Geoff Barber. "On the Importance of Work Ethic and Slaying Dragons"

I maintain the opinion that everything comes down to work ethic. As I’ve grown up, people have asked me what I want to do with my life. My answer is usually the same: I dunno, but I’m an okay writer. One of my dad’s friends who I’ve spent a fair amount of time with, a big and outspoken guy, always asked me that very same question, and I’d follow with the same answer. And then I’d get the same speech every time. “You know Ernest Hemingway was this incredible guy. There was his writing, but he was this larger-than-life figure. He’d be out playing cards and drinking in Havana all night, growing his legend as this super manly man, big game hunting, Marlin fishing, boxing and fucking girls. But come morning Hemingway would be up at six with a pot of black coffee, sitting at his typewriter until lunch. That’s what you gotta do, just write every day about anything, write about shaving!”

My dad’s friend who gave me this same impassioned deliverance on several occasions was in no way a writer or artist of any kind. I think he owned a company that manufactured industrial paint sprayers or something, but he certainly got his message across. I get up at six sometimes, make coffee and write, but this is just the product of procrastination, not an overzealous work ethic.

If you approach a new sport you are not going to expect to be good at it, we've come to learn that through experience. Why should writing be any different? Give it all you’ve got, and then some. Progress is inevitable if you work at it.

I hate to stray from the original subject matter of work ethic but this particular theme has a tendency to grow heads, like the Hydra. One head that keeps rearing up in my mind as I cut off the head of work ethic is the subject of being the best, closely related to work ethic. So I will follow up in the subsequent lines with that. Here are my worthless meditations on being the best:

It is a common thing to read writers accounts of writing, how discouraging it is, how you can write book after book and not get them published, how you’ll just be poor forever. But writing is just like everything else. There is a one percent; there is the elite, and the names everyone knows. You just need to figure out what got those elite to where they are. Their needs to be this deep seeded, burning desire to be the best. And I mean the very best, slaying dragons and murdering motherfuckers!

This applies to everything, not just writing and not just the arts. Natural talent is easily recognized but it will only take you so far.

When confronted with the decision between writing, and watching Netflix, the latter usually wins. It’s been a long day, I’ve been in school from 8:30 until 6, the metro broke, I burnt my tongue on microwave lasagna, I just want to chill. What would’ve happened if Ernest Hemingway decided to do the early 20^th century version of Netflix, instead of enlisting as an ambulance driver on the western front in his early twenties?

-Geoff