When it comes to completing a task, do you often find yourself waiting for the clouds to part, and a bolt of lightning to come down and provide the inspiration?
Do you not do a task because your mood isn’t right? You’re not in ‘the zone’?
You fool (hence the Mr T).
This week I learned from Jane to take pleasure in momentum. Don’t wait for the inspiration to come, just do it, Nike style.
Sit down and write one word of that blog post. Tell yourself that you’re going to work solidly for 8 minutes, then if you’re still not feeling it, give yourself permission to stop.
8 minutes is the golden measurement for the brain to get ‘into’ something, to produce its own ‘zone’. Chances are you’ll realise that what you were putting off isn’t actually that much hard work and you’ll feel great that you’re finally getting something done.
Take the mindset that doing something is better than doing nothing; even if it’s a lot of little something’s that add up to a big one. Rome wasn’t built in a day and all that.
The key is not only to take the first step; you need to measure your strides.
Don’t jump in with the aim of getting everything done at once. For me, writing this, I told myself all I had to do was turn on the computer. So I did that. Then all I had to do was open Word. So I did that. I’d already decided on the title for the post, so I typed that in… and here we are 267 words later.
Fools wait for motivation to cause action. In the time between motivation and action comes the excuse. So nothing gets done.
People who are Smart Busy use action to produce motivation to produce action. We’ve got the production line going, putting all our little pieces together to make a perfect hamburger or shiny new car.
So why don’t you think about what you can create with your own production line. Just take that first step, write down the title and see where you end up.
Mr T is watching.
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