In The Abyss or In The Zone. Turning a Frustrating Challenge into a Game.

So we are working on a sequel to ADD & Loving It?! A Part 2. The next step.  Taking it to the next level.

ADD & Loving It?! won awards because it dared to suggest ADHD & ADD are real, they’re impairing, they run in families, they can ruin families, they show up in odd and unsuspecting ways, they’re tricky to diagnose, knowing you have it can save your life, and there’s a ton that can be done to manage ADHD.

But it’s not easy.

Thus, the next video, ADD & Mastering It! Hopefully ready for June and airing on PBS stations starting in August and September.  A week ago, I would have said that was a pipe dream. I was stuck.  In overwhelm.  I was walking through the valley of the shadow of deadlines.

We’d hit a huge problem. Two competing ideas that couldn’t be stitched together. One was an introduction to the basics of ADHD, a whole separate. The other was a video about what to do about ADD. A slew of tools, tips, strategies and ways to transform not only your habits, but your view of the ‘disorder’.

We couldn’t just get to the good stuff, the tips, we had to include some background, get people up to speed. But it wasn’t working. It felt like you had to sit through a lesson before the fun began.

Our regular editor Jimi is off in Europe.  Ava, an editor by trade, was too busy with a thousand other things around revamping the website. (Ohhhh, lots coming!) So I called my friend Marcus, another great editor, and we hammered away at the project for four days. (And this was after weeks of editing with Jimi, before he traipsed off to nibble on bonbons in Paris.)

Finally, Marcus looked at me and said, very diplomatically, “I think we’re trying to force this.” That was an understatement. I could feel it. I’d been trying to force it for days. I was waking up in the night, thinking about it, I was going 12 hours a day with no real progress.

Force doesn’t work. If it has to be forced, there’s something wrong. I know this. Or I knew it, but of course when I’m in the middle of a deadline and trying to cut things together that were never meant to go together… well, who has time to think, let alone eat, breathe or go to the bathroom.

Overwhelmed, I’d look at the same shots on the monitor and in the editing timeline, asking, again and again, “What was this one?… Oh, right… What was before it?… Oh, right…” My brain was now concrete mixed with chewing gum, tar and asbestos. A good sign that I was stuck was that I was afraid to cut out anything. It’s like when you get clutter in your house. This was clutter on the editing screens. How could I cut something out when I wasn’t sure what I was doing, how it was going to work and what I might need?

Easy to de-clutter if you know that you are specifically moving from a big house to a small bungalow, or a one bedroom apartment, or a small van. Once you have the parameters a lot of the decisions are made for you. “This 14 foot L-Shaped, couch is not going to fit in our mobile home.”

So try as I might, trying wasn’t working. “We’re trying to make this into something it’s not.” Marcus was being polite. And I knew he was right. He didn’t suggest we abandon weeks of work. He let me decide that. Sigh….

Surrender.

I stopped fighting, stopped pushing and sat back. I started asking questions. We bandied about ideas. Suddenly, something clicked. I had a notion, then had a cascade of ideas flow out of it. Marcus could instantly tell I was on to something. Twenty minutes later ideas where tumbling out so fast I was having to scribble them down and two hours later… I was energized, in the zone, having fun, making connections, and now clearly able to toss one choice clip after another. “We’ll save that for the website. That’s a whole separate video…. We don’t need to explain this… We need a couple of Hallowell clips that aren’t here, I’ll go find them… Actually, John Ratey has a great example of that… “

And so it went.

What had become a draining, frustrating challenge turned into an exciting game. Like putting together a giant jigsaw puzzle. Only we weren’t trying to match the photograph on the cover of the jigsaw box, we were creating a whole new picture. A moving picture.

We went the rest of the day and all the next day, and it was joyful. I didn’t’ stop for lunch until late afternoon. And that, my friends, is not like me.

Tomorrow we’re back at it. And it’s fun. Exciting. I’m in the zone.

But to get here, to where we should be, to what is working and easy and flows naturally… we had to struggle, and then we had to be willing to stop, realize it wasn’t working, and step back. And then, start over.

And all those days we spent editing up to that point? A waste? Nope. The process. The game. Playful. Alas, I had lost sight of that and gotten all serious. Deadlines.

A reminder to play, to make sure every moment is fun, and to not get attached to one idea, one point of view, one belief, or even what you think are ‘the facts.’

Best,

Rick

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