Authors Note: Forgive me, this is going to be hilariously self-indulgent, but I need to walk myself through this process periodically to get my head straight. I share it in the off chance that, perhaps, you go through similar struggles and might pick up something useful.
There’s one predictable paradox in my life, and that’s if I feel like I don’t have enough time, it means I’m not doing enough. And I’ve been feeling like I don’t have enough time.
You’d be right to guess this isn’t the first time I’ve come to this realization, and I’ve learned the only way out is action – not a furious, flailing action but focused, mindful, plodding, sacrifice-ladened action.
Screwing my Head on Right
The sacrifice part contains multitudes, the first (and most important) is sacrificing the fantasy self-image of boundless possibility and potential. There’s a limit to what I can do, actually finding that limit and pushing up against it is harder than sitting back and imagining how awesome things would be “if only I had enough time”. But it’s a lot more rewarding. Here’s a quote from Thomas Edison that captures the basics of what I’m talking about:
“Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.” – Thomas A. Edison
I’ve got a TON of things I want to do, yet the death of my father this past year and some crazy physical ailments I didn’t see coming gave me an excuse to take my eyes off the path ahead, and slowly drift into the posture of “thinking” about what I want to do. Also, I’ve been lucky in my working life so that material need isn’t a top-of-mind driver. The only thing standing in my way is me, and I’m a formidable opponent. My challenges are all pretty simple, and if experience has taught me anything, the simpler the problem the harder to overcome.
A easy way to look at what I need to take action on is the old “Mind, Body, Spirit” model, something that’s obviously important to everyone, but whose meaning is unique to the individual. I imagine myself an artist, and when I’m creating art, that’s a true statement – when I’m not, I’m just an IT contractor with delusions of grandeur. The only distinction is action. So, what am I going to do about it? Let’s walk through each chunk and define what I need to do!
Mind
For me to feel comfortable in my skin, I need to be working towards something I value. This is where I can put my intellectual energy (that is often wasted with pointless “thinking about what I’m going to or should be doing). I work part-time and make a full-time living, I do this on purpose, the purpose being to buy time to create. I have not been making good on this deal with myself and it’s a self-perpetuating cycle of enervation. It doesn’t help that my “real” work isn’t enabling me to succeed in the classical sense (i.e. the use of methodologies to achieve success – a stated goal that is then either accomplished or failed). I knew this going in, my ego too out-sized to accept that I would just be a cog in the most incremental of change. The bottom line is I need to just do my best, forget what “should” happen and just make the most of what is happening. Being success-focused in ALL of your life is made more difficult when you surround yourself with people and environments that are NOT. Not impossible, but a handicap, and one I need to work at overcoming.
The “Mind” part I need to focus on is creating goals, plans and deadlines for the “Body, Spirit” parts of my life. Which is what I’ll be doing right after I finish this “thinking out loud” that you’re reading. This is all about being realistic, but ambitious, about my capabilities and my available time and energy. I get as much juice from a quality failure as I do from outright success, and both require me sucking it up and creating formal goals.
Body
Look people, my body’s getting older and I don’t like it any more than the next guy. It’s a reality that often finds me focusing on what I can’t do, rather than what I can. I just checked my Fitbit history and I averaged 10.341 steps a day over the last 365, not bad, but nowhere near what I can do. I’ve done strength training for most of my adult life, but have basically stopped in the last four years. There’s a variety of explanations, but mostly it’s time, pain and lack of concrete goals that have reduced my gym time to an elliptical. Also, there’s a mental model stuck in my operating system that belongs to a much younger self mapping muscular gain to sexual attractiveness. My 30 year-old self got a lot of mileage out of this model, but it ain’t cutting it for motivation these days. Finally, the gym used to be the source of great camaraderie, companionship and community, something that’s also been lost along the way. Trying to recapture the past is a suckers game, I have to find the sense of discovery that came from pushing myself physically, starting with weight training and expanding back into yoga.
Spirit
I need to create, when I’m doing that, I’m open to all the world has to offer. I’ve got 64,263 words worth of a novel that need fierce editing and expansion, yet its lain in digital darkness for over 12 months. I lost the thread, the enthusiastic joy of creation and blamed it on “lack of time”. There’s never a lack of time, a focused few minutes of active creation are worth hours of fretting about perfection. I “know” this, but still find excuses to avoid the one thing that brings me the greatest happiness. Somewhere in my subconscious, I’ve tied the completion of this book with a push to sell the first one, and it’s got me dragging my feet. There’s a deeper, more childish, resistance tied to wanting creation to be unstructured play. Something spontaneous. Which is just stupid, it’s never that. That feeling of play comes when all of my talents and skills are honed by grueling practice, only then do the muses alight on my shoulder. So, basically, I need to put a deadline on the completion of the next couple of drafts and accept that it’s going to take some time.
Related, but also totally not related, is this itch I have to get my visual creation skills back. I can still pull off a drawing, but that same lack of play is there. I stumbled across this quote that sums it all up:
“You can’t do sketches enough. Sketch everything and keep your curiosity fresh.” – John Singer Sargent
Sketching is the equivalent of playing scales for musicians, or running laps for an athlete, a repetitive tasking of your instrument that leads to the shortening of the distance between thought and action. It’s boring, it’s everything, and it’s something I don’t ever do (except office doodles, but I entertain myself too easily with those, and self-satisfaction is the enemy of disciple!) So, I need to set aside a specific portion of the day to sketch, it won’t be much (writing, exercise and work burn a lot of available time) but it’s what I can do. And doing, if you haven’t caught the motif, is all that matters.
In Conclusion
I hope you’ve found this useful, I certainly have. The simple act of writing all of this down (if it leads to action, and the proof will be in the pudding) is a powerful first step in setting priorities, organizing my thoughts and realistically assessing the gap between “where I am” and “where I want to be”. None of which has any value until bound to some plan of action – maybe ending in success, maybe ending in spectacular failure. But the difference between real, high-quality failure and the failure to try is the difference between a real kiss and reading about a kiss in a comic book. And I’m a guy who likes a good kiss!
Create the life you want to live – be kind, be excellent!