Someday Is Today: 22 Simple, Actionable Ways to Propel Your Creative Life

“Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.” — PABLO PICASSO

The version of ourselves looking back over the landscape of our lives, staring down oblivion, knows damn well the importance of time. We say we value time, then we binge-watch Netflix. We say we value time, but then we sit in a Starbucks drive-through line for twenty-five minutes for a cup of coffee. We say we value time, but then we play a video game on our phone for endless hours. We say we value time, and then we promise ourselves that we’ll get to that dream someday. We say we value time, but we toss aside minutes like they are disposable. When we are facing the last seconds of our lives, minutes become precious. The key is to understand their preciousness today when there is still time to make those minutes matter

I promise you there is not a person in the world who is lying on their deathbed, wishing they had watched a little more TV or played a few more video games or waited just a little while longer to make their dreams come true. But that is often what we do when we decide how we will spend our time: we trade momentary pleasure for long-term happiness. Steve Jobs once said, “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.”

“Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand, small, uncaring ways.” — STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT

Writers can’t help but write, I want to tell her. They don’t wait to write. They are compelled to write.

Rule #1: Include the Element of Time as a Primary Factor in All Decision-Making

Rule #2: Minimize the Time It Takes to Get Places Consider your commute to work. For the past twenty-three years, I have worked within ten minutes of the school where I teach, and for the past twelve years, I’ve lived within five minutes of the school. This was not by accident. When choosing a place to live, Elysha and I opted for apartments and eventually a home that were all a short distance from the school, and the commute was a primary factor in our decision-making. Why?

Rule #3: Consider All the Stuff You Didn’t Consider When Choosing (or Changing) a Career

Rule #4: Maximize Task Efficiency

Rule #5: Relinquish and Reassign Tasks

My students, for example, famously run much of my classroom. If a task can be completed by a student, it’s assigned to a student, who oftentimes does a better job than I could. Not only does this include some of the more mundane tasks, like managing the classroom library, taking daily attendance, and filing papers, but students are also invited to plan and teach lessons, lead class discussions, design and assemble bulletin boards, and prepare assignments and assessments. Students also routinely create online tools for me like Ka-hoots (game-based quizzes), Spotify playlists, and Google surveys. They are paid, of course, for their time, via tickets that can be used for weekly drawings. One student is in charge of payroll. Another is in charge of auditing the payroll. Checks and balances are important. A few years ago, I realized that I could even outsource the hiring of students for these jobs by hiring a single student to do the hiring for me. Rather than interviewing for every job in the class (more than twenty-five in all), I simply interview for one job — Human Resources Director — and that person hires my employees and negotiates salaries. My classroom runs like a well-oiled machine, leaving me time to focus on more important tasks like talking to kids, working with small groups, communicating with parents, designing lessons, and spending my lunch breaks working on things like this book.

“ten-cent tasks.” Simple, visible task completion that doesn’t ultimately move the needle on a company’s growth, sales, or innovation.

in Chapter 2: 86,400 Seconds

Rule #6: Choose How to Spend Your Time

Remember: When you say you don’t have enough time, you’re actually saying that there are other things more important to you. On your list of priorities, other items were higher on the list than the thing you didn’t have time to complete. “I didn’t have enough time” actually means it wasn’t important enough to you. “I didn’t have enough time” means it wasn’t fun, distracting, profitable, gratifying, pleasurable, or urgent enough to place it at the top of your to-do list.

Take a moment and make your own list of things you can accomplish in ten minutes.

The mistake that people make is in failing to recognize the value of smaller quantities of minutes saved, in terms of how these minutes, when combined with others, begin to add up and quickly amount to meaningful chunks of time over the span of weeks, months, and years.

