Everybody should probably stop taking their lives so seriously
These days, time is passing quickly. It’s not slipping between my fingers – on the contrary, I have filled my days with projects oriented toward goals meaningful to me, and the majority of my waking hours are spent taking small steps, making slow but sure progress across this wide field of unrealized achievement.
I’ve stopped taking it all too seriously, which paradoxically enabled me to start taking it all seriously. I’m not sure about the psychology behind it, but central to this has been removing my attachment to the outcome, and spending the majority of my time engaging in the process, thinking about different ways I can approach the tasks with constant small variations, optimizing and making the process flow better.
Not too long ago, I was bound up in the end result. In the achievement I wanted to reach. The goal of the process. Although this was exciting to daydream about, it also blocked me from getting started. If I hadn’t started, I hadn’t failed, and instead I spent days, weeks, maybe even months preparing for different scenarios and outcomes, to a degree where I gave up on the project even before taking any meaningful first step – I was simply tired out from thinking about it.
I decided to dramatically change course and devise the most minimal version of each project possible, and then proceeded to execute. The execution was inefficient and lacked detailed planning, but the advantages were tangible. Even when dealing with such a scaled down version of a project, the experience of actually executing gave me insights that I never would’ve been able to think my way to. New ideas arose during this process because I actually got a handle on how to go about making the thing, ideas I never would’ve had otherwise.
This is obviously nothing new. Tons of books, articles, blog posts and countless social media threads have covered this. The art of execution. Just about every productivity podcast in existence has an episode or ten dedicated to this very thing. Still, crunching the theory rarely got anyone very far. It’s more like a skill – something you do, keep training, and get better at. You just have to outlast the “sucking at it” part. It’s a frustrating recursion, learning how to start, before you can learn how to do. Phew. Talk about meta.
In any case, the wheels are turning, and I am now moving forward with just the tiniest bit of momentum. I still fail, I still check my poor results against my impossibly tall goals, I still compare myself to everyone and everything and often feel like a failure. But at least I am failing in motion and not withering away like an old statue, frozen in place for centuries, cracked surfaces, covered in dust.