What you do is who you are
This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Questions. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
Something a little different. I’m working on the beginnings of a new project, and I’d like to ask for your help.
First, some background:
My first year of college was turbulent and academically troubled, and I had to finish a couple of classes over the summer. When I returned, I took each syllabus for the classes I was enrolled in and typed it out into a single document with the others, producing a day-by-day breakdown of every reading and writing assignment for three months. I got to know the calendar app on my translucent white MacBook—iCal, in those days—and scheduled the key moments of each day. No one had showed me how to do this; it was just a moment when I felt huge motivation not to fail, and took stock of what succeeding would really take—of what actions would produce the reality I aspired to. In my case, working with what I call highly rotational attention*, that meant building some new architecture for directing myself.
(*There’s another common term for this, ADHD, but it pathologizes a trait that occurs in every smart creative person I know—one that we might, therefore, consider harnessing to our benefit instead of deriding.)
That semester, I was a straight-A student. And though I drifted from those practices in the semesters that followed, I returned to the very same habits more than a decade later, as I took on my first leadership role at The New York Times. I also added a rigorous practice of building, maintaining, and evolving a to-do list.
Since stepping away from that work to focus on writing, I’ve kept it up, without much modification—to the point that in the months leading up to Ironman Lake Placid, I laid out the very same kind of day-by-day schedule, one “assignment” at a time. Under the barrage of emergencies this year, the system has held up. Critically, it has helped to keep me feeling like me.
But recently I’ve taken note of some work I’m doing that my tools are not—linking each of these many tasks up to a greater purpose, making sure they reflect not just entrenched habits (a residual me) but who I understand myself to be now, and where I’m going. And that’s given rise to a new idea, which for the moment I’m calling “What you do is who you are.” Maybe we shorten this to Wydya: what you do, you are.
The idea is that whatever we might aspire to be, and however we might frame our selves in our head, who we are in the external world is determined by what we actually do with our time.
There’s an old saying, “Writers write.” The important consequence of this dictum is that if you’re not writing, you’re not a writer. If you are a writer, as I have known myself to be for 21 years, you find a way to write. If you’re a writer who’s not writing, yet or currently, then what you are doing needs to change. For all the years I wasn’t acting out the life of “a writer,” I was still writing—as such, and with intention, both in my job and elsewhere. I always stayed connected to that identity. The same is true of anything else a human being might be. What you do is who you are.
I’m finding a dearth of active tools that support this kind of integration. We have lists and calendars to manage what we do; we have diaries and therapists and introspection and friends to help figure out who we are. But where do these things intersect? How do we make who we are and what we do look and act more unified? Especially when we might have inescapable commitments (like, say, a job that pays the bills but isn’t quite a calling) that can pull these aspects of us apart? Those kinds of commitments can make it feel like we’re doomed to do something separate from what we are, but I want to challenge that. I think life offers us a little more nuance.
I don’t have an overarching answer to any of this yet, but I find the questions so intriguing that I’ve been devoting some serious time to them. And I’d like to invite you to work with me: If there’s something you are—a swimmer, a writer, a musician, a leader—that isn’t showing up at the moment in what you’re doing, drop me a note. Likewise if what you spend your days doing feels disconnected from your identity. I don’t have any solutions, but I’d like to explore with you. I think one outcome, down the road, might be some practices and tools for helping other people line up what they do with who they are, and vice versa. I won’t share anything we talk about without your permission.
When I teach yoga, I often talk about regaining your coherence: Being on the yoga mat is an opportunity to scan the distant horizon for all the pieces of you that you’ve left in different places—in arguments and conversations and problems and commitments and a million little tasks, everything that splinters you or leaves you unresolved—and bring them back to you. That’s the aim.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram.