7 Powerful Steps to Overcoming Resistance and Actually Getting Stuff Done

Another great post from zenhabits

7 Powerful Steps to Overcoming Resistance and Actually Getting Stuff Done
There are a slew of popular books and systems, from favorites of mine such as Getting Things Done to the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People to the Now Habitand more, all designed to get us more productive and effective.
But getting things done is really about one thing, and one thing only: overcoming the resistance to doing what we need to do.
OK, I would add a couple more steps to that, to ensure that we’re managing our tasks correctly:
1. Have all our projects and tasks stored in an external system (out of our heads), such as a to-do list or lists.
2. Pick the tasks and projects that are most important to work on.
3. Overcome the resistance to actually doing those important tasks.
And I would submit it’s the last step that’s the most important (although I wouldn’t ignore the other two). Unfortunately, because we’re not very good at overcoming resistance, we procrastinate on this third step by fiddling with the external system — the tools we use to organize our tasks, coming up with new and better systems, tweaking them until they’re near perfect, and so on.
That’s Resistance.
As Stephen Pressfield writes in his excellent book on this topic, The War of Art:
“There’s a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don’t, and the secret is this: It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.
What’s keeping us from sitting down is Resistance.”
The War of Art is all about Resistance, not only for writers and other artists, but for anyone trying to pursue their dreams or become what they’re meant to be. I highly recommend it. This, of course, is also a topic that is central to Zen Habits: overcoming Resistance to create new and better habits, to find happiness and simplicity, to do what you need to do and love to do.
I fight Resistance every single day, and I thought you might be interested in some of the ways I fight and beat Resistance, daily.
1. Become aware. The problem usually is that we don’t think about Resistance. We don’t understand it or even realize it’s there most of the time. We just think, “Oh, I better straighten out my desk … or get my to-do lists in order” or we get distracted by something on the web, or we feel that we have to check our email, or we’re just going to watch this one TV show, or any of a limitless amount of distractions.
Combat this by realizing that you are facing Resistance. Once you become aware of it, you can fight it, and beat it. It can be difficult to become more aware, but the key is to focus on it for a couple of days. Print out the words “Defeat Resistance” and put it somewhere visible as you work. That will help remind you to be aware of Resistance. Every time you do something that isn’t the most important thing you could be doing right now, be aware of what you’re doing.

2. Become a pro. This is the main technique that Pressfield outlines in The War of Art: combating Resistance by turning pro. The professional, unlike the amateur, comes to work ready to work. He’s doing it for a living (and loves what he does) and knows that as long as he shows up and starts working, the rest will come. Approach the work like a pro, and you’ll get the work done.
3. Be very clear, and focus. Before you start the day, be very clear about what you want to accomplish. You won’t be able to finish 10 major projects, but maybe you can finish one important project, or at least move it along to a certain point. Set three Most Important Tasks you want to accomplish today. Once you have those things defined, you’ve got to focus on them to the exclusion of all else (at least, during your prime work time). Do them first. Focus, finish, then move on to the smaller tasks you need to complete today. If you find yourself being lured to do something that’s not on that short list of three things, bring yourself back and focus.
4. Clear away distractions. Don’t spend a lot of time on this, because eliminating distractions can be a distraction itself. Instead, take one minute: close your email program and IM program and turn off all notifications. Shut down the Internet if at all possible. Close all programs except the one you need to do the important task in front of you. Clear your desk quickly (stuff everything in a drawer or something — you can organize it later) and turn off the phones if possible. Put on headphones or alert your coworkers (or family, if you’re at home) that you’re not to be disturbed for the next hour (or however long you plan to work on this task). Then get to work.
5. Have a set time and place. Make your first important task a daily appointment. For me, that’s writing. I always start the day with a writing task (such as writing this post, for example). For you, that might be different. Have a set start time, and possibly a set ending time — you’ll have to see what works for you, but the important thing is the set starting time. And when that time comes, you have to start. No exceptions.
6. Know your motivation. Why are you doing this? Why is this task important? What is it working towards? And how important is that end goal to you? Why is it important? You need to know these things to build up the motivation to overcome Resistance.
7. Just start. In the end, all the tips in the world won’t make as much a difference as this simple (and timeless) instruction. Just sit down and start. Feel Resistance to doing that? There’s no way to overcome it than to just start. Reading more about Resistance won’t help. Going to an online Procrastinator’s Forum won’t help. Working on your to-do lists won’t help. Only doing actually helps. And the only way to do something is to just start.
So how do you start, when you feel resistance? You just start. Feeling the need to do something else? Stop yourself from getting distracted. Remind yourself what you need to be doing, and why. Sit down and the set time and place. And just start.
For me, that means opening up a blank text file and writing the title of whatever I’m writing. Then I start brainstorming and outlining ideas. This gets me over the initial Resistance. And once I’ve started on that, I can usually get into the flow. But the important thing is to get started.
So stop reading this. And just start!

