual. Where you do the work, what you do before the work occurs, especially for highly creative endeavors that require spontaneous creative production like music writing, music composing. This type of stuff matters. And it's probably worth investing money in. Let me build out a space just for my composing, a special office I just go to, an outbuilding, or a really nice looking building.

I remember at some point seeing the composing room that the movie composer, I believe it was James Horner, used. And it was this over-the-top decorated, really interesting room. It matters for this type of thing. What's your ritual before you write? What's the thing that turns you right? It's you walk through the forest, you have a certain type of herbamata tea just before you sit down.

There's a certain type of music playing on a vintage record player through really high-end speakers. You want to lean on ritual for doing something that is as demanding as spontaneous creative production. Don't think about this as wasting money. Think about this as necessary investments to actually make creative work at this level, have a maximum chance of succeeding.

That's my suggestion. My second is peers, by which I mean the people you spend time with. Spend more time with people who do high-level creative work for their job. Just being around people, artists, and writers, other composers, other musicians that really take their work seriously and do it at a really high level, preferably at a level where you want to get.

It just affects the way that you approach it. You're more likely to be locked in and focused on the work that you're doing. Your mind adjusts to the norms and habits of those around you. And when the norms and habits of those around you is very much focused and valuing of creative production, your mind's going to be more on board when you sit down at that piano and say, let's go for it.

So that could also help, too. So those are two things you might not have thought about. The third is acceptance. So after you've done those things and the other things, the time blocking, and the timers, and the training, then just accept. I'm doing creative work. I've set the conditions to be as good as possible.

Where I end up at this point, this might just be what it feels like to do this creative work. We sometimes create storylines about how it should feel. We think it should be the scene from Amadeus, where Salieri has the entrance march, and Mozart comes in, and it's like, oh, I like that, and can I try it?

And Salieri's like, do you want to see the music? And Mozart says, no, I think I got it. And he starts playing it from memory completely. He's like, yeah, that's just it, right? And then he stops for a second and says, wouldn't it be better if-- and he makes some changes, and it becomes a beautiful, famous piece of Mozart music.

And Salieri's cursing the gods, like, how can he just do this in his head? Sometimes we think this is what creative work should feel like. We have these storylines about we should sit at the piano, and beautiful music just comes out, and everyone's really impressed. And the Salieris in our life are really jealous.

But that's often not what it's like. Creative production is often painful. So much of it happens in revision. I talked about last week Brandon Sanderson and his process of writing super productively like he does. But one of things I picked up from the speech I watched of Brandon Sanderson talking about his writing process is how many revision processes go into actually getting one of his novels right.

So that means there's a whole part of his production where he's writing, and it's painful, and it's not very good. But it's laying the foundation that's eventually on which he's going to build a book that he is proud of. So that's like my final point is acceptance. If you're doing the stuff you're already doing, and you add in the things I suggested you might be missing-- ritual, peer group, alterations-- doing the whole thing.

So now whatever it feels like, that's how it's supposed to feel. And don't tell yourself stories that it should feel different. That's probably what it's supposed to feel like. Keep producing, keep being deep. (upbeat music)