avoidance & comparison

The difference between “failure” and “unstoppable force” is all psychological.

I’m usually a just get it done kind of person, except when it comes to my own personal work. I get up at 4 a.m. every morning to write, but it often gets pushed back to twenty minutes before I have to be out the door for my day job because shower/breakfast/feed the dog….When I come home I put off drawing because I should finish Learn Lettering first. But I also have to do laundry, and I have a massive headache. It’s so easy to fritter away time by pushing back the one thing that needs your focus until after this one little distraction. The feeling of having waded through all of the distractions and looking for more can feel an awful lot like boredom, but it’s a symptom of avoidance. Unless you’re content doing nothing all day every day (which I suspect my readers are not), you know what you have to do. Why does it feel like the last thing in the world you want to do right now? Because it’s important. Why is it the hardest thing to get started? Because the only person who has any expectations of you is the one person telling you to do something else.

I can crush it at the day job because it’s easy to create a clear to-do list for something external; I can detach myself from it. I can put my head down and work through a migraine because I get paid to and I can clock out and go home at the end of the day. It’s not personal. It’s somehow easier to adhere to extrinsic guidelines, even if you’re the one creating the task list within that structure. But imposing guidelines and expecting results for your own personal work is somehow a different animal. There’s that nagging Resistance monster somewhere deep in my subconscious telling me it’s just a hobby.

What I’m really avoiding is the idea that I could actually be successful at something and be capable of leaving my day job in the foreseeable future. I’m excited and scared of leaving something I know exactly how to do–even if I stopped loving it–and diving into something that’s a mix of both familiar and uncharted territory. I’m avoiding picking one thing because I’m afraid that means saying no to everything else.

It’s also scary because being successful means running with successful people..and being able to keep up.

I know it’s ridiculous to fear leaving behind something that doesn’t light you up inside. If there’s something else that makes you feel like it’s your reason for being, why should there be any fear in pursuing that? I guess we’re geared to seek safety. Mundane is safe. The known is safe. Routine and ease are safe. But staying with the known out of convenience doesn’t challenge us to be our best selves.

There’s a fine line between being inspired by surrounding ourselves people who do good work and being intimidated to the point of self-loathing. It’s important to surround yourself with people who are good at a skill you want to learn or who are good at living life in a way that you’d like to live yours. Glean wisdom from their experience, but be careful not to compare their level of success to yours. This can be paralyzing. There’s a tipping point; beware of it.

You get stuff done by showing up and doing it. You get great by practicing. You get prolific by not letting anything stop you.

I can too easily go from looking at the work of someone I admire and thinking, “I can do that,” to looking at the volume of their work and thinking, “Damn, I don’t just need to step up my game…I feel like I’m not even in the game.” It’s like getting pumped up for a workout. You start warming up and get the adrenaline going. “You’ve got this!” you tell yourself. Then you get lapped by a group of marathon runners and lose all desire to continue. Why? Because you made the mistake of comparing where you’re at now to where they are after lots and lots of training. Giving up and sitting on the bench isn’t going to get you to their level. You step up your game by learning from people who know the game better than you, not by quitting because you’re not good enough. You have to start somewhere and improve you, not compare yourself to someone else’s progress. Even experts were new at something once. Even marathoners had to learn how to walk.

Well, what gives the people you admire that level of success? They have a large volume of work because they commit to doing it all the time. They practice all the time. It’s great if you can look at others’ work and be impressed by how much time and effort they put in to become as good as they are, then be inspired to action. It’s dangerous if you fall into the trap of comparison and let it stifle your motivation. It’s crazy how quickly I went from despairing and feeling like a failure to closing my browser and just writing. When I stopped feeling sorry for myself and started writing, I felt like an unstoppable force. I got bogged down in looking to others because I was avoiding my own work.

But you know what’s funny and never feels obvious at the time? Just doing my own work was the solution to getting my own work done. Imagine that! You get stuff done by showing up and doing it. You get great by practicing. You get prolific by not letting anything stop you. The difference between “failure” and “unstoppable force” is all psychological. The only difference was that I made myself start typing what was going on in my head. It’s kind of a chicken-and-egg situation, but doing is what caused the mental shift from negative to positive. I called out the monster that was psyching me out and keeping me from believing I could be anything. I simply stopped avoiding my own work and the fear subsided.

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