Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.
Frank Outlaw.
Hey, lets do a little test together? Pick up your moleskine and a really fancy pen, ok if you don't dig these things, you'll need only to think for a while.
Ok, lets start: think about something in what you really love to be well succeed but your results so far not being as good as you want. Difficult, congratulations! For me it was easy - chess is something that I'll love to play better than my feeble results in this last 20 years. Now write down 3 things that you intend to do to improve your results.
If you're like me the things that you wrote and the things that you want to improve your results are different. In this kind of situation I tend to do enjoyable things that I like to do instead. In chess what I really need is to exercise and analyse my own games. My list consists in buying more books and perhaps subscribe a magazine. It is like trying obtain a mirror by polishing a brick and after the initial insucess trying to polish it harder. Said that lets find some reasons for such a unreasonable behavior. In my case I tend to feel more secure if I have plenty resource to deal with each problem. But I tend to like more collecting resources than deal with the issue itself. This makes me feel that I'm doing something towards the solution but it doesn't really helps to deal with the problem. There are other possible reasons: the joy of collecting things, the joy of the organization itself and the joy of not put the hands on the dirty part of the job. Meanwhile I can dream about the beautiful mirror I will get by polishing that darn brick.
What is the solution? Well I did not promised any solutions did I? Anyway I think that awareness is a good start. Other approach is try to find a middle term between things that I like and things that are really necessary. And finally I find it important to share. Any suggestions?
Luciano
Making your mind your playground
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Came at the right time, as usual.
I am a professional brick polisher, too. :)
Awareness does indeed help, but not always.
This behavior is a typical procrastination pattern: You KNOW what to do to get real results - and it's not quite what you want to do.
So you end up ignoring it, doing what you want, and creating an explanation to convince yourself that you are moving forward...
PS: This quote is from Frank Outlaw is outstanding!
Luciano,
it makes us happy to know that we are doing something (and not procastinating) BUT the real procastination is not about doing nothing - is about doing the wrong thing. This causes friction with the natural flow of things - what gives me a winderful idea for a new post - this margins being so narrow...
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