How to Accomplish Anything (a General Process)

Get into the habit

In my experience, it is best practice to start a habit by doing a small amount of work, in fact a laughably small amount of work as an every day minimum.   For example, to start back writing, I started with the goal of writing one sentence a day.  That's it.  And you know what?  I still sometimes was fighting myself to start.   But once you have started, you have made a giant leap.  As is pointed out on All Japanese All the Time (AJATT), "1 isn’t just slightly bigger than 0. 1 is infinitely bigger than 0. "

You've got to start somewhere.  

Track.  

Next, engineer follow-up and follow-through.  One method is Seinfield's trick where you take a calendar and mark each day you follow your goal, eventually forming a chain.  You get a little attached to the chain, and a little more so the longer it grows.

I don't print out a calendar, however. I simply make my own chart by turning a piece of lined paper on it's side.  Each line becomes a day, and in this way I can make a chart tracking as many habits as I'd like. It looks a little like this:

Here's a sample chart of the goals I tracked over a 10-day span. I must admit it was the best 10-day span I have had as of the time of this writing; I have never had a perfect week, nor have I needed one in order to watch this improve my life greatly.

If you have some burning life-focus that you just can't seem to get started I would use the Seinfield trick.  I find a chart is better for tracking several goals in a general course of self-improvement.

Procrastinate Your Evaluation, Not Your Action

When I was a speech coach, one of the keys to my success was to take the pressure off the novices.  Specifically in the event extemporaneous speaking, I instituted a rule that a student wasn't allowed to say whether or not they thought they were good at the event until they had given 20 practice speeches.

You can apply some version of this to whatever it is you are working on.  At first, your focus should be on building the habit.  You could set a time in the future that you will allow yourself to evaluate (this Ted Talk is an illustration of why 20 hours is usually sufficient.  But even better is to allow yourself the luxury of growing slowly while maintaining faith in the knowledge that you will improve.  

When Inspiration Strikes, Do More

This step more or less will probably happen on it's own, but it might be worth a few words to encourage it further.  

Before you started you project, you were still filling your days somehow.  While, yes, it is possible to squeeze more out of time, at some point you will eventually have to push something away.  That's your real test.  Once you've allowed inspiration to guide you past some distraction, you can safely say that you have formed a habit.  Keep going, keep tracking, and one day you may look up and notice you're where you wanted to be when you started dreaming and setting goals.

Everything Else is Optimization

There are a lot of bloggers who gain eyeballs (and ad revenue/book sales) by in effect saying "Look how great I am, and look how fast I can learn anything!"  From my own experience I can say that it can be very discouraging to consume too much of that.   It's a kind of pornography of other people's productivity.  I would look to them when my passion was at its highest, but then as my passion waned, their examples would only lead me to see my efforts as a failure. Eventually I realized that these amazing, better-than-you-and-me life-hackers are really only talking about optimization.  Oh . . . they can learn a language in 3 months?  Cool. However, I probably can't do that because 1) I don't want to move to another country, 2) I don't want to study 8 hours a day and 3) I'm probably not as talented as them (also, read the fine print, so to speak, about what they are willing to count as a "successful mission").

Another example is exercise.  I have at times only lifted one day a week. On the plus side, this protocol allowed me to optimize for muscle growth and cycling my diet. However, it made it too easy to get out of the exercise habit. When I wanted to start back exercising, I set up my tracking for every day and broke up exercises so it was possible to exercise everyday without soreness.  Optimal?  I don't care; I'm building back up a habit.

It is certainly good to read up from time to time about techniques for things you are working on.  It can show a healthy interest in the subject.  But my advice is to not give up on the system you are tracking while you are experimenting with new techniques.  For example, if you have been learning a foreign language by going through a certain number of flashcards a day and then you learn about a whole new philosophy of language learning involving just talking to natives (ie wasting their time so that you may benefit), I would recommend that you keep up with your flashcard discipline and experiment with the new moves.  In this way you absolutely prevent being a wannabe. Whether acting optimally or not, you are always a work in progress. Which is what you should be.