We're pregnant!!!!

My life is crazy. Two weeks ago K. started feeling nauseous all of the time, we went to a restaurant and she confessed to me later that she felt like running to the restroom and throwing up. She was also acting really irrational, crying all the time (well, more than usual), blowing up at me for little things. I thought it was just her time of the month, but one day last week she took a home pregnancy test, and it came out positive!

Yesterday we went to her primary care physician and her endocrinologist - they both ran tests on her and confirmed that she was pregnant, and that all of her hormone levels and such are normal. We are due sometime around September. My therapist asked me how I feel about all of this when I saw him last weekend - I said that I felt really really, extremely happy, but also shocked, and also very scared. K. feels the same way.

As an expectant father, of course I'm thinking about money, as we're going to need to move out of our one bedroom apartment in a couple of years and we have so many bills to worry about. I'm also thinking about my career and where that's going. I feel like I have a lot of responsibility all of sudden, but I feel like I can handle it, like I am willing to do anything to make sure my new family is safe and happy. And I kind of like the idea of having to fall back on my myself and my instincts again, of working to provide for the people I love.

Of course our parents are delighted. J. tells me my mom and dad were dancing around the house when we called to tell them. I'm glad that we're giving them something to look forward to, after all the crap my dad's been through the past couple of months. I'm glad everyone's happy. Of course this kind of throws a wrench in our plans for a June wedding - we're going to have to go to the courthouse next month to get married. I think the plan is to go to the courthouse in Feb. but still have our June church wedding, even if the bride has a huge pregnant belly. I can't wait to see my kid - I keep talking about him as my son, even though we don't know the sex of the baby. It's incredible, K. and I had this private running joke about some hypothetical future life with our baby, and he's actually here with us now.

i kiss goodbye the howling beast on the borderline that separated you from me..

The last time I posted something personal, it was the middle of December and my dad was in and out of the hospital constantly because of his heart disease. For a while we were really worried that something was going to happen to him. This was around Christmastime when we would go to the hospital every day to be with my dad as he lay in the intensive care unit.

One day the week before Christmas they kept him overnight to run more tests on him, and his defibrillator went off in the middle of the night. Everyone became really worried that it would go off again and the next time he would not survive. My dad's heart was mostly dead tissue, and every heart attack he suffered would only worsen his condition.

The doctors decided to expedite the series of tests my dad was taking - for his liver, his eyes, his teeth, a psych exam, etc. - that would qualify him for a heart transplant. He had been going into the hospital every week to take another in the long series of tests, and since he had diabetes we were really worried that his liver would be too damaged to withstand the transplant operation. They also found a bunch of polyps in his colon and for a few days we were even worried that he had cancer and would not qualify for the transplant.

They did all of the tests in a couple of days, and on the Saturday before Christmas we were relieved to find out that my dad qualified for the transplant operation. We initially thought that it would take at least a few weeks to get a new heart - I guess we were wrong! On the morning of Sunday before Christmas, I got a call saying that my dad will be going in for surgery. I rushed to the hospital in time to say goodbye to him before he went under. My mom was crying and everyone was really emotional because there was a real possibility that something could go wrong and he wouldn't survive the operation.

