Interesting thought: what if flakiness is just another form of Resistance?
I’ve chosen to equate flakiness with Attention Deficit Disorder, which has afflicted (and blessed) me since childhood. When ADD makes achieving anything so much harder, it’s not surprising that Resistance has an easier time defeating us. We give in to it by procrastinating or just plain giving up because that hill seems insurmountable.
But what if you could climb it one step at a time? Baby steps, right? Of course that works, and is probably the only way anything significant gets done. The problem for us flakes is maintaining focus–or reattaining it over and over–long enough to reach the top.
To go back to the same goal again and again is not how we roll, usually. We lose interest before the goal is achieved. Something else attracts and excites us and we drop the ball in our hand and reach for the shiny new one. (Eek–mixed metaphor!)
So how can we work with what we have, our flaky ADD brain, to stay excited about that long-term goal that we really want? It can be done. I’ve spent a huge portion of my life thinking I was a failure and a loser, but I have managed to amaze myself a few times (thereby giving me confidence that I can do it again):
- I went from waitress to network correspondent in four years of sustained effort.
- I wrote a Kindle book (about, of all things, getting shit done) in thirty days.
- I decided to become a full-time vandweller over a year ago, and here I am.
What do these achievements have in common? Desire. To sustain focus, or keep regaining it, over a long enough period of time to achieve a long-term goal, you have to REALLY want it. Bad.
Desire is what keeps you coming back to it time after time, after you’ve given up hope, after you’ve run off to follow another goal. But this thing, this dream, keeps pulling you back. You go back to Craigslist or Amazon again and again to look at what you’re dreaming of just one more time. You can’t help reading books and articles about it. You daydream about it constantly.
“I’m just wasting time,” you tell yourself. But what you’re doing, if you choose to use it, is reigniting your excitement for the dream, motivating yourself to keep it alive for just one more day.
Keep doing that. Then act on it, just a little bit, every day.
And you’ll be amazed too.
