Sunday Musings: Don't Join the Resistance, Getting Things Done, Stories About History

Happy Sunday Friend! Here is 1 quote I’m musing, 2 Ideas, 3 of my favorite things from the week, and 1 question. If you find it useful or interesting, please feel free to forward this along to some friends or others!

One Quote I’m Musing

“Putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours.”

-Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

Firstly, the review/summary/thoughts on the Cyber Service article and panel isn’t ready. It’s becoming a hotter issue and I feel a responsibility to ensure I’m thorough and as unbiased as possible. Apologies but it also goes along, possibly, with the quote and thoughts on it.

I’m going to chat with you a little bit on procrastination, its roots, and some techniques to overcome it.

There are things that you can have others do, there are things that you can ignore. Then there are things that only you can do. I’ve long-since left the positions where individual effort will produce the best results. Even my musings (which are my individual thoughts) are still bounced off of friends and colleagues.

Overcoming the resistance of doing, our inner creative struggles and, most importantly, doing the work that only you can do. If you aren’t sure what that work is, try the Eisenhower Matrix for figuring out priorities of work. The “Do” is stuff that only you can do.

What keeps us from our “Do”? Why do we procrastinate?

We know we should do it, but we avoid it.

There are several possible reasons. Perfectionism, anxiety over “all the things” you must get done, rationalization, fear, and many others. The point is that they create something that pushes us away from the path of accomplishing our duties.

The Resistance. Steven Pressfield describes it best as the feeling of a negative force radiating from the object of our accomplishment. Buying a treadmill and never actually using it or sitting at our keyboards and not even wanting to touch it to write the words we need to write. “We don’t tell ourselves, ‘I’m never going to write my symphony.’ Instead, we say ‘I am going to write my symphony; I’m just going to start tomorrow.’” That’s the Resistance (capital R).

It’s the idea of telling yourself, “I’m not going to do this later, tomorrow, next week”. Also known as procrastination and rationalization. “You could be good today”, Marcus Aurelius writes in Mediations, “instead you choose tomorrow.”

Taking it Action by Action

Seneca said that “The path to wisdom is just acquiring one quote, one insight, making one bit of progress every day.”

I find that starting a new project or job is exhilarating. Completing a project is a bit of a letdown or empty. But there’s a period when the newness has worn down and I’m not close enough to the end where I’m thinking about how well I’ve done.

This is a time where I’m just in the moment. I’m in a routine and doing the work action by action. This is where I truly love being. I’m not attached to it all yet, but I’m certain of the piece-by-piece assembly of actions that will resolve into an ordered end state.

?P?e?r?f?e?c?t?i?o?n? Iteration is Essential

Perfectionism is one of the ways we undermine ourselves. It’s impossible to create perfection the first time, every time. Ask any writer, artist, creator, and they’ll tell you the same.

Winston Churchill once said “Nothing but Perfection can also be spelled ‘Paralysis’”.

Lower. Your. Standards. For the first session, just do the thing. Doing what you can now, making positive progress towards where you ultimately need to be.

I was struggling to piece together a series of shots in school and my (cinema) editing professor used an interesting analogy. He said that editing is like recovering after a long night of drinking, “Throw up in the morning, clean up in the afternoon”.

While a bit crass for my liking, it’s effective. You need to get it all out so that you can get moving.

Embrace that, as Hemingway says, “The first draft of anything is shit”. Be comfortable with “just ok” so that you can get the idea, the framework, the concept out. Don’t fall into the self-fulfilling prophecy of “It’s not perfect, so it’s not worth it.”

Eventually, you’ll get there.

Create the System/Routine (And Build the To Do List)

Most of the time we procrastinate because we feel overwhelmed. People today have so many more things fighting for our attention, our time, our presence. The internet, phones, email, texts, drive-by-conversations, and questions. It’s exponentially more chaotic than even twenty years ago.

Fight off your essential to do list. Make it short and do those first. Seneca tells us that “Life without design is erratic”. Setting up a system that enables our habit of accomplishing our tasks in a logical and procedural way lets us identify what’s in front of us, what we can control, what we can do well and to the best of our abilities and then take appropriate action. The system and the routine let us stem the tide of chaos and inject enough order for us to accomplish what we need.

Say No

Every time you say yes to something, you’re requiring yourself to say no to something else. You have a to do list, use it. As your day progresses, it will get more and more chaotic. When those items make their appearance, ask yourself “Is this essential?” Most of what we do day-to-day isn’t essential. If we can eliminate it or delegate it (in that order), we will find more time for the essentials by saying “No”. By doing this, we will find that we can do less better.

Part of procrastination (The Resistance) is that we, consciously or subconsciously, undermine ourselves by saying yes to things that will distract us from actually doing the thing we need to be doing.

Fear as Guide

There is no bravery without fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of success, fear of failure. Fear of not being good enough. These are all very real reactions. Pulling from my USMC times, march toward the sound of the guns. Meaning training your body and mind so that you can observe and act in a way that overcomes The Resistance when you encounter it.

When I interviewed for this current job, one of the reasons I took it was because the thought of doing it was scary.

I’m not some kind of paragon. I recognized the feeling and stopped, analyzed it. Why am I feeling this way? What about this is actually causing the fear reaction? Is it true? Is it good? Is it necessary?

My conclusion was that it is something I haven’t done, and it’s a position that will be under a very different kind of scrutiny than my previous positions. But most of all, it was an unknown that had no real reason to have such pulse-accelerating results. So, I decided I had to do it, to pull myself out of a self-imposed rut that I was getting comfortable in.

Tomorrow Isn’t Promised

“Tomorrow” is a lie we tell ourselves. It’s not “Never” or “Won’t”, we tell ourselves, “Later”, “Tomorrow”. But we’re not.

Pressfield says that we experience the most resistance from the most important things, and I agree, feeling it is likely a sign that this may be a very important thing you should be doing in your life.

-e

Two Ideas From Me

1. Something left undone occupies space both in our attention and our conscience.
2. Procrastination is a fight against self-deception. We put things off as if our later self will somehow have more time, more energy, or superpowers enough to accomplish tomorrow’s problems as well as today’s.

Three Favorite Things From Others

1. “The shortest answer is doing.” – Edward Herbert
2. Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little. - Edmund Burke
3. Quick (Manic?) History Tales from "The Fat Electrician"(That's his title). I discovered Nic (former Army 68W, now an electrician and youtuber) recently and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed his colorful walks through (mostly) military history. | More

One Question

What would you choose if you had the permission to do anything, create anything? Why haven’t you started?

Have a wonderful week,

I’ll see you Sunday. -e