The Crucible of Disney’s Room #3

Why it’s hard to finish and what you can do about it

Photo by Fabio Comparelli on Unsplash

Hey there everyone —

I had a work colleague once who confounded me. He had a solid build, and he was short, soft spoken and precise in his speech. He didn’t say much about himself or start trivial conversations in the mornings. He came in early and left late. If I swung by the office on the weekends, I’d find him at his desk. 

I initially dismissed him as a workaholic. But he wasn’t harried and didn’t talk about how much he had to do. He didn’t rush; he didn’t apologize; he didn’t insinuate that other people weren’t working so he had to pick up the slack. He rarely looked up from his computer. He was focused, determined, and calm. He appeared to require nothing from anyone else. Because I thought there was no opening to engage him, I avoided him.

One evening however my curiosity got the better of me. It was after work hours and he was there, still focused after a long day. I asked him what he was doing. He was organizing his work. I think he had a database of his projects he had to update, and some footnotes to track down, and another project that needed to be backed up before he left for the day. It was clear he was going to be there for a couple more hours, to finish up. He answered my questions with patience and attention and told me a brief story about a family member. Then I headed out, leaving him to it.

Looking back, I think he frightened me. I didn’t understand how he could do what he did. I mean that literally. I didn’t understand the thinking, let alone the steps. I’d go to the office, then sneak out early and drive to the forest or the ocean. I needed to move, to escape, to feel free. I loved the mental quiet that happened after I’d been walking the length of an empty beach for a few hours. But I also loved the ways ideas would rise up out of nowhere, or solutions to problems I didn’t expect to receive. I’ve always been in love with the imagination. Conjuring worlds; dreaming possibilities; making up characters and stories and arguments for how things could be better. I love the high of thinking and the seduction of mind.

I told myself this guy didn’t have the explorer itch, that’s why he could sit there like that. I wasn’t ready to acknowledge I was in awe of him: I’d never seen anyone who took their work that seriously. Who was producing so much that he had to track it to remember; who knew what that meant and required; whose drive and discipline was so certain that he never bragged about it, or needed to be praised for it. I didn’t want to face the idea that if that was what success looked like, I was cooked.

Whenever I am castigating myself for my disorganization or lack of discipline, I see this man’s office in my mind. I don’t remember his name. But he’s the measure I have of what it means to have your shit together, and what it requires.

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In his book Making Ideas Happen, Scott Belsky writes that the secret to Diseny’s success is that the creative process takes place in three rooms. In the first, everyone comes together to brainstorm. No idea is discarded or criticized. Everything is captured, embraced, allowed to be itself. Then everyone enters room 2. There, the ideas are linked together into storyboards. The atmosphere is convivial, productive, exciting: everyone collaborates in constructing the whole. Finally, the group moves to room 3. It’s there that the project is ruthlessly critiqued. The people are still working together, so it’s not about criticizing any one person’s point. But the project is scrutinized and evaluated and cut. Belsky calls it “the sweat box.”

I don’t know how many times a project goes through room 3, but I’m guessing it happens over and over. Or perhaps the whole process happens over and over, as the film and its production unfolds. What’s clear is that Disney knew the difference between ideation and execution, and made literal space for each of its elements.

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I’ve always loved the part of the movie Team America, World Police where they sing the song “We Need a Montage!” making fun of the fact that when you have to show the brutal, repetitive, ordinary tasks that move something forward, they’re so uninteresting and plotless that movies compensate with fast cuts and uplifting music. I spent a lot of my life in montage mode, hoping I could rush from project to project, idea to idea, without having to sit there pecking away at a database. My computer is full of half-finished pieces and outlines for enormous projects. I have boxes of yellow pads full of notes, resources, and references to books I wanted to read or actions I wanted to take. They’re all in my basement, waiting to be sorted, reviewed, and harvested. Now I want that database. I can’t imagine how many hours it would take to make it, or if it’s worth it, or if I should just drag the whole pile into the yard and burn it, call it good.

The problem with execution, with finishing, isn’t just that it’s boring and hard. It’s that it involves grief. When the movie blasts through the montage, we know we’re past the story’s organizing conflict, over the crisis peak, heading toward resolution. In art, we get a happy ending or a tragedy; we get the artificial culmination of a great idea. In life, instead, we confront our limits. We say: these are the resources we have now; this is the skill level we’re at now; this is how long we have before this thing is done. If it’s perpetually thrown into the future, the idea keeps glowing with promise. If it’s made, it has transformed us. It’s made us more capable, and if we’re lucky, more skilled, which means we can see even more clearly, from this new vantage point, what’s lacking, what’s wrong. Then we have to let it go out in the world, or bury it. There’s also the fact of having to choose: which ideas will thrive, which will be delayed or never fulfilled. Will we second guess ourselves? Will we never make the thing we’ve always dreamed of, before we die?

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In December, a lot of people engage in reflective practices. There are methods to review the year, assess progress, cull insights, celebrate achievements and mourn losses. The lights burn in the windows, then flicker out as the year closes. Suddenly, it’s New Year’s Day and we are supposed to be ready for resolutions and new goals. There’s that high of possibility, of ideation and opening out, of “growth mindset.” 

I’ve been asking myself what a process of personal “degrowth” might look like, in this moment of COP28, watching the fury and mourning that’s occurring as people and corporations reckon with the impossibility of the Earth’s sustaining growth and consumption as models of being. I’m thinking about how creativity and imagination are needed so much in this moment, but how we do the creation work might have to shift. I used to be really scared of grief, of failure, of endings. The fear was so strong I couldn’t see the consequences of my hurtling forward to the new, and not staying with the act of finishing and all that it brings up. For myself, I couldn’t grieve until I learned to sit still and allow the complexity of my feelings to arise. Now when I’m getting ready to finish something I know that grief is coming, and I wait for it, because it’s an ebbing of one tide and an anticipation of the next. It’s an exhalation and a pause, and I can tolerate it now, hold it a little longer than I could in the past. 

It’s raining here in Portland. We’re getting a deep soak and I imagine the aquifers filling in the winter dark. I know that we are collectively incubating the something that’s coming, this new way of being that will be in alignment with the ecosystems, the cycles, the fallowness that is such a necessary part of being alive. 

Stay safe out there this week.

xo

Rebecca