Since I became a practitioner of Buddhism, I think the biggest change in my life is that I became a doer. I always used to watch things from the sidelines and never really participate myself. This has always been the case since I was a kid, but as I grew I started to resent the people who went about and did things. I would judge their failures, get jealous about their success, all the while just sitting on my chair not doing much with my life.
What allows me to do things is I actually know how to work WITH resistance now. My default state is wanting to always go to a state of not doing anything. This is a pretty good trait when I have things I have to do, but this SUCKS when the things I want to do are pointless. I would quickly stop seeing the point of things, especially when I wasn’t good at them, and fairly soon I’d drop the whole thing altogether.
… Just to lament people who did the work and got to places. How silly is that? Willing to put in 0 of the work but wanting 100 of the results.
That’s just one popular reason why people don’t do things: they don’t see the point. But now that we started talking about this, let’s talk more about other common reasons why people don’t do things.
The Spork Problem
When I was in the army they gave everyone sporks. Sporks are pretty cool, they’re like… a spoon… with the poking functionality of a fork. Almost like… a Fpoon (cue Key & Peele sketch). You get both functionalities of a fork and a spoon with a spork and a lot of people actually can’t get to doing things because they’re trying to invent a spork.
Suppose I want to market my jiujitsu academy. If I’m targeting newcomers, I’d need to emphasize how fun and helpful our fundamentals classes are. But when I keep talking about that, that wouldn’t necessarily sound to seasoned colored belts who want a little bot more of a challenge in their training. Hmm. So if I emphasize how tough we are, then that might be off-putting to people who just want to start casually.
It would be nice if one piece of marketing could fit all needs, like a spork. But realistically the more of these work you do, the more you will find that it’s pretty hard to satisfy everyone at the same time. It’s like shoving an appetizer, entree, and a dessert into your mouth at the same time.
You’re allowed to have multiple outputs. Just like how you’re allowed to eat with spoons and forks separately. Giving yourself that possibility alone opens a lot of doors.
Intent Vs. Output
I gave up a lot of my desire about this, but I still think being able to draw well would be really really nifty and nice. While I don’t play a lot of music these days there were days when I aspired to be a professional musician playing in a band. The common factor between the two art forms is that the goal of practice is to get as close to actually creating what you thought in your mind.
I think I can draw a straight line but practice has shown me over and over that I apparently CAN’T! I think playing the scales is easy but again, practice has shown me that it’s not really that easy. But playing and drawing more has shown me that practice is what closes that gap between intent vs. output.
So when we are doing something, it’s important to think about our desired output. I learned the importance of intentional practice when I briefly dabbled in photography. Turns out, I didn’t even have an intention of what kind of a photo I wanted to take! Therefore I couldn’t imagine an output.
Many times we write an email to send to people. But the email is just the means of… Achieving an emotional impact to another person. So when you just think of all the things you want to say an write that, it’s very possible that it might not achieve the emotional impact you want to the other person because you never bothered to read it from the perspective of someone receiving the email.
When you’re writing a book, it’s important to actually format your text editor like a book to see your writing in the format you want it to be read in. When you’re writing code there’s this concept of a pseudocode where you put placeholders for what the code in that section will do. Doing this helps you organize your code in the grand flow instead of just thinking about tunnel visioned small chunks of logic.
Good vs. Bad
Now we have everyone’s favorite topic: I don’t want to do things because they’re going to be bad. I cannot emphasize enough the pointlessness of wanting to be good, because 1) you will get better at things ANYWAY without doing anything else other than just DOING the fucking thing, and 2) the more pressure you put on being good, the harder it will be to be good. There is simply no point in trying to be good all the time. But I know this message is hard to digest at times, so I have an alternative approach to it today.
Trying to be good feeling hard is actually a problem of minimization. You want to be good with the least amount of tries. You want to finally arrive at the state of being good and be done with it, but what you don’t necessarily think about all the time is LIFE WILL CONTINUE THE MOMENT YOU BECOME GOOD. You won the gold medal in something? Awesome blossom! But what about the next competition?
Oh you sold a lot of seats in your event! But what about the next event? As long as you don’t stop life, the next opportunity to be good at something will continue to rise up. It’s important to realize that while you can have the minimum # of attempts to be good at something, life won’t give you a celebratory ending screen after you become good.
The approach that will actually make things easy is you aiming for 10,000 tries instead of the next 10 tries. If this overwhelms you, this means you HAVE to change how you approach work. If you considered solving one math worksheet with 100 problems and having 90% or above to be one unit of work, I’d hate doing 10,000 of that as well. But what if you change the criteria to solving 10,000 math problems? Getting 90% or above in a test ultimately comes down to getting a question right or wrong anyway. So why not approach development in the way that matters in the end anyway?
Many life coaches are surprised to learn that I write newsletters like this every day. I’m only able to do this because I don’t try to do a good job at writing these; I’m thinking whether or not I write, so all I’m doing is putting down the thoughts into words. But it’s almost a year since I started this and now writing a few thousand words doesn’t even take effort for me. Would you call that good? I guess you could, but it’s just a side effect of doing something over and over again.
Also important to note: this kind of an approach to development requires the shift for you to become a BIG person. Many times you see yourself as a small person with one person’s capacity. You limit your growth by thinking in these terms. What kind of a person do you need to be to do something 10,000 times and not even care about it because you’re just that big of a person?
These are the thought approaches I use to be an unstoppable person. There’s no reason for me to stop. Things can be hard but that’s not a reason for me to stop. I might not see the point but that’s not a reason for me to stop. I might want to do a good job but that’s not a reason for me to stop. I hope you come to a realization that you too, are unstoppable.