The premise is The muse is at your writing desk. If you want to write a book, show up. Sit down. Write. Ideas will only come if you are working. Any thoughts ideas, rationalisations or fears that keep you from writing are the enemy. He collectively calls them "resistance".
You will inevitably have days and weeks without a useful page. Show up still.
I think following your motivation is great. If you are sitting around waiting for it, you need discipline. This is what this blog is about.
If I took my lead from Palinurus, I'd remark that 'the war of art' demonstrates the cultural penury of our age.
But then Palinurus took that view of himself too.
However when I started using Pomodoro technique (http://caps.ucsd.edu/Downloads/tx_forms/koch/pomodoro_handou...) to simply complete daily tasks, I discovered that process is more important than product. When I changed my focus from goal or product orientation to simply discipline/process orientation, I started achieving more.
Somehow there is an emotional weight to thinking about results. To push this burden off, I felt I needed motivation. Ironically I started seeing much better results, when I aligned myself to disciplined execution with a certain detachment to results. Eventually I started hitting most of my objectives, even freeing my time off to do things outside of my work related goals.
Motivation is essential. Why else would anyone bother, except for either a driving need or a deep and abiding interest? It's what keep you going when you start to question if you really want to keep at it. But motivation on a daily basis comes and goes. Everyone who goes to the gym or runs know that.
Discipline is about pushing through when motivation flags. I disagree that discipline is only useful for "closed mode". Discipline can also help you with open mode by making you daydream and play with ideas rather than packing it in for the day. Many extremely creative people have a very set routine. A writer might have fixed hours for when they write, every single day, for instance.
In the end it's about using both motivation and discipline together.
I have been doing Learning how to learn at Coursera[1]. There is actually term for this 'blue sky' thinking mode, it is called the diffuse mode.
In the course they call it the diffuse mode, you can also be in the focused mode.
In the focused mode you tend to see all the details, though its difficult to get insights in this mode. Your thinking and problem solving is constrained by your natural thinking patterns and heuristics. This mode is really good when solving problems you have seen before.
In the diffuse mode, you gain new insights/discoveries by linking up different bits and pieces.
Having said that:
"If you agree with Cleese's premise, I think it follows that what you need is motivation for the open mode"
I do not understand this logic, can you clarify?
My reading of the article after having done the course is:
You can be disciplined and still do this blue sky/diffuse mode thinking, i do not think they are mutually exclusive.
[1] https://www.coursera.org/course/learning
* Edit: Added more details on thinking mode, and link to course
Another hour or two on top can help when the job means you have to communicate with others. But even at a "normal" eight hours, you tend to end up with slack time, which is poisonous to how you treat the job. Discipline means starting consistently and stopping equally consistently. Starting without stopping isn't disciplined, it's desperate.
One thing I could add though (not really related to creativity as such): when he talks about the time at the start of the creative time-space, where your mind gets flooded with the list of things that you should have done and forgotten about - I think this is actually one of the benefits of this exercise. I find it very helpful to write down all these things as a list, because trying to remember them is subconsciously a source of stress. Not to do anything about them then, but just writing them down to get them out of your head.
This is one of the real gems of understanding that I got from reading David Allen's "Getting Things Done". Having these things written down on a list frees your mind from having to try and remember them and also makes it much easier to go through the list and sort it in terms of importance or even get rid of some items altogether! For me it has definitely improved my productivity and also helped reduce the stress of forgetting to do things that are important because I got distracted doing something else.
My argument was that rather than focusing so much on the reasons why people are or aren't interested in football, we should be concerned about the amount of time that debate and following football itself consume and how it is hardly beneficial to our long term growth. Having fun is important and people should spend time doing whatever makes them happy, but it would be better if we weren't so consumed by these pass-times and allowed ourselves to be disciplined. At the same time though we shouldn't completely shut everything else out. I used the term "open minded", and my intention behind the use of that term really vibes with the "open" state that Cleese talks about.
The point here is that you pick the things that are important to you (not mindless tasks) and start doing them every day no matter what and keep showing up even if you don't feel like it or know that the result won't be that great. Because the main goal is to build the discipline and then great things come out of it.
There's a brilliant talk by John Cleese that floats around HN every 6 months or so on how to be creative; if you haven't seen it yet, and you're interested in such a topic, please please please watch it:
http://vimeo.com/89936101
If you agree with Cleese's premise, I think it follows that what you need is motivation for the open mode (the blue sky, blank sheet of paper period), and discipline for the closed mode where you put your head down and get the work done.
If you try to use discipline when your job is to daydream about possibilities (whether you realize it or not), you'll just steamroll over any insights, ideas, creative thoughts with a get-it-done attitude. Your forced march straight off a cliff will be legendary.
But then, when you've got a good idea fleshed out and you just need to execute relatively mindlessly, working only when you feel motivated will be extremely counter productive, and in my mind, is where a lot of the "the last 20% takes 80% of the work" feeling comes from. You learn the true meaning of the phrase "work expands to fill the time allotted", and if you're bootstrapping by moonlighting, this is essentially infinite.
I've been stung badly by both errors in my career, with the worst case for each leaving me burned out, disillusioned and seriously considering a career change.
As an aside, I know you have to write authoritatively and with a simple premise to get good traffic to a blog, but reality is usually messy and complex, with a wealth of examples and counter examples. So often it feels like we end up with (and please forgive the straw man) a series of posts in quick succession bouncing around the blogosphere like "getting the most out of your hammer" "hammers considered harmful" "screwdrivers as hammer replacements" "hammer techniques for dealing with legacy screws" "full tool belt carpentry drowning us in complexity". And which is right? All of them, and none of them, at the same time.