Just as health-conscious people may closely monitor what they allow to be put in their body, I find it helpful to also monitor what external content I spend time engaging with. Most of us go with the flow with little regard for what music is playing, what movie is on, the people we speak with, or even things as peripheral as the scenery we walk or drive by. But what if all this stimuli was as closely regulated as the food we eat?

A few weeks ago I had a fantastic day and I've been trying to figure out why. My schedule wasn't particularly unusual, I spent most of the day working, but I remember these specifics:

Diet: A varying combination of eggs, vegetables, and chicken (so my body felt great)

Visual: I went for a walk by the East River a few blocks from my apartment in Brooklyn where I regularly see one of the most inspiring views in the world, the Manhattan skyline. This view frequently inspires me to try to make things that could be as grand someday.

The amount of time we have to actually contribute anything into the world is pretty small. I think about this in context with how much time I've had in the world thus far and I can categorize the time in terms of input and output like this:

0-16: 100% Input. This time pretty much consisted of what my family taught me, people I spoke to, places I visited, what school taught me, movies I watched, books I read, and music I listened to.

16-22: 75% Output, 25% Input. As my interest in school waned and my family supported my interest in music and making things, I was able to drastically up my output number. Since I was still at the age where I really had no responsibility in terms of supporting myself, this was pretty easy to do.

22-26: 55% Output, 45% Input. After college, that damned thing called "real life" hit me and I had to make sure I was doing that silly thing called "making money". This definitely lowered my output, but has set me up with a new set of skills and experiences that I think is starting to help me create more time to output more.

For a long time the only characteristic I identified with myself was that of creative. Making things up was all I had, and all I wanted. For the past couple years I've worked on adding one more characteristic to this list. Effective.

At some point I realized the only way to accomplish my many lofty goals would be to gradually develop an extremely strong work ethic, something I ironically was never motivated to develop until AFTER I was long done with school. So over the past 2-3 years, I've jumped head first into productivity books, self-tracking, life-hacking concepts, etc. The latest obsession this road has led me to is cognitive behavior and rational thought whenever possible. It's been the best medicine for stress I've come across, but it's had one downside for me. That characteristic I claimed was me at my core, creativity, has felt a bit squashed.

Now this is certainly not a black and white thing, and honestly I still feel like I'm being more creative than the average person on a daily basis, but I definitely feel a change. For example, lyrics for songwriting use to flow much easier than they have since implementing the practices of rational thought on myself. My guess is, that a lot of songwriting for me used to be stress-relief in itself, a time to say what I needed to say and get things out. Now, practicing rational thinking patterns (X just happened. How does that make me feel? What do I THINK about what happened and how it made me feel? Now react based on the thought more than the feeling) is honestly relieving a lot of that release I used to need from songwriting. And it's happening while it's still in my head! This is good news for my mental health, but conflicting news for my creative core.

Since implementing these concepts is still so new, I think it's safe to assume why the needle is pushed more to one side now. I've been looking for examples of people who clearly have a good grasp of finding the middle ground and there are definitely some great ones. Regardless of what you think of her, someone like Meryl Streep comes to mind. If you look at her filmography, she has the creative and technical chops to do amazing things in her art. But then if you watch her on something like Inside the Actor's Studio and hear her speak extremely logically, you can tell that she's not one of those crazy, irrational artists. She's a completely rational, in-control of her life woman, who can flip the switch to the artistic side WHEN SHE WANTS TO.

I recently took a voice lesson. I've been working on composition so much in my music work lately that I've let a couple of performance skills atrophy a bit. Noticing this, I signed up for voice lessons to make sure my (already limited) range and technique didn't completely wither.

I've studied music quite a bit in the past, but never with someone like this. Like myself (but not for voice), this teacher studied formally in college, learning classical and operatic technique, but has come to living the Brooklyn indie-rock musical life instead. (To anyone rolling their eyes at that, it's quite a powerful combo, the stereotypical shaggy guy in a plaid shirt who can sing a perfect Aria or identify any concerto) I've always liked this idea of learning as much as you can, then picking what's relevant to apply to your situation later. I did this in the past by spending years studying jazz saxophone with some of the best players around New York City, and later applying most of the knowledge in harmonic choices as a singer-songwriter and guitarist in an indie-rock band…not an obvious use of such skills, but it really worked well!

This voice teacher, went about things a little differently. He studied formally like I did, then after school he threw out everything he learned and tried writing/performing/recording being purposely absent-minded of what he learned. He did the opposite of every technique and every rule the conservatory world preached to him.

He then had polarizing approaches to compare to make a choice for his third act. The music he's making now is his most excellent and he supposes it's due to the fact that he's now making choices based on the best of each of the prior two situations. Pulling back some of the conservatory technique, as well as using tricks he only would've learned by purposely not following the rules.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about focus. I realized it’s something that I always heard people telling me to do, but not something I ever took time aside (in school or in life) to really learn how to do it. In fact, for some time I even shunned the idea. I purposely joined as many clubs, bands, projects, etc. because I was interested in so many things. I equated busyness with success. I was skipping the “being effective” part. So I’ve been trying some things.

I quickly realized that one culprit of why I was having difficulty focusing was likely space. I’ve pretty much always had three lanes moving in my life. 1)Music, 2)Work, 3)Personal Life. When I was in school, work was replaced with school (barely). The second half of 2012 I was able for the first time to create a life/art/work balance as it relates to space that I hadn’t had up until that point. The company I started got its first NY office, I started renting a studio to go to when working on music, and suddenly my apartment became…just home. In cycling between the three locations, I built up a response where I would arrive to the studio, and feel, “Now I just work on music”. I’d get to the office and think, “I’m going to knock out my DecisionDesk work”. And when I arrive home I actually immediately relax a lot more than I used to. Home used to be where I would shuffle between chilling out with my girlfriend, work on that new song, and send a thousand emails. The separate spaces concept was really helping my focus on each track of my life.

The other side of the coin though is that there is a part of me that firmly believes that you can accomplish what you need to accomplish pretty much anywhere if you know how to focus. If you have the tools you need (for me, a laptop, some headphones, and ideally some sort of instrument to write on) it literally didn’t matter. I even got deeper into this headspace after reading a book by Josh Waitzkin (the Searching for Bobby Fischer kid), a chess Grandmaster where he talked about having trouble focusing on chess when playing in Washington Square Park in NYC. He would hear a song and be distracted, someone would be talking over him, etc. So he trained himself to be able to focus (and win) in practically any environment. He would purposely play with loud music on, have his little sister screaming behind him, etc. Eventually, it didn’t matter where he was, his focus was unwavering and you wouldn’t beat him even if you were jackhammering in his ear.

A goal of 2013 for me is to be able to operate well in both the “Separate Spaces” arrangement, as well as the “Grandmaster” arrangement. I could see wanting to continue with separate spaces as a trigger to know what I should be focusing on in each space, however I’d like to be able to be thrown for a loop, “today you have to finish your work with tons of people around you talking about different things” and still retain focus. Right now I do not have the Grandmaster method down. One way I think I can try to build that muscle is by roughly maintaining my daily habit (it’s 2pm, you should be focusing on X) even when my schedule has changed my normal location (a meeting took me to the other side of town, or I’m in a different city visiting friends).