Rule #7: Minimize Time Spent on Routine Tasks and Fruitless Pastimes

Avoiding television is not hard. Simply don’t turn the damn thing on. Don’t allow it to become the background noise of your life. Don’t make it the default means of spending time because you have no other way to fill the hours. Find something else to fill the hours. The list of possibilities is endless. Read a book. Play a board game. Learn to play guitar. Knit. Write letters to friends. Learn to bake. Take a walk. Garden. Paint. Sculpt. Reupholster your couch. Call your grandmother. Start a side hustle. Exercise. Volunteer on a suicide-prevention hotline. Meditate. Breed rabbits. Have more sex. Memorize poetry. Dance naked in your living room. Live life. Make your dreams come true. Do the things that drew you to this book. When you’re old and decrepit and staring death in the face, I promise you that the evenings spent dancing naked in your living room and hours spent on the phone counseling suicidal teenagers will be more important to you than finishing The Wire or finding out if Bad Guy #625 will be sent to jail at the end of Law & Order. Live a richer and more real life than the people you watch on television. Watch television. Love television. Just watch less television.

But boy am I careful about how much time I spend on those platforms. I also know this: every moment spent on social media today will be irrelevant and forgotten three days later. Social media is temporary, oftentimes meaningless moments of mild satisfaction that will ultimately yield nothing. Unless you’re using social media to earn a living, drive traffic to something more meaningful, build a brand, or effect real change in the world, you should ask yourself what social media is doing for you.

“People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.” — SENECA

Elysha was upset. She stared at the mess and the waste, mentally calculating the loss in time and dollars. I allowed her a moment of distress, which was entirely understandable and reasonable, but then I said, “Listen, in three days, none of this will matter to us. Before we know it, this is going to turn into an amusing anecdote about the most expensive Popsicle ever. So let’s just pretend that’s already happened and not let this ruin our day.” To her credit, my mouse-visioned wife embraced this eagle-like philosophy and let go of her anger and frustration

don’t let it matter today. If I’m the only one who will notice, it ain’t worth doing. Procrastinate on stupid, menial tasks. You could be killed by a crashing airplane in five minutes. Do you want to spend the last five minutes of your life on a meaningless task that could’ve been accomplished next week? Organization for organization’s sake is a fool’s errand, perpetrated by people who don’t value their time appropriately and forget how soon they will be dead. If color-coding papers in a folder costs you ten minutes in labor but saves only thirty seconds of effort, then don’t do it.

The image was irrelevant to the assignment. The word giraffe was included in the week’s spelling list, but the assignment didn’t rely upon the image in any way whatsoever. It was purely decorative. Yet this teacher spent time swapping out giraffes. Why? There are a few possibilities:

• She assumed that she would live forever, so time was meaningless to her.

• She did not value time well spent with her husband and children, probably because they are monsters.

• She was so incredibly mouselike and fixated on needless detail that she couldn’t prioritize the simplest of tasks.

• She had such a small, empty, unambitious life that it had somehow made swapping out meaningless giraffe images a worthy, well-lived activity. In cases like these, the eagle should eat you. You deserve to be eaten for wasting time like this. In the words of Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Stephen Vincent Benét, whom I quoted at the beginning of chapter 2, “Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand, small, uncaring ways.”

The eagle reminds us to clear our march of needless things. Spend as little time, energy, and bandwidth as possible on the nonsense of life so that we can spend more time on the things we wish to see, do, build, make, and learn.

“We say that we waste time, but that is impossible. We waste ourselves.” — ALICE BLOCH

While I understand the inclination to say yes to any additional income, you must keep the big picture in mind: time is the most valuable commodity on the planet, and you have just as much of it as the wealthiest people alive. Value it accordingly. Never waste it away. Find the additional work and side jobs that price your time according to its worth. Take the time to find the right fit. Invest in yourself and your skills so you can ultimately earn what you deserve. Demand of every employer that your compensation be commensurate with your ability.

This is why I never download any games onto my phone. I do not allow myself to begin playing these games. To do so would surely lead down the Candy Crush path to certain doom.

Negative people can destroy our spirit. Strip us of our enthusiasm, excitement, and motivation. These are critical components to creativity. They are the lifeblood of anyone trying to make something.

