The Impossible task

I mentioned in the last article that the three step process to changing your life is:

1. Visualize how your life could be better

2. Figure out what you need to do in order to accomplish that.

3. Commit yourself to doing it.

Numbers 1 and 3 are fairly straight forward, but number 2 can create some problems. Obviously, if it were as easy as simply figuring out what we needed to do we would have done it already!  The problem here lies in our innate human habit of overcomplicating large tasks. We tend to look at the final outcome as our main task instead of concentrating on the preliminary goals. I’ll give you an example that I’m sure everyone can relate to.

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you were faced with a large sink full of dishes that you were responsible for cleaning? Now, if you’re anything like me, the very thought of having to wash a sink full of dishes is enough to ruin your entire day. You dwell on it, you think about how annoying it is, and you put it off as long as you possibly can. This used to drive my roommate crazy as I would often leave my sink full of dishes for days on end, always consoling myself from this burden by pushing the task into a perpetual “I’ll just do them later” status. Of course after a while, either because of the stench, the need to use your dishes, or in my case, the wrath from your roommate, you push yourself kicking and screaming into the kitchen to do your goddamn dishes. Such is life. However! What if there was no negative reinforcement pushing you to do those dishes? No roommate, no need of dishes, no stench, no burden, would you still do them? Probably not.

In life, there are no negative reinforcements to drive us to obtaining our goals aside from our own discontent, and even that can be subdued quite easily. It’s quite easy to put our dreams on the back burner while we pretend to take care of the things that ARE giving us negative reinforcement. So how are we supposed to motivate ourselves to embark on this impossible task of obtaining our dreams? Before I answer that I want to relate to you the best advice I’ve ever received.

Being in the business of giving advice it’s not hard for me to look back and truly discern what has been some of the best advice given to me. I’ve realized now that the best advice given to me was actually something I had learned in driving school. I asked my instructor “What do we do if a moose jumps in front of us on the highway?” (a very real threat driving in Canada!) My teacher said “Look away from it, because you move in the direction you’re looking at.”

You move in the direction you’re looking. That’s the truest thing there is about life, and its the answer to the question I proposed. If we give ourselves a goal and we keep focusing on it, working on it like a problem bit by bit, then eventually we solve it. That’s the way the human mind works and its the reason we have what we have in the world today. To go back to the dish scenario proposed earlier, the easiest way to motivate yourself to do those dishes isn’t to think of having to do a WHOLE sink full of dishes, it’s to tell yourself to only do one dish, commit to it, and once you’re there focusing on washing that one dish, it’s not hard to do one more, and then one more and so on.

I’ll end this article with a story my father told me a when I was a little kid that illustrates this idea of how to handle an impossible task. As a teenager he had wanted a motorcycle very badly for a long time and his father, knowing this, eventually got him one for his birthday, however, he didn’t just give it to him. A few days after his birthday his father took him out to the garage and told him that he needed him to do something for him. Inside the garage was a motorcycle that he told my father he needed to be taken apart, everything, screw by screw. It took my father 3 long days but he eventually had the motorcycle completely disassembled. When his father came back to check on his work, he looked everything over, nodded and said “Ok, put it all back together and its yours.”

It took him 2 years to put that motorcycle back together. Now you may think that what his father did was cruel but even my father admits now it was the best lesson he’s ever been taught, not only did he never have to rely upon a mechanic again, but he also learned a valuable life lesson: that even the most impossible tasks are achievable if you keep working at them, one screw at a time…