The operation took almost 2 days, with all the prepwork, and they opened him up again in the middle of the night to make some last minute adjustments, I guess this is routine. During this time we sat in the waiting room, waiting for news from the doctors. I would go out every once in a while to finish my Christmas shopping. My dad was still unconscious on Christmas day and we spent the afternoon at L. and M's, K. came home that night and her family got me so many nice presents, I was really surprised by how nice they were to me. I can't believe her bro and his gf actually made us such a nice gift, you have to see it - it's a framed set of pics of the fishing trip we took together last summer, and they made a really nice frame for it.

It took my dad several days to totally regain consciousness. He looked really bad at first - I didn't even like to look at him, he was so weak and it was hard for him to move his limbs. But we stayed at the hospital, occasionally me and K. would go out and shop along Michigan Ave., or go to the art museum. The crowds were still out after Christmas, we'd go out to eat at Foodlife or Elephant and Castle and just watch all the people walk by, as we held hands and thought about how we would be married in a few months. This was the best Christmas I've ever had.

My dad began to improve rapidly - they moved him out of intensive care, they told him he was the star of the cardiac unit as it was taking him less than half the time than they expected to recover. Soon my dad was walking around fine and his appearance also changed - the color came back to his face and he seemed much more healthier than I remember him looking in years, even decades. The puffiness in his lower extremities due to his heart not being able to pump the blood through his body forcefully enough, went away. He started talking articulately, like his old self. My dad now has the heart of a 30 year old man, I guess that's to be expected.

They sent him home sooner than everyone expected. He has to take these anti rejection medicines every day, but he continues to improve to this day He still has to go back to the hospital for monitoring but he should be out of the house, driving around, even playing golf, vacationing, exercising again, etc. in a couple of months. They say that heart transplant patients are able to go on and do incredible things - climb mountains, run marathons etc. - I might ask my dad to go jogging with me in a few months. At the very least I'm going to spend a lot of time with him and play a lot of golf with him this summer. It is really a miracle. I owe everything to the doctors at NMH - they not only saved my dad's life, but they gave him an infinitely better quality of life, and gave him decades more to live.

How to NOT do everything on your to-do list

A really good post from zen habits

Every Monday is Productivity & Organization Day at Zen Habits.
Reader Jeremy Martin wrote in with this question:
This week, I started the switch to the GTD system. I have mostly learned what I know from your site and other articles about GTD, but I also have the book on order. The mental freedom it has afforded me has been such a major relief! I immediately push out all of the little thoughts that come to my head to process later, which works very well for me because I am a person with a very active mind that never seems to rest. I cannot remember when I have had this much peace of mind.
…
My problem is that if I have a list of things to do, no matter if they are high priority or personal projects for myself, I feel guilty if I am not working to shrink that list. This can lead to periods of burnout for me, where I barely get anything done. I never know when it is okay to relax, or when it is okay to take a break and play that video game, read a book, or some other leisure activity.
Do you have any tips that might help me out?
This problem is one that many of us deal with, and there’s no easy answer. I have a number of suggestions that might help, but let me first say that they are not from the GTD system — they are things you can add to the system to make it work for you. GTD should be adapted to fit your personal working style — it’s not a cookie-cutter approach. One method doesn’t work for everyone.
Here are my suggestions:
Set 1-3 Most Important Things (MITs) for the day (you might have already read about this on my site) … the top 1, 2, or 3 things that you really want to get done that day. This is an addition to the GTD system, not a part of it, but I find it helps me to focus on what’s important. GTD assumes that you will know what needs to be done, which is true, but it’s helpful to determine that at the beginning of each day, and make sure you get those things done.
Get your MITs done early in the day. Then everything else you do is extra. And if you feel like taking a break and playing, after you do the MITs, you can do this without worrying that you’re not getting important stuff done.
You’ll never get to the bottom of your list. This is something I had to learn the hard way. I would try to clear one of my context lists (like @calls), but as soon as I crossed 2-3 off my list, another 2-3 would pop up. Now, I try to just get my list down to a reasonable number if possible.
GTD isn’t about doing everything on your list. It’s about knowing what needs to be done, so that when you’re doing something else, you know that everything else that needs to be done, at some point, is accounted for in your system, and you don’t need to worry about all that other stuff at this point. In other words, get all that stuff out of your head, and into your trusted system, so you don’t have to worry about it while you focus on the task before you.
It’s also good to schedule time blocks. I will set a block for email and calls, another for writing, another for interviews (a big part of my job), etc … this way, I just try to get as much done in that block as possible, and then not worry about the rest until tomorrow’s block. This is also not a part of GTD, but a useful addition, as GTD doesn’t really advocate scheduling. But without a little bit of scheduling, as you’ve found, it can get a bit stressful, because you never know what needs to be done.
In the end, you can try these methods out, but you’ll have to find what works for you. Some of these tips might work, some might not be for you. It’s our systems that have to adapt to us, not the other way around!

