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Not long ago the hubs and I watched a National Geographic documentary miniseries called Limitless, starring Chris Hemsworth. This is the second season of the show, which focuses on Hemsworth exploring the boundaries and limitations of being human, largely with a focus on health and well-being. Season one revolved mostly around physical challenges, but this season is about mental ones.

Each episode is set up around specific topics with correlated challenges Hemsworth takes on, and in the first one, about enhancing memory and cognitive function, cognitive scientist Dr. Maya Shankar suggests that one of the best ways to create new neural pathways is by learning a difficult skill that uses both hemispheres of your brain and is fairly difficult.

For this challenge Hemsworth decides to learn a musical instrument—the drums—and he calls up his buddy Ed Sheeran, one of the world’s biggest pop stars (you know, as one does), to help him.

He and Sheeran set a deadline of two months for him to learn play well enough to accompany Sheeran on one of his songs. But they also up the ante with a specific goal: Hemsworth will actually join him onstage in front of a stadium of 70,000 people to play along on Sheeran’s hit “Thinking Out Loud.”

Hemsworth is always highly motivated in these challenges, and I imagine this one especially: In the last episode of the previous season he learned he carried two genes for Alzheimer’s, increasing his risk of developing the disease by a factor of eight to ten, and it was visibly sobering for him. He subsequently made changes in his life, slowing down his career to spend more time with his family and focusing even more on his physical and mental health.

And yet, as many of us do, not long after embarking on this challenge Hemsworth gets distracted. He’s promoting a film, receiving a Hollywood star, and doing all the other many obligations that come along with being a major movie star. Ben Gordon, his drumming coach in the show—another musician friend—talks about Hemsworth not seeming to take it seriously enough, and not rehearsing enough to be good enough to play onstage in time for the concert.

So Gordon decides to up the ante again and, two weeks before the show, has Hemsworth play in with his own band. Unable to keep up, Hemsworth immediately realizes how crucial the drummer is to every other aspect of a musician’s performance, and exactly how shaky his skills are.

He is deeply shaken by his failure–and immediately cancels many of his other commitments to dedicate himself more seriously to his drumming in his remaining two weeks before the Sheeran concert.

The Deadline Paradox

Last week I wrote that as creatives pursuing a career in publishing, we are all essentially freelance entrepreneurs—meaning it’s up to us to create frameworks for our business that allow us to produce, manage, and sell the creative product our success is based on—our writing (or editing, in my case).

Setting specific goals and deadlines is an essential part of that, but as Hemsworth illustrated, they can be a mixed bag:

• Deadlines are motivating—they focus your efforts on a specific goal and give authors structure in a career where often we have little of it.
• But deadlines can freeze you up, freak you out, and make you focus so hard on getting it done that you lose the pleasure of doing it, or it becomes rote and tedious, or you phone it in.

I’m going to confess to you that I am Chris Hemsworth—not in the sense of being an absolutely inspiring specimen of robust well-being and ability and ridiculous attractiveness, sadly, but in that without structure, expectations, deadlines, and the threat of falling on my face, I can piddle away indefinitely on a project no matter how strong my motivation or good my intentions.

And yet I’ve spent my entire career successfully creating a deadline-dependent business in our deadline-focused industry.

I talk a lot about taking your career seriously and treating it professionally—but also keeping it in perspective so that work—even creative work we love—doesn’t take over every aspect of our lives. Not long ago I wrote about the expectations, requirements, and endless to-do lists of building a successful creative career, and realizing that everything on them is a choice, urging you to be mindful about the choices that you make.

And yet—the deadline paradox again—expectations and structure are endemic to most of our lives, and certainly to anyone pursuing a freelance career.

Pushing Beyond Our Boundaries

But there’s another area I think this episode illustrates, which is that the goals we set for ourselves may often feel just out of our reach.

In Limitless the experts also talk about how we have to fail, because that’s how you eventually succeed.

