A Bias Towards Action
The only cure to a stagnant life.
If you ever feel stuck in your old thought world, where you just think, strategize,debate, make lists, make priority matrices, think think and think, no matter how bad ass you look while doing it, you will eventually get lost in your thoughts, and never reach the fruition of your ideas.
This often happens to those who dream of doing something important and supposedly difficult. Perhaps as a business idea or a new piece of software. Or anything challenging. But this is very common in this day and age to psychoanalyze each and every thought. Every thought we have becomes a perpetual ferris wheel on which our mind keeps dwelling on and on till the thought becomes stale and we lose all interest in working on it.
One of my college mates is a liberal arts student, and he firmly believes in the idea that one must take joy in contemplating over ideas for a long long time, in order to do something constructive out of it. The belief of having a debate, writing reviews, challenging each other over an argument, regarding an important issue, is the real deal.
These things work well in the classroom and to improve one’s literary and speaking skills, but real life problems seldom require the same treatment.
In one word, all you need to do is get rid of all kinds of biases we have against making decisions to get things done.
Get rid of lists
A very good piece of advice, which is to dump all your to do lists, and just get on with it. A process of planning and thinking and (sometimes overthinking) strategizing makes any task seem to be much more gruesome and difficult than it actually is. This is a trick that our brain plays in order to remain in a passive state of relaxation rather than face a challenge. This is called the “spotlight effect”. When your brain focuses on the negatives of every situation in order to keep you away from any challenge or difficulty. A long list of to do’s makes it much more difficult to just get on with it and do something. The list grows longer and eventually more intimidating. Just pick up a task and start doing it. And if you are that much in love with making lists, make a list of things that you have done. This will not only get things done for you, but give you a sense of accomplishment. Take the difficult tasks down, one by one, and note them down as you do them. This way, you get to start with an empty page, not having to stare down at a huge list of to do’s , becasue honestly, if you start making lists, the to do’s and the tasks will never end. It would keep growing as you would have more and more things to do. And the pile up will eventually break you. Making lists is not particularly bad, but when you just keep making lists and not following through with the doing part, your dreams remain “theoretical”.
Rethinking the priority matrix
When you talk about doing things , you will always have a wall that you will hit, when you have to decide what is to be done first. Prioritization. People start prioritizing, writing things down, making a priority matrix. What is to be done now,what is to be done later, what is important, and what is not. Your priorities must be a cross section among these four categories. But there are some times when you don’t know what is important enough or difficult to put into what box. Something might be really urgent but might be really difficult and time consuming, giving you no time to do anything else perhaps for the whole day or week.
Another confusion people face is, do I start something and pick up something else when I am finished with the first thing? Or do i just do the first thing partially for one hour and then move on to the next thing,doing things in pieces? Both the approaches have their pros and cons. Doing things piece by piece gives you time to move away from things, rethink and come back, while you get other things done. But it also gives you the chance of quitting entirely. While doing one thing at a stretch till you finish it might make you bored when things get difficult, but seems, more approachable as you finish what you started, with no stone left unturned.
Dr. Barbara Oakley suggests the focused and diffused mode thinking strategy while doing anything. When you focus on something , you use a tiny part of your brain while studying it. After a while, you’ll feel tired or bored, that’s when you’ll shift from focused to diffused mode thinking. This is when you can relax, either meditate, or do some really pedestrian task like driving or washing dishes. This makes your mind wander and explore parts of things you never could in focused mode, which might lead you to the right result you were looking for.
The best approach to dealing with priorities would be doing the things that you need to do first. Like right away. Now need is where you need to decide what is most important to you. If it is a writing job that will get you your next meal, against a book you hope to write and get published some day, It would be wiser to do the former first, as survival over a short term can result into long run goals undertaken. Before you start outlining your big business plan and going out for funding, you must focus on your product first, as that is what your business will in the end thrive on. Your priorities must be ruled out based on what is the most important at the moment. Rationality is the quality needed to be adopted in this case. What needs to be done in order to benefit you in the situation now, and also fulfill your long term goals at a micro level. Instead of beating over a huge priority matrix, (which can sometimes prove to be important), you really need to ask yourself these fundamental questions.
The Draft Method
Planning and strategizing can take you so far and sometimes let you wander off a completely unrelated tangent if you get addicted to the process. Sometimes you could get hooked on to this process if you feel like you won’t succeed in the first time you try something. That is when people calculate the odds of success, or failure. But in your case, if it is something you want to do , like write a book or create a piece of art, or write a software of some sort, use the draft method. I call it the draft method, I don’t know what it is called out there. Basically, like screenwriters make “drafts” of a screenplay , which basically means that they just start writing, finish the story, and then rewrite it if they feel there is any room for improvement. Drafts are usually “tries” given to making something. Drafts , if taken seriously, can take you out of the “what if i fail” paralysis, as you are meant to fail when you draft something. That is why you do it again. You have to just trust the process of deliberate practice and keep making drafts of what you want to create, So that you will have peices that you can compare, break down and re-assemble into your ultimate masterpiece. When you call this the draft method, you need to know that there is to be room for improvement. You need to know that your first try is going to suck. But in the end, you want a tangible result on which you would build upon later.
If you keep thinking about failing or wondering how feasable or effective your idea is, eventually, you will start thinking that youre idea sucks. You will never be satisfied , or never have a “perfectly drawn out idea”. If it is something new, you will always have a vague description of what you want to achieve, which might sound similar to other ideas, but would manifest into something great if worked upon diligently. That is why most people say
Ideas suck. Execution is king.
Planning ,Strategizing and thinking is a great way to draw out a basic outline of what you want to do. But remember, there is an end to that brief process, and a beginning to the doing process,when you have to start getting your hands dirty, start making mistakes, but that is the only way you would get unstuck in life, and achieve success. Eventually.
