The Detriment of Passion: Why the Best Time to Work is When We’re Not in the Mood

When we are not in the mood our energy is low. But when our energy is low our mind is better aligned to what matters when it comes to doing good work; contemplation, reflection, prioritization. Critically, not being in the mood means not going down too many wrong paths. In this episode I argue that the best time to work on a given task is when we're not in the mood, and discuss how we should stop waiting for mental energy, and instead wait for mental clarity.

Transcript

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So we all know what it's like to not be in the mood to do something, to do a project, a task. Maybe you get up in the morning and the enthusiasm just isn't there. You don't have that mental focus. You're not envisioning how the project's going to go, you're just not excited at that moment usually hits us at different times of the day. Maybe a certain time of day we are motivated, and other times we're not. Not being motivated to do a given task is probably kind of the norm. It's kind of the usual state, because there's no reason that we should necessarily have a ton of energy every time we get up to go do something or every time we think that it might be a good time to work on it. It's just common. It's not necessarily a bad thing. It's just a lack of energy, a lack of enthusiasm, a lack of hyper focus that you might otherwise bring to a project. We all know what that's like. It's pretty normal to just not be in the mood at any given time, on a given day to go work on a particular task or a particular project. So you can imagine getting up in the morning and you just don't have that enthusiasm, you don't have that focus. So maybe you choose not to do it because you're going to wait maybe until a later time on that day, or maybe even just a different day to work on something. And often we don't get around to things like we should, just because we don't find that we're in the mood. And then you can kind of do a little introspection and ask maybe why you're not in the mood. Like, shouldn't I be in the mood for this? Why is this not exciting? So that low energy state of mind, I don't think it's a pejorative thing, but I think it's pretty common and it doesn't seem to align with what matters when it comes to a task. Right. If we think about getting a project or a piece of work done, it seems like we should be focused on the core pieces and we should bring an energy to that project in order to get it done, because we don't want to do wrong work, we don't want to go down a bunch of wrong paths. We don't want to not be able to focus on the right thing. And so it seems like that mental energy or that motivation would help us get aligned to what matters, focus on the right things, not go down paths that we shouldn't go down because our energy is too low or our heads just aren't there. Right. And so this kind of comes down to when is the best time to work? Because we have to work, we have to do projects, we have to work on tasks. Whatever it is, whether you're self employed or you work for a boss, or you just have a bunch of side projects, there's always things to do. It's good to have things to do. We should be busy. But it seems like there's a timing there, right? You can put yourself on a really strict schedule. And I think we all know that those only last so long. Those are really hard to adhere to because it seems that there's something natural about the intermittent behavior of human beings. It seems like it makes sense to sometimes pounce on something and sometimes not. It seems like there are better times to work and better times not to. I think we spend a lot of time just kind of waiting for the right moment to act. Not waiting, doing nothing. But maybe we go work on something else. We try to pick the thing that we're most in the mood for, whatever it is. But we all know that feeling of just not being in the mood. The energy is low. Our minds are just not super focused on the task at hand. We just don't have that enthusiasm to work on it. But what I want to argue in this episode is that when our energy is low, our mind is actually better aligned to what matters when it comes to doing good work. So that sounds a little bit funny because you're not going to be as focused on the task at hand. You don't have the energy that you want to bring to it. Again, we all know that feeling of just not being in the mood, so why would that be a better time? Or why would that be a better state of mind in terms of being aligned to what matters? We'll think of some examples of how you're thinking when your energy is just lower and you're not in the mood. Often you're actually a lot more contemplative. So you're kind of just sitting back. You're not pouncing on it, you're not thinking. You need to blast something out. You can almost imagine sitting there, almost a bit bored, but not really bored. You're just kind of more contemplative. It's almost like you're looking at it, you're poking at it, but you might not be doing a lot. Okay, but it's contemplative. You're spending more time stepping back and kind of looking at something holistically. There's more mindfulness, there's more reflection, because reflection, in some sense, is a bit easier than doing the work, right. And if you're doing it more slowly or maybe not