The Shell by Molly Drake

The Shell
by Molly Drake

Living grows round us like a skin
To shut away the outer desolation
For if we clearly mark the furthest deep
We should be dead long years before the grave
But turning around within the homely shell
Of worry discontent and narrow joy
We grow and flourish
And rarely see the outside dark that would confound our eyes

Some break the shell
I think that there are those that push their fingers through the brittle walls
And make a hole
And through this cruel slit
Stare out across the cinders of the world with naked eyes
They look both out and in
Knowing them selves and too much else beside

Weekly Review: Key to GTD and achieving goals

Another good GTD article on weekly reviews, important as this is a new year and I'm revamping my weekly review process.

found at http://zenhabits.net/2007/02/weekly-review-key-to-gtd-and-achieving/

David Allen says that if you are not doing your weekly review, you are not doing GTD. I agree completely, and I’d like to add to that: if you are not reviewing your goals weekly, you are not focused on achieving your goals.
Every GTDer has put off the weekly review, sometimes for several weeks at a time. Every GTDer has felt the guilt of not doing the weekly review. Every GTDer, to live up to that title, needs to get back on the wagon and do the weekly review!
It is the key to the system. Here’s why:
In GTD, you capture everything, and process it, and use context lists for your next-actions … but things still slip through the cracks. The weekly review catches all those things that slip through, and empties your head of the “stuff” that keeps your brain working overtime.
Often, even if we’re good at processing our inboxes and checking our context lists on a daily basis, we still forget to check our project lists. This means that there might be projects that don’t have next-actions on your context lists, or maybe you’ve forgotten to add a project or check it off as done. Or maybe the project’s stalled and you need to jump start it.
Without the weekly review, the system begins to atrophy over time, until you no longer can be sure that it is complete or even working at all. Then you stop trusting it, and soon you’re not using it at all, really.
The weekly review clears your head and leaves you feeling calm and satisfied. Mmmm!
A weekly review doesn’t have to take long if you do three things:
process your inboxes on a daily basis, so you don’t have a huge pile of stuff waiting for you;
set aside time dedicated to the weekly review, and clear aside all distractions; and
really focus on getting the review done quickly and completely.
Here are the basic steps to a weekly review:
Pull out all loose papers, receipts, post-its, etc., and put in your inbox. Process your inbox.
Process your notes.
Review previous and upcoming calendar data to trigger next actions.
Mind dump - empty your head of everything not already in the system. Process it as you would your inbox.
Review next-action lists, project lists, waiting-on list, and someday/maybe list.
Review your goals.
Note the last step: review your goals. This is the key to keeping your goals on track — you have to review them regularly. First you have to set your goals, of course, but then you have to review them (preferably daily, but at least weekly). If you’re not, then you’ll forget about them, and when you remember them, you’ll do some things towards your goals, and then forget again. You have to have a regular review of your goals on a weekly basis in order to keep that focus.
Here’s my best tip for doing the weekly review: make an appointment, either on Monday morning or Friday morning, with yourself to do the weekly review. I suggest the mornings because by afternoon time, you are way too busy with other stuff that comes up to keep this appointment. If you do it first thing in the morning, you can get it out of the way and move on to the rest of your chaotic day. Stick to this appointment — keep it sacred — or your system will begin to fall apart.

Obama's victory speech after winning the Iowa caucuses

GTD Flowchart

I found this helpful image about the GTD weekly review. I don't even have a 'Reading' category. My own weekly review needs to be streamlined, so I may try this.

