The thing about doing good work

...is that you know when it is good.

And when the work is good, you don't spend a lot of time asking yourself questions about philosophy and education and the definition of quality and the definition of fun, and whether you need more self-discipline or whether you need another lifehack, because what you are doing is good, both in process and in product, and so it makes all external questions about quality and creativity irrelevant.

I cannot be the first person to have come up with this, which is to say that I cannot be the first person to have learned this in practice, and I also cannot say that you should drop everything and go do good work because sometimes it takes time to figure out what good is and what work is and what your particular good work should be.

Either that or reading Plato's Republic was a form of cowardice, in the sense that it was a deliberate turning-away of the problem in front of me so that I might pursue a noble distraction by finding out what Socrates might have said about it.

But this is also confusing because the Republic is worth reading, as is The Grapes of Wrath, as were all of the other philosophical and technical and artistic resources that eventually gave me what I needed to get back to the keyboards (piano and laptop) and the music composition software.

So it may be cyclic, in the sense that if you have a problem that you don't yet have the knowledge to solve, you either look for technical manuals or examples of the best work in the field you're pursuing, not that I am writing a novel but that I am writing and thinking and so I must read writers and thinkers, and I am composing a chamber musical and so I must listen to a whole pile of music and sing and play the best of it.

But as soon as I figured out how to solve my own problem I was way way way less interested in how other people solved theirs.

Because I'm doing good work on my own, and I know the work I'm doing is good, and it seems like the best thing to do is as much of it as possible until I come to another problem I don't have the resources to solve.