On being ordinary.
What comes before brilliance?
Write where and when you can.
Growing up, I had a romanticized view of writing. To write you rented a beach front or hill side villa. Surrounded yourself with nature, coffee, a light breeze, silence, pen and paper.
Despite shipping multiple titles, I haven’t rid myself of this notion. This summer as I came close to shipping my next book, the romanticized version snuck in. Where will I pen the final words of my work:
a) Coffee shop(s) in historic Savannah.
b) The onboard lounge on the A380.
c) A quiet cool corner overlooking the runway at LaGuardia.
d) The poolside in Atlanta.
It turns out, I penned them at my desk. My good old boring desk. In Karachi where the weather was a pleasant 34 (degrees C, not F) with 80% humidity. Some not so final words at 2 am on the dinning table, while everyone else slept, last week. Under the fan. Others at 5 am. Life is like that. You plan on being exotic. You end up being ordinary.
This got me thinking. About my earlier books.
Reboot. Most of the 280 pages were written on a borrowed desk in our eldest’s room. Or at the office during the lunch break. Founder’s Puzzles, on the sofa in the living room. Originally as Twitter threads. Craft. On paper, in a really nice notebook, dictating on the phone during morning walks on the roof, or lecture slides for the Tech Product Dev course.
To be fair there was a bit of the romanticized edition too. Option Greeks Primer, final edits to the Macmillan draft at a swanky 5 star Persian restaurant in Dubai. Where they marked my table and had it available every evening.
Not because I was a king but because meals before 7 pm were off 50%. They had the best serving of Irani rose tea served in small decorated sulemani glasses that made me feel like royalty. In 2014, not everyone knew about the special deal. I would often be the only guest. So I was treated like a king and ate like one too for AED 40 plus tips (about $11). I would work with the draft till late night, sipping rose tea after a full day of teaching my treasury workshop. When I was done, all I had to do was find my way to the elevator and then my room to go sleep so I could get back on the lecture circuit again the next day. That 2 week client engagement comped for meals and stay and paid my bills so that I could write at night.
Romanticized indeed if you could fall in love with dissecting TARFs and structured products. Some of the hardest and strongest of our work happens in the most boring and ordinary of locations. If you keep waiting for exotic getaways to showcase your brilliance, you will be waiting for a long time. Before you get to brilliance or the beach side villas, you first have to accept living with being ordinary and boring.
Pen something down today. Come out of the wait state. You don’t have to be exotic. All of us here are also ordinary.