Walden . . . Underground

I know that my most loyal reader has dreamed before about a cabin in the woods, a place to draw nourishment off nature and solitude.

In that spirit, I did a post on my blog about sustainability about underground houses.

Go into Nature

Last week I wrote about going into the silence.  It truly is the best place to invest your time, whether in quiet thought, meditation, or writing.  Today I want to write about my favorite kind of silence: going into nature.

This doesn't have to be elaborate, like going to some nature preserve.  Instead, you can go to a park, or even slowly walk through your neighborhood, stopping ever so often to just focus on some detail of landscaping and to just  . . . listen.  Or, you can do my favorite method, garden in a way that lets nature in.

The benefits of going into nature as your means of going into the silence have been demonstrated by research.  (As a side note, this leads to one of the great paradoxes our age has not yet grappled with entirely: what to do when science and data vindicate a practice that doesn't seem to follow the rigid or analytic patterns of science.  But that's the thing: analysis the is the tool the human uses to improve life.  When there is a conflict between the system and the human, just go ahead and value the human).

Check out the webMD article on Eco-therapy or this website that clearly enthusiastic on the subject.  If you share my intuition that a connection to nature is the right thing for humans, you might skip the articles.

The real trick, however, is spending the time in nature.  To do that you have to giving yourself permission to spend the time in this way.  To give yourself that permission, in the short run, you might need to get more done in less time.  If you're in that situation, look into my time management tricks.

A Year in Permaculture

I have a confession to make: I am a very bad gardener of annual vegetables.  Horrible might be a better word.  I am inconsistent in watering.  I sometimes get behind in weeding.  And periods of neglect lead to many plants just burning up in the summer.  It is tragic.

But only recently, while thinking on a walk, did I realize that this fact does not disqualify me from teaching others about sustainability, or even gardening.

To develop a way of life that is sustainable, I think there are 3 keys:

1.) we need to develop perennial systems that do not rely on our inputs
2.) we need to realize how essentially right nature is.  This is terms of speed and rhythm.  We need to realize we are rhythmic, networked beings.  We are NOT mechanical or computational, in spite of how often we try to distort others (and, for a few people, ourselves) into fitting that mold.
3.) we need to use the internal combustion engine significantly less (which means we will have to eschew travel, even though that completely goes against a key tenant of the "life-style blog" school of thought).

I think I can help new comers down any of these three paths.  So even if I don't get as much lettuce or squash as some master gardeners, I can achieve my personal big hairy audacious goal of helping 100,000 people to live more sustainable lives.

If Left Red-in-the-Face-Embarrassed

. . . it is probably time to take a break.

It's amazing how naturally I go from playing a game, thinking a lot about it, taking those images in my mind's eye and projecting it into my future, imagining playing it having as a significant meaning to my life, learning about the social scene (and social status) of the game, thinking of how I will one day be great, thinking how that means I must be making rapid progress, and being deeply embarrassed  when I suffer the kind of set-back a newbie must come to accept.

I wrote that this all happened naturally, and I love nature, so I love this too . . . right?  No, this pattern may be natural, but it in unbalanced.  This is not the a path that a well-adjusted or centered person will follow for long.

It is natural for any individual, or even a group, to get unbalanced.  But the whole will push back to that part. And when the whole gently pushes back, we can tense up, and redouble our efforts . . . or we can breath, get some perspective, and (re)locate a balance.

All of this came from playing Go.  I thought I was ready to move down another handicap against Fuego.  I thought I understood the concepts to win at the next level down.  I did not.

And that should be okay.  And it is if you play the game for its own merits, instead of following the path outlined above.  I want Go to a game in which I cultivate a different growth than ego-measuring (never will your ego be less than when you are constantly seeking to validate it).  To do that, I should only play it when I am in a mood to do that kind of cultivation.

There is the advice to "lose 50 games as quickly as you can."  And I like that advice.  But, for it to be a real vehicle for harmony in my life -- a stop-gap when I can not get it from natural surroundings bursting with life -- then I need to balance the seeking of 50 games with other values.  To be balanced, I must balance the game-of-balance with clearing my head enough to have an attitude open to balance.