Making more work for yourself can be good

People who sustain success across decades seem to share this trait:

They go out of their way to challenge themselves.

To challenge yourself means to expose yourself to situations and training that you may not be extremely familiar or comfortable with.

Playing to your strengths is always a good idea, but greatness demands more than that. It requires you to double down on your strengths while still trying to bridge the gap with your weaknesses.

My favorite example of this principle is Christopher Nolan.

Christopher Nolan — the director of Inception, The Dark Knight trilogy, Interstellar, and Oppenheimer — loves playing with time in his stories. He hardly ever linearly tells stories, choosing to use a timeline as a suggestion instead of as a structure.

But this doesn’t mean that his stories and method of directing are always the same. It’s the complete opposite; Christopher Nolan actively seeks out new challenges with each new project.

He tries to never use CGI, opting for complex physical stunts and effects. One of his biggest challenges was in Oppenheimer. Since it was a story about the atomic bomb, he needed to have an explosion scene.

Surely no one would blame him for using CGI to create the blast. After all, you can’t make a bomb just to shoot one scene, right?…

Well, Nolan DID!

“I wanted to take CG off the table and see if he could come up with real-world methodologies for producing the effect of the first atomic blast,” Nolan explains.

He had already used some CGI for the Batman films, but that felt too easy to do. He wanted a worthwhile challenge this time around.

And while Nolan did make his job harder, it’s important to realize that it wasn’t just for the sake of challenge. It was to create a better product.

Nolan believes in practical filming because it means what you see on the screen is what the actors see. It also brings out better acting because the actors don’t have to imagine something that’s not there — they can respond to the explosion.

As the saying goes, the hard way is actually the easy way. When you are certain that you are doing everything you can to create something meaningful, the output is always better. Conversely, if you cheat and rush yourself, you may get done more quickly but the diminished quality will show.

So seek out ways to bring the best out in yourself in perpetuity, even if it means more work right now.

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