I’m always late to the party. I spend time thinking about the best way to solve my problems. Like that one time I wrote about wanting to travel back in 2014 but finally did it in 2017. I was three years late.
Here is what I’ve learned from those three years of waiting. You can spend your imagination on worrying and thinking. It’s the most familiar way I use my imagination. It doesn’t make it the best option.
After that one random Saturday, I’ve transitioned to doing as a way of thinking. I learned that worrying is one of the worsts ways to use your imagination and time.
We all know this. But, I don’t think we stress about what we need to do. I think we stress out because we are afraid of how we are going to do it.
Like any Tim Ferriss fan, I found the answer through his podcast.
“Don’t count on motivation; count on discipline.” — Jocko Willink
Except I learned it the hard way. I thought I could rely on will to get there, the sales mentality of hustling your way there. It failed me. Wanting it badly won’t get you there if you don’t have the right strategy. The same goes with having the perfect strategy but not having the right mindset to want it.
I needed a system. Maybe because I read Atul Gawande’s Checklist Manifesto or maybe because I always search for the silver bullet, I had to find a way to manage myself. Today, I use a checklist made for the hypothetical ‘baby Tan’. Before you stop reading because I just referred to myself as ‘baby Tan’, hear me out. I get it. It’s a bit crazy. Writing is how I think things through.
The Baby Checklist:
- Did you eat yet?
- Did you sleep yet?
- Did you play yet?
Sound simple? Yes. Simple but difficult. It looks something like this:
Leave it to me to make a checklist of a checklist. It’s very meta and abstract. Yet, it helps me take care of the most controllable tasks in my life when everything gets busy.
But something weird happens when you eat healthy, sleep well and play hard. You start acting your way into being in the moment.
Once I began following that checklist, something serendipitous happened to me. I got busy with being in the moment. I stopped getting busy with doing.
I had this realization when I listened to Vigo Mortensen talk at the Palm Springs Film festival this year. He said one thing that stood out, “go slow to go fast.” I heard it again with Tim Ferriss, “fast is smooth; smooth is fast. Not me, though. I love being busy because it lets me avoid life. You can be less authentic when you’re busy. You can take less fault when you’re busy. You can be less intentional when you’re busy. More busyness means less loving, caring, and ultimately being.
I get it. Being sucks sometimes. It means I get to sit with the painful questions: What is my life goal? Where am I heading? What do I want out of life? What am I scared of? Why am I afraid? Why is it simple but hard?
But when I do remind myself life is short, I accept a funny truth about my problems. It’s an opportunity to solve them. It’s a chance to build confidence. And I get to trade them up for new problems to solve and build confidence.
I’m not a zen monk and I am far from being mindful. If I can benefit from scratching the surface of it, I’m curious about sitting with the tough questions and being in the moment. It’s better than what I am used to, which is living in the future and being anxious about uncertainties. I focused on a baby checklist everyday to solve bigger problems of tomorrow.
Thank you Angel Alvarez, Gabi Browne, Geoffrey Mark, Ginny Sullivan and Thao Nguyen for giving me feedback on my three part post. I wouldn’t have published this without your feedback.
You can find all three posts here:
Part 1: The Past | Hungover from 2016
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🙏 for reading!
