George Kao says prolific creators use regular schedules to generate ideas, and scheduling itself is a learnable skill. When you miss scheduled work, be gentle with yourself, know it's possible to improve, and get curious about what blocked you this time so you can adjust next time.
What happens if you fail to follow your calendar? Let's say that you've scheduled to do some important work that you know is going to move your business or project forward, but the time came and you didn't do the thing that you'd scheduled. Now the typical reaction is maybe self blame, discouragement or maybe even self doubt to say, well, there's no way I know how to follow a calendar, I'm just not that type of person. So you start having these limiting beliefs that oh, I'm just a go with the flow type, that's all I'll ever be or not that that's a bad thing. But what's interesting is that if you look at the lives of the most successful creative people, the most prolific authors of books, or the most prolific movie directors or artists, painters, musicians, they create, consist and they do it oftentimes by having a schedule of creation. Many famous authors are known for saying that, listen, I just sit down to write at 9:00am every day and I write until 12:00 or 1:00', clock, whatever it may be. No matter if the inspiration is there or they have, because they've been so consistent with their schedule, they've learned to develop inspiration at that time. And I've discovered that to be the same for me too. I used to not believe that I could create on a schedule. And then after, after some practice I realized that, wow, somehow I have ideas when I need to have them when I'm on schedule. And it works now. But what happens if you fail to follow it? Let me give you an encouragement. First of all, be gentle with yourself. Just be gentle, take some breaths. Know that it's a process. Following a schedule, just like any other skill, like walking, like writing, like speaking is a skill that takes time and practice to develop to be able to do well. So don't expect you to be yourself, to be able to suddenly do it, you know, not be able to do it one day and then suddenly be able to do it the next day and consistently, right? It's a skill. So be gentle with yourself. Number two, know that it's possible. Use me as an example of someone who never was able to do it and then eventually learn how to do it. And now my business thrives because I'm able to create on a schedule and I enjoy it now, whereas I didn't used to. So know that it's possible. Be gentle with yourself. Know that it's a process. Know that it's possible. And thirdly, get curious about why you didn't follow the schedule this time because there's something you can do differently the next time to maybe follow your schedule a little bit better. So, for example, maybe you didn't follow your schedule this time time because the thing you were doing prior to what you were supposed to do went much longer than you expected. So maybe the learning there is, oh, I need to schedule more time for that previous thing in the future. Or maybe another learning might be, oh, I got really intimidated about doing this thing that's on my calendar. Then maybe the solution there is to say, oh, next time I need to chunk down this intimidating project so it doesn't give me as much anxiety. I need to think about smaller pieces of it and schedule to do the smaller pieces. Or maybe you realized from asking yourself the question, getting curious, why is it that this time it didn't work? And what might I do differently next time? Maybe you realize that you have a limiting belief that, oh, there's no way to be in flow and to be creative in my genius on schedule. And then the solution might be to say, well, I'm just going to try anyway and see what comes out and, and let what comes out be perfect as it is in this moment. Because I'll tell you, I just keep making these videos and some of them turn out to be very well liked and some of them turn out not to be. And I keep writing my blog posts, I write many of them, some of them turn out to be very well liked and some of them turn out not to be. And honestly, I feel pretty much the same all the time. When I first came into this park, I honestly wasn't feeling very inspired to make these videos, but I did it anyway and this one turned out okay, I guess. So be gentle with yourself. Know that it's a process. Know that it's possible for you don't have that limiting belief. And third, get curious about why it didn't work and how you could do it differently the next time. I hope this is helpful.