I have four strategies for dealing with these people who continue to plague our psyches. The people in our lives today who cause us grief as well as the ones from our past who might still bother us. The high-school bully. The ex-spouse. The evil stepfather. The toxic frenemy. The miserable boss. The selfish aunt. You can’t allow these people to continue to rule your mind. You can’t permit them to consume your thoughts or influence your mood. My suggestion is to use one of the following four strategies to bring an end to the festering: forgiveness, empathy, elimination, or an enemies list.

Mostly through revenge, I suspect, though if a couple were magnanimous enough to acknowledge their awfulness, ask for forgiveness, and perhaps make efforts to correct their wrongdoing, that might be enough. For the rest, it’s probably revenge. Not the “hiring a contract killer” or “publishing surreptitious photos of someone’s third nipple” kind of revenge. More like achieving remarkable success or someday exposing them for their awfulness.

your need for perfection is simply a symptom of your fear of failure or your tendency to procrastinate. 2.Almost no one is doing anything perfectly. Join the crowd. 3.Just starting something, as imperfect as it may be, already makes you better than the vast majority of people, who never start anything. Be better than everyone else. Start something terribly imperfect today. Or be like everyone else and go nowhere. Harsh, I know. But it’s what I say to myself almost every day, and it works.

We don’t juggle our passions. We engage with them, one at a time, over the course of time. We divide our interests and divide our time in pursuit of those interests, knowing that one may very well inform another. Stuff begets stuff.

nuggets of wisdom

But I can guarantee that none of these things will come to pass in this year or the next. That’s the thing about a five-year plan. It allows you to do nothing for a long time.

All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there is this gap. For the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not that good. … And if you are just starting out or if you are still in this phase, you’ve got to know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you’re going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions. I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It takes a while. It’s going to take you a while. It’s normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that. “The most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work.” Make terrible things

When we begin making things, we must give ourselves permission to make terrible things. Miserable, rotten, no-good things. Things that make us wonder if we’ll ever make something good. Judgment, taste, and self-assessment are critical to the creator’s journey, but these tools should be applied only to the things we are making. Not to ourselves as the creators of the things. The things you make can be terrible. They probably will be terrible from time to time, particularly in the beginning of your journey. There is nothing wrong with stepping back and deciding that your spy thriller, your lemonade stand, your stained-glass window, your carbonated goat’s milk, your short film, your escape room, your advertising jingle, or your corn maze is terrible. This is a normal and essential part of the creative process. But that doesn’t make you terrible. It doesn’t make you incapable of making something great someday. Judge the work. Critique the work. Despise the work. Just don’t judge yourself. Good people make terrible things. Talented, creative, brilliant people make truly terrible things. Judge the work. Not the person. Despise the product but love yourself. Then start again. Move forward. Make progress. Create another terrible thing until you make a not-so-terrible thing. Maybe even something great.

Another part of me wants to kick him in the pants for acting like such a fool and not pressing on with his dream. Trying again. Refusing to give up

“Find someone who has a life that you want and figure out how they got it.” — LANA DEL REY

Unable to afford medication for their kids. Desperate times for two young parents, both of whom had dreams of publishing novels someday. King wrote: The problem was the teaching. I liked my coworkers and loved the kids — even the Beavis and Butt-Head types in Living with English could be interesting — but by most Friday afternoons I felt as if I’d spent the week with jumper cables clamped to my brain. If I ever came close to despairing about my future as a writer, it was then. I could see myself thirty years on, wearing the same shabby tweed coats with patches on the elbows, potbelly rolling over my Gap khakis from too much beer. I’d have a cigarette cough from too many packs of Pall Malls, thicker glasses, more dandruff, and in my desk drawer, six or seven unfinished manuscripts which I would take out and tinker with from time to time, usually when drunk. If asked what I did in my spare time, I’d tell people I was writing a book — what else does any self-respecting creative-writing teacher do with his or her spare time? And of course I’d lie to myself, telling myself there was still time, it wasn’t too late, there were novelists who didn’t get started until they were fifty, hell, even sixty. Probably plenty of them. I slowed my pace as King read that passage aloud. By the time he had reached the end, I’d come to a complete stop. I couldn’t believe it. Stephen King was talking about me. Talking to me. Absent the alcohol and cigarettes, I was coming perilously close to despairing about my future as a writer, too.

