OK here we go another 750Words, it’s day 7 and I’ve showed up everyday. I have already written 4,600 in six days, that’s about a tenth of a book.
The compound effect is already kicking in, a small step every single day makes things happen. If someone had said to me last Monday that I had to find time to write 5,200 words in a week, I would have laughed. My Uni dissertation was 10,000 words and that took me an age. Well, I have written half that in a week, in less than 4 hours in total. Mind you as a student I had a slightly different focus!!
I now feel it is getting easier each day to do. I am sure there will be days, when the novelty has worn off, that I will find some days when it’s more like a chore. But I have noticed that the most successful people do the hard work whatever.
That’s one of the biggest learning curves I have had, is that life is full of repetitive and mundane things, that simply have to be done. What happens a good deal of the time is just as the momentum is going, we give up.
Then we realise that was a mistake and we have to start over again. Each time you stop and start, it becomes harder to get going again. It’s like a car, the hard work is accelerating to a ‘cruising’ speed. Or going for a run, the first part is hard, but once you are in your rhythm, it’s easy to keep going.
Life is like that, it’s the starting that is hard and the over-thinking of things is where the procrastination creeps in and the voice in our head starts to convince us it’s OK to not do something.
We become experts at creating excuses not to do something, instead of stopping the talking and just getting on with the doing.
Then we find, that once we get going it is not so bad, in fact it really is 10 X easier than we anticipated.
However, life isn’t a short-sprint either and many of us are guilty of starting, getting some momentum going, then seeing some results and relaxing.
Then we start to find the ‘doing’ a little repetitive and mundane. We give up, we see the initial success. But what happens then is that we realise that stopping leads to things not going the way we wanted.
Then we remember the hard part of starting and we go off again telling ourselves that it’s hard work etc. and we’ve find it even harder to start again.
So the key thing is to start quickly, not allowing too much over-thinking, then do the ‘doing’ by small steps that you build upon. The momentum will build better if you increase things over time, a step at a time.
No good charging off on a sprint at the start of a long race, it’s just not sustainable.
The one missing element however in all of this, often the reason successful people plough on through the hard graft, is your ‘why’ power.
I always thought that anything was possible through sheer determination alone. While this is true in the short-term and in extreme situations in life, longer term you need something far stronger. Will power runs out for all of us without the ‘why’ power.
Your ‘why’ power is obviously unique to you and what drives one person, will not be the same as the other. So we all have to search inside ourselves and work it out.
It could be family, recognition etc. etc., and it will be tied directly to your values.
Values are the corner stone of everything in our lives. If you haven’t yet worked out what they are, then I really recommend doing so. So few people bother to work out what they are and write them down. Even fewer live their lives by them.
Whenever we comprise our values, we will feel uncomfortable and that won’t go away all the time that remains the case. We will not be happy if our values are compromised over a long period of time. We can accommodate others values with people we love and trust.
The core values that we hold, will determine our ‘why’ power. Our ‘why’ power has to be strong enough to overcome the obstacles and curve balls that life will throw at us. Your values are the stone of life and therefore the reason we go on and on with our dreams, often against all the odds, is that the ‘why’ power is totally aligned with the core values we hold.
Philip Dodson 