The Everydayness of Excellence

Dear friends,

I am setting out in my van for Slovakia.

Before I leave, I always find it hard. Habits are hard to build and easy to break.

Or are they?

When I examine it, I see it differently.

In its place a different question arises — do you have the capacity to trust yourself?

When you trust yourself, you discover the gift of being able to let go.

When you don’t, a neurosis hunts you — Christ, I’m breaking my rhythm, will I ever get back into it?!

This year I have concentrated far less on quantity of work, and far more on patterns I can repeat.

By that I mean simply:

What can I get to every single day?

After a topsy-turvy life, I have found myself in the longest period of stability I can remember.

Creatively, I have always existed in a relative state of desperation — reacting to this, chasing after that, longing for everything or crashing against the nothing.

My oh my, normality has arrived as the most curious oddity.

With it though, has come a gift.

What does one do with days when they start to repeat?

Even next to all the madcap haywire opportunities of my life — gigging from one side of Russia to the other on the Trans-Siberian Express, doing what I could in film and fundraising during the refugee crisis, wintering alone in a van in Northern Scotland — none of them prepared me for one of life’s great gifts: repeated weeks.

During this period, I have reappraised what I want from life, and found many complex things falling away.

What is simplicity?

Once you experience it, what do you do with it?

Well, the gods hand you space, and then they say — go find out who you are.

For many of us space is a double-edged sword creatively.

We yearn for it, dream about it — and yet when it comes we find ourselves blunted.

Holy hell, what was it I really wanted to do again?

What is it that you want? Why do you want it? When you go after it, do you discover that indeed, it is the right thing?

In these crevasses devils linger.

The path to who you are is lined with the beady eyes of self-doubt, the persecution of unfixable things, the weight of might-have-beens.

The tough thing to see is always the thing you wanted to avoid:

Deficit.

I don’t mean this in the form of that great modern cancer — not feeling good enough.

I mean it rather as an encounter with yourself exactly in the state that you are in.

Once you see that, certain things become clear.

Particularly, how deficit can be filled, and what with.

All of us have holes.

Holes of skill. Holes of achievement. Holes from life. Holes from death. Holes from projects. Holes from dreams.

If you find yourself full of holes today, do not worry — you are in a good club.

It is not your job to fix all your holes. Because some holes, we must simply reconcile with.

Yet some holes — some holes are the whole opportunity of our lives.

As I drift past my mid 40s, I see mine as my great teachers. My God, too many of us fall through them.

We believe we have arrived in a fixed form — idiotically, as so many adults come to believe.

My God, I have had that fantasy shaken out of me.

What a blessing, to have holes to fix!

What I have realised this year is the extent to which everything is before you.

You walk around carrying all types of dark passengers with you, and then you let these passengers lock you up in chains.

All the knowledge you accrued, all of it — it brings you to this doorway, to this gateway, to this threshold.

So what will you do with it?

Because knowledge goes one of two ways.

It either starts looking forward, which burnishes it into wisdom.

Or it starts looking backwards, which calcifies it into cynicism.

This year, I have taken on the adventure of living forward.

What is it that I can do today, that might make a difference to my life in the future?

Better — what would happen if I started to live by a new value, a new approach, a new pattern? If I threaded a sequence of days, of months, even years — where might that bring me?

My God!

You start looking it in the eye and the strangest things happen!

First, rather than feeling that dread of a Monday morning you catch yourself, unexpectedly, on the Sunday, excited for the next day.

Second, who the hell is this new visitor? Hope! Where did you go for so long, and how is it my heart can carry you again?

Hope and excitement.

Two things that cynicism breaks itself upon.

But there is a third, and it is in this that I want to land today’s letter.

I heard the performance psychologist Dr. Gio Valiante say it — simply these words:

There is an everydayness to excellence.

I think too many of us carry around baggage from our past that tells us we can’t do things.

That we can’t pick up a guitar.
That we can’t learn the piano.
That we could never paint the picture, write the book or hell, make the new start.

But if there is one thing that I’ve learnt this year, it is that excellence begins in the joyous decision to first start, then to start threading some days together.

As such, I am living in repeated patterns.

Many of the new things I am trying to learn are outrageously difficult, and even with 10 years doing an hour a day, will only cause a dent.

And yet, to move towards excellence in anything you have to have the guts to walk through fires of failure — over and over, and day by day.

In this, I have been making a happy home.

And despite the many whisperings from old parts of me, I can now see, after months of gentle — but daily — commitment, there is some progress.

My God, how do we forget it?

That every day we have the opportunity to learn.

That every day we can rewrite the script we thought written for us, or that we got too comfortable in writing for ourselves.

It is not about excellence either.

It is about the aspiration to give what is within you a fucking chance.

So if any of this has made any sense, then please — stop putting it off any longer.

Because the years will go by, and as they do the devil will get louder.

Instead, can you give yourself an hour?

One hour per day.

For you.

Can you point it in the direction of something you’d like to create, something you’d like to learn, or something you’d like to build?

If you can do that — and then do it for a year — I can tell you something from my own experience this year.

Your life may not change.

But you will start to change.

Within each one of those mini hours — each of which becomes an Odyssey — you encounter yourself.

And yes, you walk through a million miniature failures.

But failure is not a state.

It is a pathway.

A pathway to excellence.

And you enable it by taking Dr Gio’s advice — by seeing that, after all, there is an everydayness to excellence.

As for me, I have learnt to trust, finally, in my own pattern.

For this time, I will give myself over to life, and see how it will fill me.

I need that, as we all do.

To take your emptying, give it back to life, and let its source enrich you once again, for the next chapter.

With love, Jim

I spent a lot of time thinking about how creatives can better promote a creative life.

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