Create A Body Of Work
How to stay on track when playing the long game.
The biggest rewards in life come from playing long-term games. A career, fitness, any kind of expertise or mastery—they all require consistent effort over time.
In long games most of the rewards come at the end and the daily grind can feel frustrating. It can be tempting to look for shortcuts and compromises.
That’s when shifting your focus from the current project to the body of work you’re building can be a useful reframe.
I came across this idea in the Farewell podcast episode Playing the Long Game in a Quick-Fix World. Brad Stulberg talked about it in the context of how he approaches writing:
I think the biggest thing before even starting to write a book is to remind ourselves that we want to create a body of work. And we wanna judge ourselves based on the body of work that we create.
And a body of work is more than a book.
A body of work means something between 5 and 20 books. Probably closer to 10 to 20 books.
That’s the goal. I want to be a professional author, I want to have a body of work, and I want my body of work to be judged.
If I try to write a Let Them Theory every single book, one that’s not my values, two is not gonna work because I’m not Mel Robbins, and three I would just be frustrated.
But what I can try to do is try to have a body of work that I am proud of. That is the first thing that grounds me in the long game.
Writers, artists, and researchers build literal bodies of work, but I think the idea transfers well beyond creative fields.
An athlete’s body of work could be the sum of her training and races, beyond the placement in a single competition or the execution score of a single workout. Parents can visualize their body of work as the collection of family memories and the kind of people their children grew up to be.
The goal is always to have something you can look back on with pride.
The challenge with playing the long game is that there are few rewards along the way. And at the start of the game in particular, you have no idea what the outcome will be.
That’s why I find it helpful to focus on building something we can be proud of. The metric is entirely personal and the motivation is intrinsic.
Of course, real-world metrics matter. Sales, subscribers, rankings—they are all feedback that can help you assess your impact and improvement. But they are short-lived sources of motivation.
If you’re in it for the long haul, if you think in terms of infinite games, if you’re after compounding effects, then you must apply a long-term mindset. The body of work framing can be a compass to keep you on track along the journey.