An odd thought I had today in the shower:
It’s an odd exercise, and I don’t know if it works, but it seems like it ought to at least get you partway into the mindset of the person you want to be.
Written and drawn over the course of two hours today. Consciously minimal cleaning-up.
I’ve been staring at this blank pagetext-entry box all day – seriously, I opened the tab at 8:45 AM and haven’t closed it since – and I can’t start writing because I’m scared that I’ll write the wrong thing or say it in the wrong way.
The irony of this will become apparent in a moment.
I’ve been struggling with a lack of motivation for years. In the best-case scenarios, I get projects started but I can’t get them finished, except for the most trivial tasks like washing dishes. Most of the time, my ideas don’t even make it off the drawing board, and it’s not for lack of quality of the ideas – it’s that I just can’t get going on them. For a long time, I thought it was related to fear of failure – but I don’t so much fear failure as expect it. A while back, one friend suggested that it was fear of success, that I was sabotaging myself because I was scared of what would happen if I followed through. But I don’t think that’s it either – I yearn for success. I actively want to be successful.
I think what’s actually happening is that I’m afraid of the process.
I’m afraid that I’ll screw it up – not that the end result will be bad, but that my method for getting to the end result will be bad. I’ll do something wrong and the whole thing will have been for naught and everyone will laugh at me, or I’ll leave a step out, or I’ll go with an outmoded model of how things are to be done and not realize it. It’s not about trying and failing – it’s about trying wrong.
Which is why this post has been so hard to write. What if I’m doing it wrong? What if there’s a Right Way to write posts like this and I don’t know about it? What if…
Hey, nobody said fears have to be rational.
Anyway. At this point I feel like one of those stereotypical City Slickers who shows up for a safari with three suitcases full of everything they could ever possibly need, plus additional stuff strapped on just in case. What I need is to convince myself that moving forward is more important than knowing the map perfectly. That’s not to say that I’m going to strike out completely unprepared – but I need to figure out that I don’t need to be prepared for every eventuality either. Most of the time, there aren’t actually any tigers anyway.
If you aren’t familiar with it, the Pareto Principle is simple: 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. In the context of productivity, that can be read to mean that 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort. The thrust of the idea – which has been a productivity darling for a while now – is that you should pare down to the 20% of the effort that’s generating 80% of the results. Sure, you lose 20% of your results, but you gain back 80% of your day.
Here’s the problem with the Pareto Principle: it’s missing a key statement, one it shares (or ought to) with Hofstadter’s Law. “80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes, even when you account for the Pareto Principle.”
In other words, let’s say that it’s true that 20% of your work produces 80% of your results. So you cut out the 80% of the work that’s only producing 20% of the results. Now the earlier 20% is now 100%, and the earlier 80% is also 100%. But doesn’t the Pareto Principle still apply? 20% of that 100% effort produces 80% of those 100% results.
As a wise woman once said, “it’s turtles all the way down.”