The Flimsy Self-Imposed Deadline jordanmarsh6, January 11, 2022April 5, 2023 Lin-Manuel Miranda is the creator of the extremely popular musical Hamilton. Based on the life of Alexandar Hamilton, one of the founding fathers of America, the show literally sings/raps for an entire two hours and 35 minutes. Can you imagine the creative work that someone would have to do to produce that long of a play? Most albums consist of 3-4 minute songs that last for an entire 40 minutes at best; this guy produced one cohesive script that not only lasted a long time, but was very interesting. Lin-Manuel Miranda was already a large name before he wrote Hamilton. His first work that made him famous was his writing of In the Heights. I won’t dig too much into that storyline, although its amazing. You’ll just need to know that fact to understand the next paragraph. I was listening to a podcast (Adam Grant’s WorkLife podcast) where Lin-Manuel Miranda spoke about what made him so successful as a playwriter. Here’s a snippet of the transcript from that podcast between Adam Grant and Lin-Manuel Miranda (emphasis is my own): ADAM:But Lin, I have to wonder, there have to be tasks now that are not intrinsically interesting or meaningful to you that are still important for you to be able to produce your brilliant work. How do you motivate yourself now…? LIN:A couple of things…I learned very early on that I thrive on deadlines… Tommy Kale who is…maybe the most important collaborator in my life, realized very early that I thrived on deadlines. So he just said let’s meet every Friday before any producer ever saw In the Heights…he just said, bring in something every Friday, we’ll meet in the basement of the drama bookshop. And on days when I brought in stuff, we had stuff to talk about. And again, it became a joy to work towards that Friday meeting. Uh, and that’s how In the Heights gets made. That’s how Hamilton gets made is by, um, knowing that if I bring, if I work hard, um, and writing is always hard, I’m going to get to bring it into a room with, with smarter folks than me. And we’re all going to get to kick the tires on it and make something better. Think of Lin-Manuel Miranda on a Thursday, realizing he hasn’t done any work on the scripts. Without someone to impose a deadline and meet with him on Friday, he would very likely have breezed through that Thursday also having not made any progress. Knowing that someone was relying on him to come with something to that meeting, it motivated him to produce scripts that have gone on to capture the imagination of millions of people. It’s very similar to that distressed college student ensuring that assignment got turned in with two seconds to spare: we, as humans, are often willing to go through hell or high water to accomplish something by a deadline someone else sets for us; but we’ll have no problem letting deadlines slide when we try and impose them on ourselves. You want to stay motivated? Have someone else set deadlines for you and have them follow up on that deadline. Self Improvement