28. Mostly Failure But All Fun

Playing a video game, a sport, or making music is so much fun. Did you notice that these interests are filled with failure though? There are brief moments of success but it is mainly about striving for some goal. All creative work is like this. You want to play more. You want to get better at it. We fail repeatedly because we lack some specific knowledge. When this becomes clear something gets triggered in us. Suddenly we are wrapped up in activity. We are lost in the moment. We surrender with devotion, stumbling joyfully from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm, as Winston Churchill described, while harnessing our creativity with the fervor of someone addicted to solving problems like Sherlock Holmes. 

“My mind," he said, "rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world.
- Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four (Sherlock Holmes, #2)