at all, you're just kind of looking at it. Imagine popping open a document. Maybe you're working on an article or a book or something for business, and you're kind of staring at it. Maybe you're scrolling it. You're just kind of reflecting on it, but you're not really doing it right. But that is more contemplative. That is, in some sense, more mindful when it comes to things like prioritization and decision making. You can't really prioritize and decision make while you're doing the thing, but you can when you step back and look upon what you've already done and what you plan on doing. When we are kind of of a low energy mind, we are not really getting overwhelmed, which is a good thing, because we're just not hypercharged, hyper focused, kind of blasting it out again. We're kind of just sitting back. We, by default, kind of avoid impulsivity. Right. When you kind of act on impulse, which, as I'll argue throughout this episode, can cause a lot of problems, and you think about the nature of deep work, right, as opposed to just kind of shallow work. Deep work is often slower. It is more contemplative. You're doing what I would call thinking more structurally. If you were looking at that document and you're supposed to write something, if you just started writing, and this is kind of what we're told, like, just start writing. Just start writing. Get the words out right. And there is some advantage to that. But you're not thinking about the structure, the scaffolding, the kind of invariant pieces, the parts that are always true no matter what you write, those kind of really true universal properties of the thing you're doing, you can't do that when you're working really fast, but you can when you're kind of slow and you're poking around a bit and you're thinking of just the structure of the thing as opposed to getting a bunch of things done on top of that structure. So deep work and concentration are kind of more commensurate with this kind of low energy state of mind, I would argue. And then you have things like better listening skills, reduced stress, reduced anxiety and things like that. So I began by saying, look, we all know what it's like to not be in the mood the energy is low. And I think the default kind of reaction to that is, oh, this is not good, because that's kind of how we're raised. That's how we're taught in society. You got to pounce on things. You got to go, you got to have mental energy. People have that coffee in the morning. You're supposed to be passionate. You're supposed to have enthusiasm about what you do. And so if you're not in the mood, if you don't have any of those things, don't have the energy, the enthusiasm, the hyper focus, then that must be a bad thing. There must be something off, there must be something wrong, like, why are you not passionate? Why do you not want to jump on this, take over the world, do a really, really good job and get it out there? That was kind of the first part. But then I said, think about this, that when our energy is low, our mental energy and physical, it's actually better aligned to some of the things that really do matter. You tend to be more contemplative, you're more mindful, you're more reflective. It's easier to do things like prioritization and think about specific decision making. You avoid getting overwhelmed, you don't act on impulse. Deep work and concentration is actually more amenable to being in a low energy state. I would argue better listening, reduced stress, anxiety, and things like that. So the low energy state of mind is not all pejorative, it's not all bad, it's not all negative. There's something actually quite good about it. And I would argue that in that state, your mind is actually aligned to what truly matters in any given task, which are things that have to be contemplated, things that have to be reflected on, things that are invariant. So invariant are the things that don't change and everything else does. When you're pouncing on something and you're going really fast or you're banging it out, you don't have time to understand what those invariant pieces are. You don't have time to kind of notice what's not moving when everything else does, because everything's just kind of moving and you're not really paying attention. You also have a tendency to go down a lot of wrong paths, and that's kind of the core mechanism I want to argue in this episode, when you do things with a lot of passion, with a lot of enthusiasm, is you actually end up creating quite a bit of trouble for yourself. And I'll give you an example in a bit, but it's because you bring a lot of energy in, a lot of ideas and a lot of enthusiasm. And these sound like they're good things, but it makes you explore almost too much of the possibility space, almost too many of the potential paths. Because every time you explore a path that comes with a cost, it's not free to explore a path. It might be somewhat free to do it kind of mentally. Like you're just assuming, running what if scenarios in your mind. But when you're actually doing it on paper, if you jump in and you don't have time to kind of consider what it is you're doing, whatever goes down on paper is unlikely to be removed that easily. In other words, let's say I go to write something, maybe it's a chapter for a book, and I'm just going to bring a bunch of enthusiasm and passion to it. So I'm