I have just had an interesting experience. Back in November I signed up to a course called Blog Mastermind that is designed to help someone start a blog from scratch and build traffic with the idea of eventually monetizing it and making some income from it. It gave me assignments to complete each week that have generally proven quite easy to do. The first 10-lessons focused on content so I haven’t done much on building traffic and that frustrated me so I signed up to another course called SMARTS, which focuses heavily on building up traffic using all of the new social media opportunities that are bursting forth right now. It’s an impressive course, well-researched, well-presented and very in-depth. The only problem now is that I am feeling blown away by the amount of new things to learn, new skills to develop and the length, breadth and depth of actions to take.

I did some thinking today about the work that I have to do and to understand and curb the negative feelings that are starting to well up. It didn’t work so well as my first impulse upon finishing was to take a two-hour nap. I woke up realizing that I was procrastinating in classic fashion and went to the computer only to turn right around and go back to bed (but only for a minute). As I lay there I realized that the whole procrastination mechanism had been triggered in a big way:

1. I have set myself too much to do
2. I have not broken things down into things that are possible for me to do in the moment
3. I have set (or had set for me) more and more rules about how to do things leading to a perfectionist attitude that added to the demotivation and perceived levels of impossibility
4. I have created too many objectives and expectations that I cannot fulfill in the moment and that will not be fulfilled for a long-time (such as achieving the rate and size of growth of two phenomenal sites, Zen Habits and Think Simple Now! and also achieving preeminence and great income etc).
5. I have made this whole venture my ‘great hope’ and that ultimately makes me feel a little bit desperate, which always makes me edgy and prone to make poor long-term decisions. It also tends to destroy good and sensible habits that slowly build momentum and slowly take me on the journey from here to there
6. I have taken on too much that requires multiple development of new learning and new skills that need to be applied immediately, i.e. I don’t play to my competencies and instead focus a lot more on what I don’t have rather than what I have.

I have exhibited all the classic symptoms of the past in terms of indulging in distractive behaviors. I have responded that way because I experienced negative emotional symptoms. Those symptoms occurred because of one very basic problem - I have created desires for myself (or effectively have had them imposed upon me by the requirements of the courses that I follow) that prove impossible to fulfill in the moment of wanting them.

So, the big question, “How do I turn all of this around?” Largely, by doing just the opposite:

1. I have to take a deep breath and just accept current limitations and instead look at what I can do well and what works well.
2. Get back to setting realistic weekly and daily objectives and put them into a “How To Do List” each day.
3. Get clear about the 80/20 ratio of the things that I do. Many of these new assignments require a high-level of detail, that proves time-consuming to learn, to prepare and to process. By getting clear on where the real value of each task lies I can focus on that and make that excellent. The rest of the details are often just trimming. They make the thing nicer and can have some influence but give lower impact overall. If I feel pressed for time when creating an article, or something similar, then I want to get the main value created and then post it. If it proves popular and ‘hits a spot’ then I can refine it later on as those refinements will probably have a greater return for the effort made. I must remember my mantra on this: that it’s better to make some kind of step forward than to hesitate and make no step at all.
4. I have indulged (again) in too much fantasizing and setting bold objectives (I kidded myself that I wasn’t setting pinnacle goals but from my respondent behaviors I have to conclude that I duped myself). I can only get great final results by taking great actions along the way and anything that causes me to think more about “What’s the right thing to do next?” rather than “What’s the next possible step?” tends to throw me into analysis paralysis. I often don’t know the right thing to do next (if I did I wouldn’t ask myself the question). Taking actions leads to the accumulation of experience and judgement that then indicates for future similar circumstances what the right thing to do next is.
5. Again, I have begun to focus on the results of the whole venture and the desired expectations rather than just getting on with taking the steps and developing the ability to take better steps. From time to time I have to look up to see if I’m still headed in roughly the right direction, or, if not, to make sure that I like the direction that I’ve ended up traveling along. I have looked up recently and I feel off-track and don’t like some of the things in my current terrain. Now that I have done that I accept the misdirection and will just turn a little bit to go off in what I perceive is a better direction.
6. The most difficult path of progress to take is one that requires not just taking steps but also development of that walking process as you go along. Development requires experimentation and that means ‘wasted efforts’ as we refine our abilities. If we set ourselves productivity targets that depend upon poorly developed skills and experience then we set ourselves up to fail. The two are mostly incompatible. New skills lie at the edge of the ‘personally possible’ and until they become fully assimilated they will prove unreliable. Any attempt to depend upon them in productivity (or fulfilling desires in the moment) will likely fail more often than succeed in the early days of development. This has the effect of making us feel bad and also of changing our focus from what we can do to what we cannot do. When we focus on the personally impossible we grind to a halt. That’s a big difficulty for me right now. I have a great number of things to do and yet I have to slow thing down in order to learn the things and develop the skills that eventually lead to competency and hence unquestioned ability and finally, confident and sustained productivity.

So, I messed up a bit recently by not managing my desires and expectations with sufficient care and this brought me to a standstill where I felt bad and indulged in distractions and procrastinated. The good thing for me about this realization is that the cause and effect mechanisms that I searched so diligently for stand up to proof. By changing my thinking to implement the ‘opposites’ above I predict that I will immediately get back to high-productivity (and this blog post is the first proof of that).

I feel very pleased because I have developed robust theories about how the mind works and how emotions affect us that predict what will happen if desires are not controlled (as this whole article describes). I have developed methods of getting things done that work in harmony with these theories so that an individual no longer needs to spend great portions of his or her life responding to emotions and rarely fulfilling desires. I have found that these theories and methods work far better and far more precisely than anything that I have ever come across in the fields of religion, philosophy, psychology and personal-development. They do this because they focus on the root cause of problems, whereas almost everything else focuses on handling the symptoms of problems. Handling symptoms only leads to a barely controlled containment of the problem at best. It does not remove the problem so that we are free to get on with other things unhindered by negative emotions and our ineffective responses to the things that cause them.

I want to build a business that gives other people the benefits of the knowledge that I have and the great results that I now prove capable of achieving and could never do before. I want to build a business that teaches and trains people to perform at far higher levels than what they do now and it will be based upon sound principles, easy to understand and robust, because they deal with the fundamental root causes. What this now means is a change of pace and direction for me. I got into blogging not just so that I could spend my days writing but because I want to build this business. Blogging as the sole strategy for doing that is too limiting so I’m branching out into other ways of helping other people and making connections over the web. I’ll post fewer articles directly to this blog whilst I build up connections and traffic elsewhere but I will put up the links to the new content that I place elsewhere. That will introduce you to some new sites through which you can satisfy all manner of other queries and so I hope to bring even more value to you!

If you want more insights into better living then subscribe to my blog (use the orange button in the header bar above)

Related posts:

The Journey

The How To Do List