I got my dream book deal, then I stopped writing...

On my flight back home from London after signing my book deal, I felt lost.

Before the trip, I expected this to be a 'happy-ever-after' moment after walking out of Bloomsbury's headquarters, yet I still felt the same, and I had to head home and actually write the damn thing.

And this is when I started watching The Bear on the plane.

In case you haven't watched it yet, The Bear is a show about a young chef, Carmen Berzatto and his story of trying to save his dead brother's struggling restaurant. At its core, the show's about what most creatives struggle with: the pain that comes with chasing artistic success.

When I started the show, I thought it was going to follow another biopic arc of pain, sacrifice and glory. But two scenes from the last episode of season 3, 'Forever', subverted my expectations.

And these scenes made me see that I might be looking at creative work all wrong.

Scene 1: 'It Worked'

Let's start with something familiar.

This scene shows Carmy at a dinner where he confronted his old mentor, David Fields, for 'giving [him] ulcers, and panic attacks and nightmares' when he worked at his restaurant.

Fields' philosophy of excellence boils down to his reply to Carmy's grievances:

'You're welcome.'

Carmy continued: 'My life stopped.'

And Fields said: 'That's the point, right? You wanted to be great. You wanted to be excellent. So you got rid of all the bullshit, and you concentrated, and you got focused, and you got great. You got excellent. It worked.'

What Fields preached was a myth most of us believe: success comes from an intense push, countless personal sacrifices and boom: you become great.

And yes, it works, but only for the external metrics of 'making it'.

If we tune into our feelings, we rarely find true fulfilment in these pushes for excellence. We'll reach a point where we've 'made it', but still feel a deep lack.

And the problem is that we start to believe that this is inevitable. In reality, there's a different path altogether.

Scene 2: 'Modicum of Effort'

The scene opened with Carmy dropping a handful of trays on his first day staging for The French Laundry. Then, after a few minutes of struggling to prep a roasted chicken, he saw Chef Thomas Keller coming around the corner.

'Morning, Chef. How're we doing?' Said Keller with a smile in a calm voice.

Then he said something that I've been turning over in my head ever since:

'This is your first day. You'll have a legacy in this restaurant... So always remember: come in every single day, and just try to do a little better than the day before. Modicum of effort. And that'll compound over the years that you're here, and you'll leave this restaurant with education, training, skills and a path forward.'

I think Thomas Keller wasn't acting at all in this scene. This moment felt so real that for a second I forgot I was watching a TV show. It was a window into a very different philosophy of creativity.

Our War Against Mastery

I still think about a book I read 11 years ago: Mastery by George Leonard. I didn't understand it at all at the time, but its ideas kept bearing fruit as I've gotten older.

In chapter 3, Leonard argued that America is at war with a fundamental source of human fulfilment: mastering something at a slow and steady pace, because our culture is convinced that:

'Life at its best... is an endless series of climactic moments.'

This attitude impacts everything, from how we spend our money to how we see our work. If we don't see immediate rewards for efforts we're putting in, we give up and move on to something that gives immediate gratification.

And this habit of climax-seeking is fundamentally flawed, because a climax, by definition, cannot continue forever.

Leonard continues:

'If our life is a good one, a life of mastery, most of it will be spent on the plateau. If not, a large part of it may well be spent in restless, distracted, ultimately self-destructive attempts to escape the plateau.'

This is the core of mastery: to practice a craft, we must also enjoy those moments when nothing much is happening. In fact, the plateau is where we'll spend most of our creative lives.

And there is no clearer way to see this than in martial arts.

The True Road To Fulfilment

When I landed back in Melbourne from London, I was terrified to start the first chapter of a 70,000-word manuscript.

I spent days 'researching', journaling, taking photos and wandering the streets. Basically, I did everything but writing.

And this is around the time when I discovered karate. My girlfriend had convinced me to join her for a trial session, so one evening, with nothing better to do, I said yes.

I've done some martial arts as a kid, but the experience was so humiliating that I was convinced I had zero talent for it.

Yet, I remembered something Leonard wrote:

'Despite the noise outside, climbing the stairs to the second-story dojo was like entering a sanctuary, a place both alien to my customary existence and altogether familiar.'

Honestly, at the time anything that would get me away from writing sounded like a good deal. I hopped on the mat, got my ass kicked, and realised that I still sucked.

But it all made sense the minute I walked out of the dojo, drenched in sweat.

The session felt like a hard reset to my system, and somehow I've forgotten about what I was so worried about during the day. My mind was quiet, maybe for the first time in years, and this is when I understood what Leonard wrote:

'I knew that, no matter how I felt climbing the dojo stairs, two hours later–after hundreds of throws and falls–I would walk out tingling and fully alive, feeling so good, in fact, that the night itself would seem to sparkle and gleam.'

I honestly didn't know what I was looking for when I started practising karate. A distraction, maybe. Yet, that feeling of presence, peace, discipline and steady progress kept bringing me back onto the mat.

I even grew to love all the things I once found tedious: driving to the dojo, getting changed into my dogi, and feeling sore the day after.

And this was the first time I'd experienced joy with no attachments. There was no destination, no achievements. Just a pure love for the endless path of mastery.

After all, a black belt (Shodan) in Japanese means the first grade. There is no end to this journey.

A few weeks after I joined the dojo, something unexpected happened.

Back To My Desk: One Word At A Time

Somehow, the ritual of practising karate started impacting my writing.

One morning, I sat down in front of my computer without expecting anything. I didn't have 70,000 words to write. I only had to worry about putting one word in front of another.

Yet, this new approach to writing gave me that same joy of walking out of the dojo. I put down my coffee that morning, looking at the first 500 words I wrote, and the same joy was there. I was focused, and I didn't worry about anything else besides what's right in front of me.

In a sense, I did 'get rid of all the bullshit', just not from a place of pain. My life didn't stop. It flowed, and I realised my work is just a part of it.

And I showed up every day, trying to do a little better than the day before because I knew no matter what happens, the joy of knowing that I showed up will always be waiting for me after the session.

As I'm writing this newsletter, this book I wrote is about to go to print. And all of it was made possible by what Chef Keller called:

'A modicum of effort.'

And if you want to tap into this same stream of steady yet fulfilling effort, here are 3 protocols to consider.