Death and Underachievement: A Guide to Happiness in Work

Some thoughtful words (and new year resolutions for some)...

from 43 Folders
Ryan Norbauer | Dec 31 2007

The trite wisdom of contemporary folklore instructs us that the arrival of the New Year is a time to reflect on the achievements of the preceding 365 days and to bear down and “resolve” to achieve more in those to come. Over time, we learn what a hydra-headed beast this is: no matter how many projects or actions we may whack off our ineluctable lists, it seems that yet more (often increasingly ambitious) commitments spring up in their place. With each new year come self-recriminations for our failure to meet the unlikely goals we’ve set for ourselves—lose weight, read through those piles of books and RSS feeds, start picking up our socks—and a stultifying brainstorm of new projects we’d like to take on.
This New Year as I contemplate my resolutions, it’s the underlying concepts of achievement and productivity that are on my mind—and by extension the still grander issues of purpose and meaning in work. I invite you then, patient reader, on a desultory First Night journey with me as I take our mutual favorite hobby—the idle navel-gazing contemplation of productivity—to its most absurd yet logical conclusion: to ask whether eradicating the need for achievement itself might not be the key to happiness in work.
The Ticking Clock
I’ve always liked the lilting final words of James Joyce’s Ulysses, perhaps because they so aptly encapsulate my default stance toward the world—toward any new project or potential obligation that might amble my way—“yes I said yes I will Yes.” Although many toxic workplace cultures demand such an attitude, I am an enthusiastic yes-sayer by personal constitution and without coercion, and to this I probably owe a certain wide-ranging, if shallow, familiarity with the world, which I rather enjoy. But at the same time I am often burdened by a nagging awareness of all the grandiose things I intend to do and the inadequate time I have to do them. The ticking clock is always in my ear.
My lifelong preoccupation with accomplishment has always been not so much motivated by a desire for praise or reward as an anxiety about having some concrete achievements to which I can point and say, “look there, you cold and unfeeling universe: something I’ve done, something I’ve made, something I shall leave behind.” In this way, accomplishment has always been my answer to mortality—a subject to which I devote inordinate amount of thought. I’ve always felt that striving, however futilely—for perfection and transformative self-improvement—was the way to find happiness and purpose in this brutish and fleeting existence of ours.
Work is, after all, how we spend most of our waking lives. Thus if we are to take life-and-death seriously, we must take work and its goals seriously, and the same in reverse. The words of the beautiful Phil Ochs song (download) are apt here:
… I won’t be laughing at the lies when I’m gone
And I can’t question how or when or why when I’m gone
Can’t live proud enough to die when I’m gone
So I guess I’ll have to do it when I’m here.
Yet I’ve lately been wondering whether all this struggling against the inevitable through yes-saying, list-making, and project-contemplating isn’t in some ways contrary to my ultimate goal of finding some satisfaction “when I’m here.”
I was recently set to thinking about all this while reading a most extraordinary little tract by a man called Ray Bennet MD, which I stumbled upon in the most unlikely of places: the “stocking stuffer” bin at the middle-brow furniture retailer Restoration Hardware. The book is titled The Underachiever’s Manifesto: The Guide to Accomplishing Little and Feeling Great. Its genius lies in the fact that it does for self-help books what Woody Allen did for thrillers and musicals in Manhattan Murder Mystery and Everyone Says I Love You (respectively)—that is, to be the greatest send-up of a genre and simultaneously its greatest achievement. The central conceit of the slender volume (and, I suppose my central conceit here) might best be captured by the opening paragraph of its chapter on work:
Underachievers are the best, most dependable workers. This may seem counterintuitive but the key here is that while some achievement is necessary and good for productivity, a lot of it is dangerous to you and everyone around you. And if you have a wide enough perspective, you’ll see it’s also an exercise in futility.
The assumptions underlying this statement can be found among Bennet’s “Principles of Underachievement:”
Life’s too short.
Control is an illustion.
Expectations lead to misery.
Great expectations lead to great misery.
Achievement creates expectations.
The law of diminishing returns applies everywhere.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
The tallest blade of grass is the surest to be cut.
Accomplishment is in the eye of the beholder.
He extensively employs the language of pathology to describe what he calls the “dangerous addiction” to achievement, which he diagnoses as an ultimately fatal disease:
Consider: how many brilliant careers are coupled with disastrous marriages? How many talented, hardworking people smoke too much, exercise too little, or drink themselves into oblivion each week? At the other extreme, how many fitness-crazed or hyper-competitive individuals tear up their knees running marathons or risk life and limb scrambling to mountaintops? How many brilliant and ambitious people dream of winning accolades for their genius, only to wind up working for their C+ colleagues? And even if you do manage to just about maintain a full-sprint schedule of personal and professional achievement, it can take something as commonplace as the flu to throw your whole highly tuned enterprise stressfully out of whack. What you’ve never realized all these years is that it’s your commitment to excellence that is at the source of your trouble.
Which is an intriguing way of looking at it. Bennett’s ideas turn my longstanding notions about the need for achievement in the face of life’s brevity entirely on their head. And I’m increasingly inclined to buy his interpretation.
Futility and Insignificance