going to write a bunch of stuff and isn't that great? And then a day or two later look at it and be like, well, actually, this doesn't really fit well. It's not easy to get rid of that work because people don't like to toss what they already did. It seems like that would be a big waste of time. Kind of a sunk cost fallacy, right? So they end up keeping a lot of junk that is not needed. And that junk comes with a cost because they have dependencies. They have to work with all the other parts, the other words in the chapter, the other chapters in the book, using a book as an example, but whatever the project is, to just go bang out a bunch of work because you're enthusiastic and because you have a lot of passion creates a lot of work down the road that you have to undo because you weren't being contemplative, you weren't thinking about the structure, you weren't thinking about the kinds of things that you think about when you're slower and maybe not really in the mood to do it, but can kind of do the cognitively easier, kind of just look upon the work and understand the overall structure of it. And it sounds funny that deep work and concentration would be easier, but in some sense it is, because you're not necessarily doing the thing. You're just kind of stepping back and looking at it holistically. And in some sense that's cognitively easier to do, but it's actually also more important because you're looking at the most critical, important aspects of the task, I would argue. So this calls into question when I, when I said at the beginning, we think about what the best time to work is, and I think people would assume the best time to work is when you're in the mood, right? Is when you have that mental focus, that enthusiasm, that energy. But based on this last bit of argument I made here, that when our energy is low, our mind is better aligned to what matters, you could say that maybe the best time to work is not when you're really enthusiastic talking about that mechanism of going down the wrong paths. I think that's definitely the case, because if you're going to create a lot of work that you have to undo down the road, which I think is the case, when you bring a lot of energy to your work, then you can say, that's definitely not the best time to work. And so when it comes to waiting for the right moment to act, because again, there are better moments than others, maybe that better moment is not when we're really in the mood and we're really enthusiastic. In other words, there is a detriment to passion. It's not all good. There is something wrong with getting really excited. There is something wrong with bringing a bunch of mental energy to something. Not always. I think there's a time and place for it. But by and large, when it comes to tractability, when it comes to doing what's really needed to get a project out the door, to build, to create, what's needed is not a bunch of mental energy. What's needed is mental clarity. There's a big difference between those two. Mental energy can bring in kind of the dark side of creativity, where you bring all these ideas and all this energy and you go down all these paths. But because you do all that, they come with a cost, and it ends up being really hard to rein it in at a later date because you brought all that energy, it felt good in the moment, but it ended up costing you in the long run. And I think that's kind of a universal truth for life in general. A lot of things that feel really good in the moment can end up costing you down the road. And so there is a real benefit to having a kind of low energy, calm state of mind, the kind that you find when you're actually not in the mood or excited or interested in doing something. What matters in our work, I'm going to say is, again, let's pick on that mechanism. This is not going down too many wrong paths. So let's think about this kind of what I call the dark side of creativity, for lack of a better term. I mean, creativity is a wonderful thing. We should build. We should create. And to be clear, there are times when having that mental energy is a good thing. It's fun to be in the mood for something, and we want our work to be fun. I think it's important that work is fun, but there is a dark side to kind of this excessive energy or passion or creativity that you can have. Think about the example of white collar crime. What does that have to do with it? Well, if you actually look into white collar crime now, this is crime that is committed by ceos of companies, right? As opposed to the more obvious crimes of killing someone or something like that. White collar crime. If you read about this, these are individuals who, they weren't looking to do anything particularly nefarious for the most part. These are not people that go into business because they want to break the law or they want to cheat people. What they end up doing is actually getting quite creative and ingenious in the way that they try to find loopholes in things like regulation, right? Not in the illegal way, but just loopholes that would allow them, for example, to save some tax money, that would allow them to maybe meet their revenue targets for that fiscal year or that particular quarter. And it usually starts off, and you can go read about people who have interviewed the people that are currently and have been in jail for these crimes. Again, they