Read more: “Failure IS an option”

I would characterize myself as a doer, at least in the sense that I like to have projects to work on, a sense of purpose and a goal. And I’m fortunate to have a career that’s also one of my prime interests, so I generally like to keep myself quite busy with projects I’m working on, often those that may expand my current offerings or capabilities. It excites me to think about trying new things and growing in new ways, so I tend to take on things that stretch me.

And then, historically, I commence to panicking. Many are the exchanges with my husband where I come into his office nearly hyperventilating at the fact that I’ve bitten off so much more than I can chew, clearly don’t know what the hell I’m doing, and am undoubtedly going to drop the ball. Sometimes I will begin to concoct ways to pull out of whatever I have committed to.

And then I never do. I take a break and a breath, gather my thoughts, and start working on whatever the project is, one little chunk at a time.

And I manage whatever the challenge is, every single time, on deadline, and usually with results I’m fairly happy about—but often only after plenty of failed approaches along the way.

Yet most of the time I end up enjoying even that—the process of finding my way through it, figuring it out, trial and error. It expands my knowledge and abilities, which then become so much a part of my mental database that it simply feels like I’ve had them all along.

And none of that would ever happen if I didn’t continually reach just a little outside of my grasp—pushed by deadlines and expectations I’ve committed to.

Yes, it’s often terrifying and uncomfortable (just watch the first season of Limitless, as Hemsworth faces unimaginable challenges that I can’t imagine putting myself through). But as psychologist Adam Grant posits, perhaps it’s that very anxiety and pressure that push us right to our limits—and, as with Hemsworth, beyond. Perhaps that’s actually how we grow as artists (and as people).

I think that’s what life is. If we never push our boundaries, just live comfortably inside our current comfort zone, then we’re on autopilot, treading water in circles in our nice little warm pool rather than swimming out further. Not necessarily into open water (or frigid Arctic water, as Hemsworth does in season one), but at least outside of your own tiny harbor.

It broadens our horizons, challenges our limitations, and lets us grow. We don’t have to do it to the Hemsworth extreme; some people’s tolerance for risk and discomfort is always going to be higher than others’. But I do think that if we try to push just outside of that tolerance in our lives, it’s how we create a rich, meaningful existence of growth and expansion, rather than one that may feel static or narrow or limiting.

Balancing Our Deadlines

None of this is contradictory with my previous blog posts about saying no and rest and not letting work take over every aspect of your life. These are deadlines and obligations and expectations you are choosing to abide by, for values that they buy you.

Read more: “You Have to Make Choices and They All Have a Cost”

But it’s why it can be so important to create that structure and expectation for yourself as a writer. Especially if we are not working to someone else’s firm deadline, it can be so easy to spin our wheels or drive in circles, endlessly drafting or rewriting and never really crossing the finish line or getting our work out into the world.

You can create this structure for yourself in many ways: by committing to a crit partner or accountability buddy, or online writing sprints, or even just a regular writing schedule you consistently keep to. Set concrete goals and deadlines—with meaningful rewards and consequences, which you honor and take seriously (and if you start fudging on them, then up the ante to make yourself tangibly accountable). Book a coach or editor and ensure you have a firm turn-in date; knowing you’re contractually responsible for meeting it can be a potent goad and motivator.  

Deadlines and expectations ensure that we will show up regularly, even when we don’t want to. That we will persist when things get hard and even hopeless.

They focus us too. I’m as prone as the next person to lollygagging and procrastinating, but you’d better believe that if a deadline is ticking down on me I’m going to get serious about completing my task before the clock runs out. If I promised something to someone, I will by God deliver.

And they ensure that we keep growing, instead of stagnating.

The trick is to balance that motivating framework with not taking on too much—and that, as I mentioned in last week’s post, might be the ongoing work of your career as a freelancer: regularly assessing and growing your business while balancing it with the rest of a satisfying life.

Your turn, authors: What do you struggle with most in creating a framework that allows you to commit to your writing and career regularly? Do you have systems in place that create structure and deadlines around your work? What are they?

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