I can’t do this yoga pose – yet.
I can’t speak Spanish – yet.
I can’t keep my attention stable during meditation – yet.
I can’t do this – yet.
(Inspired by The Practice by Seth Godin. Highly recommended.)
You can do everything right and still fail.
You can do everything wrong and still succeed.
In the end, all you can do is realize that failure and success aren’t always yours to control.
In the end, all you can do is do the best you can.
“Write 3 pages of Stream of Consciousness journaling.”
“Coming up with 100 things to be grateful about.”
“Publish a daily insight.”
My initial reaction, and maybe yours, is, “That’s so much.”
And that’s exactly the point.
It IS a lot.
But actually, it isn’t.
And when you try it out, and see that it isn’t, you’ve shattered the illusion of scarcity and discovered abundance.
Maybe we humans are wired to believe in scarcity and fighting over sparse food.
And while that may serve us well, in many endeavors, there’s much more abundance than we think.
If your gut reaction was, “That’s so much,” I invite you to try it out.
Write down what the voice in your head talks about for 3 entire pages.
Write down 100 things you’re grateful for.
Challenge the scarcity mindset.
There may well be abundance on the other side.
You kind of want to run a marathon.
You kind of want to eat better.
You kind of want to move more.
You kind of want to feel better.
And everything kind of stays the same.
Only when “kind of” becomes “absolutely” and “want to” becomes “choose to” change happens.
I absolutely choose to write.
I absolutely choose to run a marathon.
I absolutely choose to eat better.
I absolutely choose to move more.
I absolutely choose to do whatever it takes to feel better.
Because there is no other way.
Here’s a question Tim Ferris asks startup founders (and himself) when deciding to invest time and money into a new project:
“If, in one (or two, or three) years from now, this whole project has failed miserably… Which assumptions you hold today were proven wrong?”
Tim Ferris
Answering the question first requires defining failure and success.
For my project of publishing a daily insight on this blog success looks like this:
Write & publish.
Edit.
Write & publish.
Edit.
Then write & publish some more.
Good, bad, well-received or not, received or read by anyone at all, it doesn’t matter.
Because first of all, writing is a creative outlet for me.
Second: long as I write & publish consistently, I trust I will get better at writing and publishing.
Finally: I trust that from all that sculpting away, day by day, will come better and better insights.
A pretty low bar for success – which, counterintuitively, often leads to more progress long-term.
Now we have established that:
What are the assumptions that could be wrong if next year, it turns out I failed to write & publish every day?
Here are some I can think of:
Will these assumptions be proven wrong?
Only time will tell.
Until then… I write & publish… then write & publish some more.
Unintentional choices. Unintentional actions. Unintentional behaviors. Fickle results. Fickle habits.
Intentional choices. Intentional actions. Intentional behaviors. Desirable results. Desirable habits.
To get desirable results and habits, we must first make the unconscious conscious, and the unintentional intentional, .
You may not always know Why. Or How. Or What exactly.
And yet, you know that it Must happen.
Maybe that’s enough.
