Managing Our “Improvement Energy”
I took a whole week of vacation last week and holy crap did I enjoy the release of just unplugging from the strain and struggle and obligation of just keeping life together. I didn’t even realize the demand it all places on our psychic energy until I was back and had rebooted my standard operating system and the various Improvement Projects I’ve been fighting through on a daily basis:
— Building a revamped business development department at work and finding new and better ways to start conversations with new customers and bring them into our sales cycle
— Renovating my house, the first one my wife and I have ever owned, which we bought 4 months ago from two septuagenarians with dated tastes and a penchant for haphazard DIY and taking shortcuts
— Fulfilling the commitments I’ve made to myself and my good friend and partner on the West Coast, Zach Kanner, as we build and grow our creative venture
— Making new friends and building a life for myself in a city I’m still new in
On top of all this, there’s the layers and layers of minutia that fill the spaces in between those intensive undertakings and getting back into it all is frankly uncomfortable and overwhelming.
But I read a short and sweet blog post from Seth Godin yesterday:
Take a time-traveling Ben Franklin for a ride in your Prius and you’ll give him a heart attack.
Meanwhile, you’re driving down the highway while eating a muffin and texting at the same time.
We can clearly get used to more than we expect. We can learn to live a space station orbiting the Earth, and we can learn to sit in zazen meditation for 18 hours without moving.
It’s not what you are capable of. It’s what are you hoping to accomplish…
And I exhaled.
It doesn’t all happen overnight. We can all think to a moment in time not long ago where our past self would look at our future self in admiration and think, “Holy Crap. How does he manage it all?”
We cut things out that don’t matter as much, we put things on the back burner that can afford to wait, and we focus on the big things that move us towards the person we want to be. The impossible things become doable and the doable things become standard and the standard things become habit and then we don’t think about and appreciate this great thing we’ve programmed into our operating system that makes our life better — going to the gym regularly, eating healthy, journaling, meditating, reading, praying, cooking for ourselves, building things, creating things. It all seemed like a tall order at one point.
You have to build sustainably. Cut the fat. If it’s not a top priority, don’t drain yourself trying to make it one. I’d like to play better golf, but I’ve got a lot of shit going on that’s far more important to me, so I’m not gonna be upset when I shoot in the 90s every time I go out or spend a whole lot of energy trying to get better right now. I’ll just enjoy it for what it is and know that my Improvement Energy is already accounted for elsewhere.
If you place too high a demand on yourself, pushing it to the redline for too long, you burn out before you achieve the important thing you set out to do. We’re capable of far more than we ever believe we can take on, but we have to prioritize and build step-by-step. This is why building habits is so important — moving activities into the “autopilot” section (low demand) of our brains and out of the “learning” section (very high demand) of our brain. Think how hard driving used to be or how much a strain the first day of a new job or new class is — now, they’re second nature. It’s all about managing the cognitive load, your brain’s RAM.