It is surely worth taking a few moments away from our quotidian busywork to step back and ask why we’re doing what we’re doing and whether doing it differently (or, more importantly, thinking about it differently) might improve the satisfaction we’re able to derive from our work and life. In his manifesto, Bennett is calling our attention to the ultimate futility and often self-defeating character of the human ambition to create, excel, and win, with the reasonable expectation that this might encourage us to calm down a bit and perhaps even phone it in from time to time.
He is certainly not the first to do this, nor should he be. The fundamental relationship between death and how we spend our time is the single most important issue with which a human must grapple. How are we to decide what to do on a day-to-day basis unless we have an answer to this problem firmly in our heads?
Ancient Greek religion provides us with the story of Sisyphus, the king who put Death in chains and in so doing freed humanity from mortality. This didn’t last long, alas, and the gods punished the king’s cunning by compelling him to an eternity pushing a rock up a hill that was condemned always to escape him and roll down to the bottom again, forcing him to begin his efforts anew. Sound familiar? Here’s David Allen:
How would you feel if your list and your stack were totally—and successfully—completed? You’d probably be bouncing off the ceiling, full of creative energy. Of course, within three days, guess what you’d have? Right—another list, and probably an even bigger one! You’d feel so good about finishing all your stuff you’d likely take on bigger, more ambitious things to do.
The unending struggle of Sisyphus is often used as a metaphor for the human condition, but some of us resemble it more than others—and we tend to be the ones with the more ambitious lists. Robert Burton, author in 1621 of the brilliant, sprawling Anatomy of Melancholy rightly lists this sort of ambition as one of the causes of the subject of his book, saying that those under its sway “may not cease, but as a dog in a wheel, a bird in a cage, or a squirrel in a chain…they climbe and climbe still, with much labour, but never make an end, never at the top.”
The essential point that we must confront here is that the achievements which seem so important and for the pursuit of which we perpetually torture ourselves are on the one hand futile and the other utterly insignificant. What is the ultimate summit we expect to reach? And if we can’t answer this question, why do we exert ourselves as if we’re heading towards one?
The eloquent everyman-philosopher Alain de Botton puts it this way:
The advantages of two thousand years of Western civilization are familiar enough: an extraordinary increase in wealth, in food supply, in scientific knowledge, in consumer goods, in physical security, in life expectancy and economic opportunity. What is perhaps less apparent and more perplexing is the way that such impressive material advances may have gone hand in hand with a rise in levels of status anxiety among ordinary Western citizens, by which is meant a rise in levels of concern about importance, achievement and income.
A sharp decline in actual deprivation may—paradoxically—have been accompanied by a continuing and even increased sense of deprivation and a fear of it. Populations blessed with riches and possibilities far outstripping those imaginable by their ancestors tilling the unpredictable soil of medieval Europe have shown a remarkable capacity to feel that both who they are and what they have are not enough.
De Botton continues for the rest of Status Anxiety to show that much of our concerns about achievement are extremely localized—relative to those around us and to the expectations with which we were raised—rather than viewed relative to our place in the universe or the gestalt of our personal existence. What we need in order to judge the irrationality of the things about which we fret is a sense of scale and perspective. De Botton is providing us with a long historical view; the great evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins gives us a genetic and probabilistic one:
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.
