Written in February 2023.
Every hour of every day, we dream about freedom. Mostly from our desks.
To have freedom, you need money. To make money, we work.
Why we’re so strict about the wrong work
Funny thing about people. We go easy on ourselves when it comes to the work we choose to do for ourselves. And we’re strict, almost perfectionist, about the work we do for other people because we have to.
Part of that, maybe the biggest part, comes from how we were raised and taught. But the real problem, I think, is that we don’t have enough will to improve ourselves.
And the first thing to do to fix that will? Do the thing you want to accomplish. Every day. That’s it.
Even a dot is hard
Doing something you’ve never done, and doing it every day, is not easy.
Say you decide to make just one dot with a pen every day. One dot. The world’s easiest art project. Keeping that going past one year, into two, into three, is genuinely hard.
That’s why we need to build the habit of stacking up something of our own, day after day.
We have to shed the old habits and attitudes that have soaked into us like ancient customs. Think about it: we’ll pull all-nighters, with crazy passion, to hit the deadline on someone else’s project. To pour that same passion into our own work, we need a first step. Before that, no matter how hard you thrash around, it won’t work. Forget a year. You’ll struggle to last a few months.
Start embarrassingly small
So start a tiny project, just for you. Something like:
- Draw a circle that looks like today’s mood.
- Write a one-line review of something you saw today.
(Some days your mood circle will look like a lumpy potato. Still counts.)
Leave a small record every day, and it piles up as quantity. And that quantity becomes the foundation that lets people see you as someone solid.
Once you have a few hundred of them, a pretty respectable pile, that’s when you can start raising the quality, one by one. It won’t be too late.
So be wary of the big ambitions and the butterflies you get when you start. Just begin, tiny and fearless, like it’s one more ordinary part of your day.
I’m always rooting for you.