Part way through writing Done Beats Perfect, a book about beating procrastination, I put a post up on Facebook saying it might never get finished.
Everybody thought I was joking. It wasn’t a joke. It was deadly serious. I’d written the part about deciding what you actually want, and the next part was about becoming the person who gets it. And I just stopped.
Marcus Aurelius wrote himself a note about exactly this kind of stuck. He was Roman emperor at the time, so he had more on his plate than most of us ever will.
Do not disturb thyself by thinking of the whole of thy life. Let not thy thoughts at once embrace all the various troubles which thou mayest expect to befall thee: but on every occasion ask thyself, What is there in this which is intolerable and past bearing?
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Eight, translated by George Long (1862)
In plain English: stop picturing every problem the year might bring, all at once. Take the one in front of you and ask whether it’s really more than you can handle. It almost never is.
Too much to figure out
“You won’t figure it all out in your head.” Someone who knows me well has said that to me more than once over the years, and it’s wisdom I’ve taken to heart.
Tony Robbins puts it another way. He says, “If you’re in your head, you’re dead.”
Try to work out every single detail for the rest of your life and it can rapidly create overwhelm. Sometimes it’s the rest of the year, or even just the rest of the day. There’s too much to do and too much to figure out. Instead of sorting any of it, you put it off, or the whole thing starts to come undone.
Nigel Risner and I talked about this on an episode of our podcast. We picture all the things that are going to go wrong, and we start feeling the bad feelings before any of them have happened. We’ve all been there, me included.
The page where I owned up
What got me moving on the book again was writing the next page. One of those pages was the one where I confessed to being stuck. I know it’s a strange thing to put in a book, but it felt right for the book I was writing.
That’s Marcus’s question in practice. Forget the whole book for a minute and look at one page. Is that page really more than you can manage?
You can use it whenever the list in your head gets loud. Name the one thing in front of you. Ask Marcus’s question about that one thing on its own. And do the smallest next step you can, even if it feels too small to make any difference. That small step is what gets you back into momentum.
Fifteen minutes is enough to start
Health works the same way. Maybe life’s gone backwards a bit lately. You’ve put on some weight, you’ve not been eating the things you’d choose, or you’ve not been moving your body on purpose. Getting back to fit can feel a long way off, and you don’t click your fingers and have it happen.
Could you go for a short walk today, even if it’s only 15 minutes, or cook one different meal tonight?
That’s all it takes: a small positive action that moves you slightly closer to your goal. Keep doing that and those actions stack up, and the results will follow.
You don’t need the whole year worked out to take the next step. If you’d like a bit more of Marcus for the days that feel heavy, I wrote about his advice for getting up when you don’t want to.