To some, these facts may be depressing; to me they are comforting. But we’ll deal in a moment with what to do with our newfound perspective; for now it’s enough just to note the facts. And all the facts point to a universe that is utterly indifferent to your body-mass index, your latest promotion, or how well-organized your reference filing system is. You neighbors may pretend to care—and then proceed to think of you with acrimonious covetousness or jealousy—but, as the Copernican principle reminds us, in the long run your neighbors are just like you: a speck, on a speck, on a speck. (Listen to Neil deGrasse Tyson’s interview in the last part of this Radiolab segment to have this concept dizzyingly driven home.) But even if we were to abandon all reason and evidence and assume the human race enjoys some sort of privileged status in the affairs of the universe, we need only remember that each of us is one among 6.6 billion people (give or take), and that even if you were to attain a level of accomplishment that (let’s face it) you could never even dream of approaching—say, becoming prime minister of Canada—the vast majority of people now and ever living will never even have heard of you. Let’s further suspend disbelief and presume that measuring your success against those of your peers is a worthwhile and significant undertaking. Remember, then, that with each subsequent rise through a social stratum comes an increasingly insurmountable and intimidating group of competitors. And this is just as true of prime ministers and emperors as it is of district managers and fry cooks.
If we are to accept achievement as the vehicle to guide us through life, we must at least admit to ourselves that it’s a ferris wheel we’re riding and not a bullet train. I’m ready to make that admission. I say fuck this ride; let’s go eat cotton candy.
Hope and Comfort
And indeed this is why there is no despair when we truly confront the empty promises of achievement—and view our work and accomplishments in the light of that insight. We don’t give up and shake our fists at the unfeeling universe and embrace total idleness. Nor do we ignore the awesome preciousness of the life and time that chance has bestowed upon us. We try to be nice, have a little fun, and expand our awareness of the world we live in. We do the best work we can, but we don’t fret when we fail, nor do we jeopardize the quality of our work—or the happiness of our days—by bowing to the pressure to take on more than we can handle.
Albert Camus was but one of many philosophers and poets seriously to tackle the question of how we are to fill up the time that we have while we are here on earth, but I like many of his answers best. He saw the futilely struggling Sisyphus as a strangely sympathetic figure. Camus—who was in fact one of the more accomplished and ethically upright individuals with which the caprices of the genetic blender have gifted our species—embraced the absurd futility and overwhelming insignificance of our individual lives as a counterintuitive source of hope and empowerment. “The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd [than that of Sisyphus]. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious.”
Camus believes that it is not the activity of work that leads us to despair, but the hope for some sort of grand success that will never come. Insofar as we can resist the temptation to view our lives as goal-driven in this way, we have at least the prospect of happiness. As The Underachiever’s Manifesto has it: “striving is suffering.” It is only by accepting the illusory nature of achievement that we can hope to transcend it. Would it be mawkish of me to invoke Steve Jobs?: “our time is limited, so don’t waste time living someone else’s life.”
There are also more sublunary and practical reasons why the pressure for extraordinary achievement is counterproductive. The diet that permits the occasional bucket of french fries is the one more likely to be adhered to, and the exercise regime that demands only a gentle stroll every day rather than a heart-pounding decathlon is the one more likely actually to be followed. Extreme expectations apply extreme stress and create extreme resistance and procrastination. In so doing, they undermine our ability to get anything we want. We forfeit perfectly serviceable rewards in the pursuit of enormous and unattainable ones.
So calm down. Pour yourself a glass of port, cuddle up in front of the fire with a book that you’ll probably never finish, and chill. The hard part of life is done: you are here and alive to read these words. As the Manifesto commands, “stop worrying about being perfect. Dedicate yourself to the pleasures and benefits of mediocrity.” For my part, I’m formulating precisely one New Year’s resolution. Contrary to what this essay may seem to imply, it’s not “be a lazy sod,” but rather merely to be easier on myself this year and enjoy the go-round. And, let’s not kid ourselves, if you reached the end of this essay, it’s probably a resolution you should give some consideration too.