It’s good to know how hard it was for those who came before us. I think that we often see the creators of good and great things as somehow special — imbued with talent and power beyond our reach. Artists who ascended the mountaintop with grace and ease. Sometimes this is true, but more often, it’s simply dogged determination, a refusal to quit, a relentless drive to succeed, and dumb luck. Knowing this can make our journeys easier.

Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases

You’re not special. You’re not a unicorn. Neither blessed nor cursed. You’re just another creative soul, journeying on a long and windy path to making something good and maybe great. There is no telling how long it will take you and how many bayonets to the chest you will have to suffer along the way. But cheer up. You’re walking in the footsteps of greatness. Just keep walking.

Accountability Finding your team and involving them in your creative process can also add a much-needed layer of accountability to your productivity. If no one is reading your manuscript, it’s easy to get lazy when things get hard. If no one is listening to your song, it’s easy to abandon it when it becomes a struggle. If no one is listening to your podcast, it’s easy to never edit and publish. If you never preview your musical for an audience, it’s easy to avoid scheduling an opening date. If you never step up to that open mic and tell a joke, it’s easy to put off your career in comedy to another day. One of the biggest stumbling blocks for creative people — the potential makers of things — is a lack of accountability. Since most creators are not working for someone else, they decide on timetables, completion dates, criteria, rubrics, and more. The artist decides when to paint. The musician decides when to compose. The entrepreneur decides when to write their business plan. The poet decides when to write. The dress designer decides when to sew. The cake decorator decides when to bake. When you are your own boss, as many creators are, you’re not required to insist that your employee — also you — get anything done. The boss isn’t required to make the employee accountable, because they are one and the same person. As a result, nothing gets done. Or nothing gets done on a timely basis. Procrastination, often fueled by fear and uncertainty (and that damn need for perfection), rules the day

Ever since 2010, I have been posting my yearly goals on my blog and on social media as a means of holding myself accountable. I repost my goals monthly along with my progress so far. In 2021, the year that I’m writing this book, I have a total of fifty-three goals spread out among six different categories. That’s admittedly a lot of goals, but I believe in setting a very high bar and accepting failure along the way.

We need our people, but we also need the right people. Honest, supportive human beings who are invested in our success. Folks who lack envy. People who genuinely love you. Cut out those who don’t fit the bill.

Success comes when we wake up every day in that never-ending pursuit of why we do what we do.” — SIMON SINEK

I want to earn a living in a career that allows me almost complete control of my time. •I want an opportunity to be financially independent

You need to find your own motivators. The reasons you do what you do. Find the things that make you want to run through someone or toward someone or away from something. Dig deep. Ask yourself hard questions. Give yourself the time required to find those answers, as uncomfortable or painful or heartbreaking as they may be. They can be the fuel that you will need on the days when your desire is low but your time is still ticking.

goals. It is the acknowledgment that long journeys require small steps. The how is the reminder to focus our energies on only those things that we can control. It’s the understanding that we can’t make this journey alone. We need others holding us accountable, rooting for us, and demanding that we keep working when quitting seems the more logical, sane choice. You must answer the why and the how — not just today but constantly and relentlessly. Why do I do the things that I do? must be a question that never-endingly rings in your mind. What is the next step to reaching my goal? is a question you must repeatedly ask yourself. Answer the why and the how, and you’ll discover how easily all those other answers suddenly fall into place. Answer the why and the how, and you will find yourself excited about getting out of bed every morning, motivated for a multitude of reasons and knowing exactly what needs to be done. Most people feel neither excited nor motivated when they open their eyes at daybreak. Most people wish for an extra hour in bed and wonder how they will fill the empty hours of their day. Creative people — makers of things and dreamers of dreams — can’t afford this dithering nonsense. Answer why and how, and the course of every day will be clear, and the reasons for embarking upon it will be abundant.

you must manufacture the ratio by collecting the positive statements of folks who would otherwise be forgotten and use those words on those days when:

• you awaken lacking the enthusiasm to dive into the day.

