I Work Like a Monk. It's Not Always Practical.

I have a habit of going into the work and not coming out for weeks. No output shown. No visible motion. Just building in the quiet, at depth.

Total absorption - the world reduced to the one thing in front of me.

I used to file this under discipline; something I’d manufactured and could be proud of.

But it isn’t - it’s wiring. If i’m left to my own defaults, I run monastic. I’m reclusive by nature and I enjoy building in silence over performing in public - it’s how I produce my best work.

It’s also one of the reasons I’ve never felt comfortable with typical online ‘marketing’.

But I recognise it can be problematic because a business is not a monastery.

Work built in isolation still has to reach the people it was built for. I can refine a thing to the millimetre in a room nobody’s looking at, but it means very little to anyone other than me.

When recognising something you do isn’t practical, most try to become the opposite of it. They try to run at a temperature that belongs to someone else’s nervous system, permanently, and they call the exhaustion that follows a discipline problem.

It’s not - and running the wrong register against your own wiring doesn’t build anything. It drains until there’s nothing left.

I don’t want to be outward all year. Force it and it shows - a silent rebellion.

But it’s not a flaw to fix - it’s information to use.

And using it means figuring out how to align with natural wiring, and what the season demands, and what is most likely to close the gap on my goals.

Those 3 things often aren’t the same, yet the relentless linear model of life treats them as one.

It applies a single instruction to every month of the year - always producing, always visible, always on - and when the results come out inconsistent it diagnoses a character flaw - something to fight against.

The nervous system is cyclical. It has seasons. Running one instruction across all of them costs more than it should, every time.

So what I’m learning to do instead is to see which seasons match my own nature, and lean hard into those.

Winter and autumn are where the monastic register comes into place. The contracting seasons - recovery, reset, consolidation, precision. The work of subtraction and depth.

When the season is asking me to go quiet and build at the root, my default is the right instruction, and I run it without apology. I don’t white-knuckle through the contraction pretending it’s a productivity failure. I use it. There’s a running joke with people who know me that I’m always in the best shape physically in Winter, rather than Summer because Summer just isn’t my season.

It asks for the opposite; outward energy, deployment, the work reaching the room. This is the seasons my wiring fights. So these are the seasons I build differently - not by becoming someone else, but by putting infrastructure in place that carries the outward work when my own instinct is to retreat back into the quiet. The assets do the reaching, so I don’t have to perform it live. Systems that create presence, without being there live.

Honour the wiring. Honour the season.

My monastic nature was never the problem. Neither was the outward one. The problem was running a single register all year and calling the fallout a flaw in myself.