weren't in there to be nefarious or to break crimes. It started off with these little simple kind of strategic moves that they were doing to save the company money, and they would get rewarded. They were considered that. These are brilliant moves that you're making. You're very strategic, you're very creative. And it kind of snowballs, though, right? They start going down all these different paths. I can save money here. I can save money here. I can reword this. You start getting into some little things where you backdate a contract so it fits into the quarter, and then they meet their revenue targets. And then all of a sudden, over time, eventually, holistically, all these things amount to an illegal act where you're misrepresenting, let's say, the amount of revenue or profit that you're making as a company, then that is obviously causing investors to do things that they wouldn't do if they had the right information and this kind of thing. And if you look at the lawyers who defend these criminals, these white crime or, sorry, white collar criminals, when they just break down the individual details that they were doing in the books, you shift the number over here, you do this, you do that kind of cooking the books, right? But they're doing it in such minute steps that nothing in and of itself, from a detail perspective, actually seems that illegal. But holistically, when you step back, you realize that it had this kind of overall holistic, systemic impact on the business, and more importantly, on the kind of end users of whatever service or product that business was bringing to the public. So anyways, why am I talking about white collar crime? Well, I think it's an example of the dark side of creativity. Just because you can invent many different ways and bring a bunch of ingenuity to something and think up all these different ideas and try to be really smart and clever about what you're doing, it can end up snowballing into things that cause you a lot of problems down the road. In the case of white collar crime, this is literally getting into trouble, because you will get in trouble with the law. And most of what we do in life is not going to get us in trouble with the law, but it can still cause you a lot of problems for the same kind of reason, right? You can be building a piece of software and you have all these great ideas, like, hey, I could add this feature, and I could add this feature, and then I could bring maybe artificial intelligence here, and then I could do this. And you become quite enamored with your own ideas and your own ingenuity and creativity, and they are good ideas. And in and of themselves, there is nothing wrong with those ideas. But all those ideas have to work together holistically. They're all dependent on each other. And every little bit that you add to your system, to your program, to your piece of software, to your product, is going to be something that you have to contend with down the road. And it has this kind of way of leading to a combinatorial explosion, if you will, where one little piece that gets added just exponentially increases the amount of complexity in the overall thing. So this is what I mean by the dark side of creativity. Just like the white collar crime, where individually, people are not going into business to break the law, they're just finding loopholes in legislation. They're finding little loopholes, maybe in the tax law, where they can save some money. I can do this offshore, I can change the wording here, I can change the date on this one piece of the contract, whatever, right? And they do these little things, little things that by themselves maybe don't seem so bad, but holistically, it causes a really big problem. These all add up. They all interconnect and ends up creating a truly nefarious situation that harms a lot of people down the road in the case of white collar crime, actually leads to something quite illegal, and then they do jail time. For know, if you think about the mechanism of a Ponzi scheme, right, the biggest ever know. Bernie Madoff. Right? And just an example. You know, a Ponzi scheme is essentially taking new money to pay old money, right? So basically, you create this situation where you kind of, in one example, anyways, you might be misrepresenting what you actually have, and then people start investing a lot of money in what you do. But then people start kind of like a margin call. They say, okay, now I want to kind of cash in, but you don't really have that money, so you got to go raise more money so that you can pay the old money, right? So you're taking new money to pay the old money. And to keep this afloat, this Ponzi scheme, you got to keep taking more, taking more, taking more, taking more. And it's just this big house of cards that eventually collapses, right? It's similar to what you do when you get really enthusiastic about something. It starts off innocuous. It starts off as just, I'm being clever, I'm being creative. I got lots of ideas. But you start building these dependencies, they start growing more and more. And eventually what you're growing outstrips your capacity to backfill it in a way that you can handle it. I had an episode a year or two ago now on WeWork, right, as that company that what they really were was, I guess maybe to some extent, still are a real estate company, right? But