Desperate measures

One surprising facet of complete flakery is perfectionism.

People like us don’t get shit done because we set impossibly high goals. We give up before we start, or very early on, because we know we can never achieve the vision we see in our heads. Letting go of perfectionism ain’t easy but when you want something badly enough, you’re willing to take desperate measures. The memoir I’ve supposedly been working on has become stuck in my head. I am so afraid of not getting the words exactly right that I’ve procrastinated day after day away. “I’ll start tomorrow morning, first thing.” “I’ll write on the bus.” “I’ll get to it tonight.”

Yeah, that never works.

I came across a book called Mini Habits: Smaller Habits, Bigger Results by Stephen Guise, that proposes setting “stupid small” goals that are so easy you can’t NOT do them. So yesterday, I set myself a goal of writing just ten words. That’s all. If I could do that, I would consider the day a success.

Well, it took all day to work up the nerve but around 11 o’clock last night, I finally started on my ten words. And wrote several hundred.

Which is the whole point of Mini Habits: once you start, you’ll probably keep going. Without the pressure of HAVING to keep going, you can relax and let go of all the negative self-talk that winds up making you even more averse to doing the task at hand.

Maybe this is the answer that will get my book (and more in the future) finally written. I hope so.

What “stupid small” goal can you set for yourself today?

p.s. Yeah, that’s an affiliate link up there. If you click it and buy, I’ll make a few pennies.