Bringing in your A-game

Some days it is just not possible to bring in your A-game. There are tons of potential reasons for it, you might not have slept well or not enough, you might be tired of the morning or worried about something, so that the concentration eludes you. This is all normal, and plain denial is not going to make it go away. In my case, the late evening yesterday had me hitting the bed after 1 a.m., so I have to admit that I have not been in my prime today.

Photo: PxHere

I had a teleconference in the morning, but I was fairly distracted and did not manage to make much sense of it, let alone making a significant contribution to it. All I could do was to promise that I would look into the matter and report. In the afternoon I had the PhD group meeting and my concentration was somewhat better: I followed the presentation and even figured out an interesting question that was well appreciated by the speaker.

Going from the office to the university (which luckily is only about half a block away) I realized that the rear tire of my bike was flat, so I texted Karen in case she could pick me together with the bike to bring it to the workshop, and so we did after my university meeting was done. The physical activity of loading the bike into the minivan and back out at the shop did me really good, it cleared my mind and, once we were back home, I felt inspired to try to find a solution to the problem they had asked me about in the morning. It was solved in less than an hour.

My point today is that sub-optimal performance is an essential part of being human, and what is important is how we react to the situation. Some people have no other option than biting the bullet and trying to do the best they can anyway. This would be the case of real-time action people, like surgeons, policemen, air controllers,... They better do their best to avoid being in a bad shape, because it might have consequences.

For the rest of the people, particularly creative types like myself, we have the luxury of being able to have bad days. If your program does not work in the morning, try working on something else for a short while and you might get a fresher view that helps you fix it. Or you can sleep over it and try your luck again the following day. One big problem with creativity is that it cannot be forced, and indeed it is well documented that putting pressure on a creativity task is likely to make the result worse. So deciding when to keep at it and when to let it sit becomes a very important part of all jobs with a significant creativity content.

The bottom line here is that the famous adage "A winner never quits..." has to be salted with "but he knows when to take a break". I hope you all have a wonderful evening.