they acted like they were a software company. And because software is so much more rapid and scalable, they were able to almost artificially grow the presence of their business to a very large size. But they didn't have the real business, the real estate ability to kind of backfill it. So they'd have all these, let's say, debts with respect to real estate that they had to pay for. In order to do that, they had to go raise more money much faster. So they kind of used a software version of their company, which wasn't really real, to bring in a bunch of money to back again, find new money to pay the old money kind of thing. Right? I was talking about that mechanism in terms of information versus physical, right? The informational side of things, ideas, thoughts, creativity, that can always scale to infinity. It's always very rapid, but there's always a physical side that has to catch up to that informational side of things. In the case of WeWork, they were growing the informational side of things, the software, but the physical side of things, the real estate eventually had to backfill what they were growing. And when the informational outstrips the physical, it tends to, again, create that kind of house of cards that collapses. So the WeWork example, white collar crime, where you're misrepresenting something, you're informationally doing something, because information is kind of free, right? You can just say what you want, you can put what you want on a report, you can kind of cook the books, and you can present that. And then money will flow in, and money will flow in, but eventually the reality will catch up with you. Either a physical real estate business or investments that actually have to be there when someone goes to make a call and get those investments back. Creativity can be like that. I mean, those are extreme examples, but creativity can be like that in your life. Passion can be like that. Enthusiasm can be like that. We assume that these are always good passion, enthusiasm, these are obviously good things, and there are good things about them. There's nothing wrong with having some energy in what you do, but there is a dark side to that creativity. You keep finding things to invent. You keep bringing more ideas in. You keep applying that passion and enthusiasm to just make more, make more kind of on the informational side of things. But then when the physical reality kicks in, now you have a ton of stuff. You got to rein in a lot of mess. You have to clean up a lot of complexity that has to somehow intricately work together and coordinate with all the other pieces that you just invented out of thin air. A low energy state of mind can be really, really beneficial because it, by default, doesn't allow you to go off on all these different paths. It doesn't allow you to kind of enter that dark side of creativity. Our minds need to be aligned to what matters on a project. And what really matters on a project are these kind of slower, structural invariant pieces that absolutely have to be there, not all the crazy ideas you could possibly bring into something. What we really have to avoid is going down wrong paths. And a lot of enthusiasm and hyper focus and energy on a particular project can easily take you down wrong paths. Again, it's not all bad. You do have to explore that possibility space to get ideas. I think there's a time and place for that, but I think the best place to be is actually similar to where you would be. If you're not in the mood for something. It's kind of a free ticket to having a nice, calm, contemplative state of mind, poking around the work, not thinking. You have to get a bunch done, because slower really is faster. And when you slow down on the structural pieces, you'll end up creating a lot more. And it's also important to note that you think about the creative energy that's needed to explore a lot of possibilities that's really just free. I would argue it's like entropy. It's just always there. It's always growing. There's always lots of disorder, there's always lots of different ideas you can tap into. It's not hard to let your mind wander. So to me, that's not where the focus should be. If you're only working when you're really in the mood for something, then you're kind of supercharging the entropy of the project, because now you're really going to explore all these different areas and go crazy, and it's going to cause you a lot of problems. Exploring a lot of those ideas are easy because complexity is just always there. Entropy is always there. The disorder is always there. It's not hard to tap into a lot of ideas. What's harder, what's more important is being able to slow down and think of things structurally and in a contemplative fashion. So when it comes to the best time to work, I'm arguing that this has to be when you're not going down too many paths, and that happens when you're, as we would often say, not in the mood. You don't need that energy. It's actually better to not be in the mood for something, because now you're in that low energy state of mind when it comes to waiting for the right moment to act, I think the best time to work is when you're not in the mood. Imagine again, you're sitting down. You have to work on a book, but you're not in the mood. And so what's that going to do? Well, you're going to kind of poke around that writing. You're