What You Want To Do and What You Want To Have Done
/From an email I received last week:
Just wondering if you have any advice for hacks who should know better.
I’ve been doing magic for 20 years, children’s shows as well as close up and corporate walk around.
Since Covid hit, everything’s been too hard. Cancellations, restrictions, masks, Covid safety etc
Lock downs and the current climate, it seems to me, also gave everyone the chance to scale down any events they ran on an annual/semi annual basis.
Most of the local “full time” magicians, if they didn’t have regular 9-5 side gigs started halving the prices of their shows, but I don’t feel like selling myself short and undercutting anyone when we had it pretty sweet for a long time. The gigs are there, just mostly in regional areas, so a lot of the costs will go to travel and accommodations.
As a result, while my children’s shows are back on track, I am having second thoughts on a few corporates I have lined up for December, so much so, that I’m nearly at the point of offering the gigs to others. I don’t feel I have the confidence to pull it off any more after such a big break, and I don’t feel I’m the only one in this boat.
Do I just fake it till I make it again, like I did the first few years?
Is this something everyone goes through, and it’s time to call it quits?
—DH
This is not a question I could answer for my closest friend, much less a stranger.
I don’t know too much about what’s going on in the world of semi-pro kid show and corporate show performing. I mean, I hear stuff from people who are in those worlds, but I don’t have any first-hand experience.
So, the best I can do is offer you the way that I would go about thinking of this issue in a general sense.
First, I’m operating under the assumption that you don’t need the money these gigs would provide. Yes, of course, the money would be nice to have, but if you needed it, then this wouldn’t be a question in your mind (I would assume).
One of the reasons I can’t answer your question directly is because I don’t know your feelings towards corporate performing in general.
I’m going to discuss how I would go about coming to a decision regarding this. Let me introduce an idea here. We’ll call it The Want Matrix.
For any activity you can think of, you may want to do it or not want to do.
And for that same activity, you may want to have done it or not. What I mean is, at the end of the day, would you look back and be glad you had done it? Is it an activity that would be a good use of time for the person you want to be?
I may not ever want to do the dishes. But, at the end of the day, I would want to have done the dishes.
Conversely, I may want to smoke crack (that is, I may have the desire in this moment to smoke crack). But looking back on that action from a future perspective, I would not want to have done that. I would regret it. There are people who do something every day and then, later in the day (if not immediately after), they wish they hadn’t done it. That’s because that thing is something they want to do, but not something they want to have done.
So we can take a look at any activity and place it somewhere in this grid:
Here’s how I treat the activities in each quadrant.
If it’s something I DON’T WANT to do and I DON’T WANT to have done, then I just don’t do it and give it no thought at all. It’s not worth devoting any headspace to.
If it’s something I WANT to do and I something I WANT to have done. Then I do my best to make indulging in that activity as easy as possible.
If it’s something I DON’T WANT to do, but something I WANT to have done, then I will set a rigid schedule for that activity. For example, I never really want to write. There is always something I’d rather be doing. But making a schedule and sticking to it has allowed me to be the most prolific writer in the history of magic.
If it’s something I WANT to do, but something I DON’T WANT to have done, then I just make that activity off-limits in my mind, and that’s the end of the debate.
Now, when I explain this sort of thing to people, they say things like, “Well, what do you mean you just make yourself do the things you know you should do? What do you mean you just tell yourself not to do something that you want to do and you stick to that?” It sounds like a demonstration of crazy discipline, but that’s not really how I see it. What I do is I make the decision and then I just don’t debate it in my mind anymore. I just tell myself the matter is over. If you set your alarm for 7am to get an hour of exercise in before work, and then, when your alarm goes off, you sit there and negotiate with yourself whether you’re actually going to workout or not, then there’s a good chance you won’t. If I gave myself the option of talking myself out of sitting down to write every day, then I’d probably talk myself out of writing all the time. But I just don’t let that debate occur. That may just be another definition of discipline, but it doesn’t feel that way to me.
When it comes to sticking to a pre-set schedule (of things I don’t want to do, but want to have done) or abstaining from activities (that I may want to do, but don’t want to have done), I find it’s helpful to think of my mind as two separate entities. (Obviously this isn’t something I came up with. There are biological and psychological precedents for thinking this way.) There’s the dumb part that’s is present moment-by-moment and just wants to fuck around and eat and watch tv. Then there’s my “higher-self"“—the part that has the goals and aspirations and knows what I should be doing. I find that-weekly or monthly-it’s a good idea to sit down and check in with y higher self and come up with the plan that my dumb self will follow for the next week or month.
Thinking of my mind as bifurcated in this way means I don’t get thrown off when part of my mind doesn’t want to do work, or wants to eat an entire pan of brownies. Yes, of course part of my brain wants to do that. That’s because there is a stupid part of my brain. Before I used this model, I would think about something that was important to do and I would commit myself to do it. “I’m going to mow the lawn today,” I’d think. But then later on in the day I’d think, “I don’t think I want to mow the lawn.” And at that point my mind was conflicted. And I valued each option equally because I was thinking they were coming from my one mind. But now I know I have two minds. The one that looks out for my higher self, and the one that is stupid and/or evil. That part of my brain is free to have any thoughts it wants. It just doesn’t set policy. I don’t listen to it.
This may make it sound like I’m always hyper-productive or something, because I’m always doing stuff I would “want to have done” at the end of the day. But that’s not entirely true. Relaxing, hanging out with friends, and taking it easy are all “activities” that fall in the category of things I want to do and things I want to have done. So I get plenty of that in as well.
The purpose of the Want Grid for me is to identify the things that are important to rigidly schedule, and the things that are important to completely avoid. Everything else will sort of work itself out automatically.
This may seem like a big detour from the original question. But really I’m just setting all this up so I can answer the question in the way I would answer it for myself.
If I was in D.H.’s position, I would place the activity of doing corporate shows in the Want Grid, and let its placement determine my course of action. From his email, it’s clear that at this time, corporate shows aren’t something he wants to do. But, are they something he wants to have done? Other than for the money, I mean. Would doing corporate shows be a good use of time for the person he wants to be? If the answer is yes, then he should fight through the resistance he’s feeling, just as you’d fight through your resistance to get out of bed and get some exercise. If the answer is “no,” then he should devote that time and energy somewhere else.