No Routines, No Discipline? You’re Awesome — You’ve Got Grit!
Meditate one hour a day for the next 60 days — if you can do that, click here to read something else. But if you struggle with changes like this — a lot — then read on: I wrote this for you.
For 60 days, one hour each, that’s the challenge Naval Ravikant put to his Twitter crowd. Unlike all those self-help folk, I do struggle with meditation and the thought of meditating for ONE HOUR seemed, well, insane. (It still does.) But I wondered and I sat down and I tried. And to my surprise it worked. In fact, it was easier to meditate for one hour than for 15 minutes. What gives? I think my brain goes like: no point in trying to pretend it’s “almost over”, I’m gonna be here forever. And then, the other 59 days flew by as well, right?
Wrong.
I wish. But no. I did manage for a bit more than a week. Then work happened, I slept very late, skipped a day because I was drowsy, and then the spell was broken.
I failed.
Or that’s what I would have told myself until a few years ago. No more.
Failure, and who you’re not
Back to failing though, and we’re on the right platform to talk about it. Medium is one of those places where a lot of highly disciplined people run around and write. And, gosh, I admire those types for their ability to establish a good routine and to improve their lives by the 1% rule. It’s amazing. And it’s not me.
Jumping into these kinds of routines, even with a fashionable bit of struggle, is a superpower — and it took me a while to figure out that that’s not my superpower.
In the meantime, I beat myself up.
Next time, just try a bit harder.
What’s wrong with you? I know I can wake up at 5 am. I do it for flights! Where is my determination now?
Failed. Again.
Maybe the lyrics are different for you but we all know the song. It sucks.
What we also know: It’s alright to fail, because it’s necessary for learning, right? We know that the question is how we handle it: gotta try again! Here is the piece I struggled with: Insanity. Let’s look at its vastly over-used definition again:
Insanity Is Doing the Same Thing Over and Over Again and Expecting Different Results.
I tried again, and failed again, and the insanity was that I expected the struggle to end, that suddenly there would be “success”. Because there are those folks who struggle and then they end up with this ironclad routine. Amazing. Again: not me.
What if you’re great at something else?
My struggle changed completely when I stopped looking at what I wanted to happen, and instead looked at what I had done:
I had picked myself up a thousand times, had gritted my teeth and went at it again. Maybe with a different angle, maybe a different nudge, a new tool. But I went.
If ironclad-routines are not your superpower then maybe this is:
You fall. You stand up. You try again, differently.
Is that a super power? Oh yeah. Why? Because it means you don’t give up. Routines are there to make it easy. But not you: You chip away at a problem, routine or not. Call it persistence, call it grit. It’s awesome!
And it’s necessary for your sanity to look at it like that: Search on Medium and read everything about the power of positive thinking and self-love and self-forgiveness and why those are good things. (See you in a month.)
It’s about making peace with what you’re not great at and appreciating what you do so well. And then that bit of human magic happens: you’ll bounce back on your feet with a smile. Superpowers are awesome. Find yours and use it.
Here is another piece of human magic: Once you are there, once you’re okay with how you currently do things then you can change. Read about reinventing yourself, about changing the narrative of your life. This TED talk for example doesn’t too bad a job at at. The only thing you’ll regret is never trying.