going to look at the scaffolding, the structure. Those are the things that matter, because everything that emanates from that writing has to be consistent with that structure. It makes more sense to be slower on the structure than faster on the content, because the fast content is the dark side of creativity. That's just going to load a bunch of dependencies that you're going to have to rein in later. The best time to work, I would argue, is actually when we're not in the mood. It's that low energy state of mind. The mind ends up being aligned to what really matters. It's not going down the wrong paths. It really is the best time to work. It really is the right moment to act. And it's od again. I think it really goes. It flies in the face of what we're told and the way that we normally think. Because when you're not in the mood, you literally don't feel like doing it. But what you really don't feel like doing is not necessarily the job or the task or the project. What you really don't have is just that mental energy that you assume you need. That's what you're feeling. You don't have that hyper focus, you don't have that enthusiasm. It's not that you can't do the work, you just don't have the things that you erroneously think you need to do the work. And I think that's a key realization. Working on a task does not need mental energy, it just needs mental clarity. It doesn't need enthusiasm, it doesn't need passion. Not only does it not need those things, there's a good chance that having those things when you go to do the work is going to cause you a lot of problems. I think we need to look for moments when we're not in the mood as kind of a free gift, whereby the characteristics that lead to true productivity are now more easily implemented. And this is a good thing because I think we are usually, if you think of the percentage of time you are in the mood and not in the mood, the percentage of time when you're not in the mood to work on something is actually probably more. It's probably a bigger number. And if we look for the moments when we're not in the mood, it's kind of a free gift. Like this is actually a good opportunity to work on it, because I'm not going to be clouded by this excess energy that's probably going to cause me a lot of problems down the road. There's always a time and place for that mental energy, but I think it's few and far between. What we need is contemplation. What we need is structure. What we need is a calm focus on the invariant pieces, and that will build you more. It feels like when you have energy, you're being more productive. But if you have to go shovel all that crap out of what you made down the road because you just did too much, or you went down too many wrong paths, then that's not more productive. Is it. It's better to produce less of something that really works than more of something that doesn't. And in the long run, the long game there is that you will end up producing a lot more by being in that low energy state of mind, keeping the mind aligned to what actually matters, not going down all those wrong paths that we tend to do when we have a lot of energy, a lot of enthusiasm, when we are in the mood. I think the best time to work is actually when we are not in the mood, and that would be the right moment to act. Okay? So I began by saying, look, we all know what it's like to not be in the mood. Our energy is low. We're not really enthusiastic. We don't have a bunch of passion. And the thing is, we kind of assume that's not good, that's not aligned to what matters, right? But then I said, look, when our energy is low, our mind is better aligned to what matters because it makes us more contemplative, we're more mindful, we're reflective. It's easier to think about prioritization and decision making. We can avoid being overwhelmed. We don't act on impulse. Deep work and concentration is more commensurate with this state of mind. Better listening skills, reduce stress, reduce anxiety, all that stuff. What matters in our work is not going down too many paths. And that's what the dark side of creativity, enthusiasm, passion, energy, can actually bring. Just like a white collar criminal who starts to think about so many different ways that they could creatively kind of save the company money. When you step back and think about that holistically, it ends up causing a lot of problems. It ends up creating something that's really hard to backfill in the end, and it eventually collapses. I think the best time to work is when we're not. And I think if that's true, then we should stop waiting for mental energy or assuming that you got to have that coffee or got to be in the mood or got to have that enthusiasm, and instead wait for mental clarity. Stop waiting for mental energy, and instead wait for mental clarity. Look for moments when you're not in the mood as a free gift, whereby the characteristics that lead to true productivity are now more easily implemented. And I think if you do that, you'll see that you'll actually be a lot more productive in the long run. Okay. There is a detriment to passion. It's not all bad, but there is one there that needs to be recognized. And I think it could be true that the best time to work is when we're not in the mood. Okay, that's it for this episode. Thanks so much for listening. Until the next one. Take care of you. I know I.