Passion Makes You Mechanical

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I was rendering new images for a long time last night. Passion about a project, which comes from a completely human and emotional place, can make people mechanical.

This morning I read Seth’s post about being a “pilot”- someone meticulously checks off a to-do list and looks after details while remaining unseen. This way of relating to your work precludes innovation, but slipping into the “pilot” role and loosing yourself in a stack of tasks that need to be carried out to support an idea you’ve fallen in love with can be wonderful. Time passes differently, you start to pay less and less attention to your surroundings and yourself, and when you “snap out of it”, a lot of work has been turned around.

I know what Seth is saying, but activities like jogging, painting, and even writing could be coded as “pilot” behavior. It’s no way to live life entirely, but carving out contained spaces for meditative, automatic task-completion can be a wonderful escape, and nourishing a project by yourself requires it.

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