You know how to never get things done? Spend time getting ready for them.
Sounds deeply intuitive but it’s just plain old common sense. The beginning of a thing can be a real trap if you work on it too long. You lose momentum. The juices slow down then stop flowing and the temptation to jump to something else becomes too strong to fight. So you find yourself flipping from one thing to another. It’s murder on the mindset.
My problem is I have a perfectionist tendency. If it’s in the genes I probably got it from my father. He was an osteopath. As a trained doctor who was treating up to 30 patients a day making sure you are right before you snap someone’s neck back into alignment was probably a good plan.
But I’m in the creative end of things so it’s not a good fit here. I need to move fast and loose. Come up with good ideas and sometimes crappy ones too. It’s just a thinking stew pot so stir it.
Who cares? Keep moving.
When I’m not moving quickly I get tired. So tired I feel like I could sleep standing up. Then I just want to go in and have a nice snooze.
But in doing that I’ve wasted a lot of time over the years. It’s only occasionally useful if I wake up quickly with a start because I have an idea rumbling in my gut begging to reach my brain. It needs me to start to work writing about it. So that’s what I’m going to do.
From now on I’ll be adopting this as my modis operundi on this blog.
Every day for the next month.
I’ve now realized that every day and every night form a kind of template that look a lot like a mobius. They magically turn into the next day and there’s no obvious seam between them.
There’s no start point and there’s certainly no end point.
So what am I getting so ready for?