• some monster has hindered your momentum with a few words of criticism or doubt.

• you start to wonder whether the work you are doing is worthy of continuing.

• it feels like the world has decided to place its boot on your neck and remind you of how little power you really have.

Personal mantras work, too. I have a collection of personal mantras that I speak aloud constantly and speak silently to myself even more. The most prevalent is one told to me as a middle schooler by one of my teachers: “A positive mental attitude is your key to success.”

“It’s a town full of losers, and I’m pulling out of here to win.” — from Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” “What one man can do, another can do.” — from the 1997 film The Edge “He who avoids complaints invites happiness.” — Abū Bakr (I couldn’t remember where this one originated, so I had to look it up. Turns out it’s attributed to the father-in-law of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, as well as the first caliph of Islam. No recollection of where I read or was told this mantra, but it’s been in my head since college, and I’ve always liked it a lot. Complainers are the worst, so this one pops into my mind whenever I find myself on the verge of complaining.) “When they said ‘Sit down,’ I stood up.” — from Springsteen’s “Growin’ Up” “Rage against the dying of the light.” — from Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night” (I have the entire poem memorized, thanks to Hugh Ogden, and I recite it to myself often, but this is the line that returns to me when I feel my effort is waning.) “The hard thing and the right thing are usually the same thing.”— Me, spoken through Budo, a protagonist in Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend “Teach ’em.” — Steve Brouse, my friend and colleague, who said this to a teacher who was complaining that her students didn’t already know something

I told the universe (and anyone who would listen) that I was committed to living a creative life not in order to save the world, not as an act of protest, not to become famous, not to gain entrance to the canon, not to challenge the system, not to show the bastards, not to prove to my family that I was worthy, not as a form of deep therapeutic emotional catharsis ... but simply because I liked it.

If you want to make your dreams come true, a concrete median with a struggling, leafless sapling makes a perfect place to write a couple of pages before having your teeth cleaned. Any place that contains a reasonable amount of oxygen and terrestrial gravity works just fine. A concrete median is admittedly not ideal, but people who wait for the ideal circumstance in order to create usually die before their dreams are ever realized

The making should be ordinary. The results should be extraordinary.

There’s also nothing wrong with feeling great about yourself. Look around. How many people do you know who are truly chasing their dreams? I don’t need to look very far to find a whole lot of people working in careers that they stumbled into because it was convenient or easy or afforded them a good salary. It’s not hard for me to find people who spend their days at jobs they do not love and their evenings in front of the television and do little else to fill their hours. Unhappy people are everywhere. They are like weeds. I see a hell of a lot of people living ordinary lives, but very few grew up dreaming of one day being ordinary. Yet here they are. Everywhere. Ordinary. I see these people. I look hard at them, because they serve as reminders to me that if I had chosen the easier pathway, that could be me, too. Good job, Matt! Even if I’m falling on my ass or landing on my face, at least I’m failing while trying. Climbing and slipping and falling but then picking myself up and trying again. If you’re chasing your dreams — if you’re trying to make great things or carve a new path or bend the universe to your will — you’re already doing better than most of the human beings on this planet. Many live in circumstances that tragically don’t allow them to chase their dreams. Others have the means and ability but simply don’t. Kurt Vonnegut once posed the question: “Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?” Many people are living in perfect freedom but have absolutely nothing to say. Truthfully, most people are average. It’s the mathematical definition of the word. If you’re reading this book, climbing a mountain, and truly chasing the dream, you’re doing better than most. You’re above average. Probably a lot better than just above average. Remember that. It will help. I promise it will. But maybe don’t say it aloud very often. No reason for the world to think you’re an arrogant jerk. As I’ve said, there are already too many pitfalls awaiting you. But nothing wrong with holding your head high, believing in the future, and, most importantly, believing in yourself

things you actually need in order to work, absent the niceties on the previous list. Post this list in all the places where you might be working