There’s an essay by J.E. Littlewood called The Mathematician’s Art of Work that I return to over and over, because it paints this fascinating picture of what it’s like to become really interested in the conditions under which you do good work.
The essay is set in Cambridge, and Littlewood tells the story of his students who do and don’t produce the work they care about.
He notices over and over that the students who push harder and force themselves to work more and more, without any interest in how they actually do good work, often work themselves to oblivion, produce very little, and may even drive themselves completely into the ground.
And this is a real risk with work we care about.
The essay is interesting to anyone who cares about creating the conditions that make good work possible.
Ideal conditions and real conditions
There seems to be a push towards a single model. A single way that people do their best work.
These models get pushed as kinds of universals. They don’t necessarily show an interest in the unique conditions that each person needs to do the work they care about.
Often, the best conditions under which we work will defy the rational.
If we only listen to what makes sense, then we may not do any good work at all.
It’s fascinating to see these problems taken to their extreme in an intense academic and intellectual environment, where people are driven to do exceptional work and yet find that the very things they think are going to support that end up undermining them.
We can have some very strong ideals about what a good workday looks like.
Long hours chained to a desk. No holidays. Limited breaks.
Working in perfectly orderly, tidy environments.
Sitting down to work at 8:00 a.m. and finishing at 8:00 p.m.
But over and over again, we can observe a divide between ideal conditions and the real conditions that suit the person.
Littlewood directs us to pay attention to the reality of who we are. And rather than overriding that reality, to pay attention to it.
It’s almost as if we need courage to take our differences seriously.
And I think it shows how we can become a lot more interested in the unique and surprising conditions that we really need, and that we come to discover from experience actually do serve us in doing the work that we really want to do.
The eccentric conditions of good work
A mathematician may discover that they can only do their most thoughtful work while sitting in the back of a cabaret, listening to music and having a glass of scotch.
This may seem a little inconvenient, but sometimes we need to find really relaxing environments to properly engage.
Many writers describe themselves as having to write from bed.
Truman Capote described himself as a fully horizontal author.
We can instead imagine that we need really strict and professional conditions. And then, when we get them, we find we can’t produce anything.
The tension and the coldness and the sterility can shut down our thinking.
In his book on writing, Stephen King talks about this. He discusses how he’d long dreamed of a house with a gorgeous library, with a big desk in the middle where he could finally sit down and write properly.
Eventually, he gets the house and the library. He sits down at the desk and discovers he can’t write.
Day passes after day after day, and he starts to think: If I’m going to write again, maybe I need to go back to conditions more like the trailer I was writing from. A little desk looking straight at a wall, nothing to be distracted by, just me and the text.
It can seem pretty perverse that we get what we want, we get what we idealize, and discover we can’t really do anything with it.
Ideal conditions are so often illusions.
Any writer who’s gone to a country cabin for six months to finish a novel, and only then discovered that they actually write better in crowded cafés, will be able to tell you how disheartening these kinds of fantasies can be.
We can imagine that we need more time to create, the perfect place, the perfect people. And yet when we get all those things, it can be extremely disappointing.
I think what’s so interesting about Littlewood’s essay is that it shows us how important it is to take an interest in the reality of what we need and what we actually experience.
If Stephen King had decided to keep writing and writing at his ideal desk, he may never have published again.
Rest is part of the work
Littlewood shows us that rest is an inherent piece of productivity that we may be all too willing to overlook.
This is a real risk with intellectual work.
Sustained intellectual work will eventually exhaust our minds, and major ideas will often appear after periods of rest.
Littlewood saw how students who worked longer and harder very often found it didn’t take them anywhere.
They needed a few weeks a year of proper rest. They needed to limit themselves to a few hours a day of concentrated work.
It can be very tempting to want to push through and get things done, and then look back days later and think: That was a complete waste of time. I could’ve been doing nothing instead, and I would’ve been much more productive.
This is also an idea that Nietzsche returns to over and over across his books: the necessity of rest, of taking time to walk while you think, to incubate your ideas gradually, to embrace convalescence.
Nietzsche was often ill and suffered from serious health problems for many years of his life.
He would often have to retire to a dark room for days on end, not being able to write or do anything at all.
But he would emerge from these periods with deep insights.
He came to see over time that forced rest, and the pain of that withdrawal, could lead to some of his most profound breakthroughs.
These kinds of creations can’t be forced.
These kinds of ideas can need time to ripen.
And long periods of apparent inactivity can lead to profound breakthroughs.
Often, we know this.
We know that the best ideas come on walks. They come while showering.
And yet we can still resist making this part of our work.
There’s a huge amount of patience required for this.
We may not want to accept that intellectual vitality is very hard when we’re tired.
And we cannot command inspiration.
We can only cultivate the conditions under which it may arrive.
Taking our own conditions seriously
Many of the ideas we inherit about engaging in serious work can actually undermine us.
There are some forms of work and types of people for whom pushing day after day can be highly effective.
Only we can work out for ourselves what works for us.
Littlewood seems to embrace the eccentricities of his mathematicians. He writes the essay as an encouragement to younger mathematicians to take the conditions of their own work seriously.
In pushing ourselves to conform, we can drain and destroy our ability to do good work.
We can look outside ourselves for the correct model and try to force that to work.
We may not think our real experience is important.
We may not want to discover that we’re the writer who needs to write only while lying down.
We may want to sit at a nice desk.
We may want to appear to be doing important work.
We may not want to accept that we only really do good work while sitting in a modest café that’s not too quiet but not too crowded.
Or in the back corner of a hotel lobby, with an espresso being delivered to us every half hour for five hours straight.
I believe Voltaire was famous for drinking 10 or 15 coffees a day.
And I’m more than a little jealous.
We may instead think of ourselves as needing correction.
And we may not have much experience in taking our own needs seriously.
Seeming eccentricities can seem like affectations, but they may actually be evidence that we’re willing to just follow the path that works for us.
We are a condition of our own work
We can have these very unhelpful ideas about how things should be done.
We may think that to learn guitar, we have to start with acoustic guitar first rather than moving straight to electric.
We may think that we have to write everything on a typewriter rather than writing it out longhand.
We may not want to experiment with just transcribing our ideas and seeing what that produces.
In trying to remove the reality of who we are from the creative process, we can find that we lose our relationship to the work because we’re no longer important. We’re no longer present.
Work is an important way for us to build a relationship with who we are, with the future in terms of what we build, and with reality in terms of what it might become possible for us to make.
But this starts with caring about ourselves, our own interests, our own capacities to do good work, and the conditions that requires.
Trying to be more and more efficient can get in the way of creating.
Creative work can be inherently wasteful.
We have to be prepared to take a chance and speculate and test: Does this work? Is this even possible?
We have to build prototype after prototype, and many of them end up in the bin. But nothing is ever wasted.
It may be inefficient to travel to the right café or inefficient to get hold of the right pens.
And we can think: Why is this necessary anyway?
If we try to make ourselves neatly explicable, we risk erasing ourselves and our ability to create at all.
We are a core condition of our own work.
If you want to contribute something meaningful, if you want to do something different, if you want to push knowledge forward in your field;
if you think there’s something important for you to say;
and if you want to make something that’s genuinely yours—
you may also have to author the conditions under which you make it.