Maybe I don’t need to do everything
It’s been more than a year now I’ve been struggling to write. I’ve had a stew going on in my head full of ideas for a while now. But halfway through stirring the pot, I start realising maybe the stew should just be a side dish to the steak that I should start focussing on. So I plan for the steak. The stew slowly fades into the background. I clear the kitchen area and prepare for the impending mise en place routine. While chopping the garlic, I realise how making dessert would be a greater challenge since that’s something I’d never done before. Okay this analogy is running a bit deeper than I thought. But this workflow of shifting requirements is a shallow rendition of how my brain prioritises what I should be doing for my side projects.
Since the time I got done with my slacker years in college, I’ve always had this fascination for being able to do a multitude of things. Through the next couple of years I was able to carve some time out, usually on weekends, to pursue some pet projects. I tried dabbling in things like making music, writing about movies, getting handy with some DIY maker things and working on some interactive web stuff. These activities worked out as a healthy escape from the weekday routine and at times allowed me to switch off for a while as a means to reboot by the coming Monday.
But as time went on, it became harder to start a project or an activity. Because I’d already start pegging expectations on it. And sadly, most of the time it was something as inane as “Would this actually get enough likes on social media?”. The priorities for doing certain things start getting more and more obfuscated. And the justification I would give myself is that I don’t wan’t to half ass anything. Either I do it well or I don’t. And that All or nothing attitude started sounding the death knell for all the plans I had.
This in turn goes into this cyclic thought process of what needs to come first: motivation or action? That dwindling motivation becomes a slippery slope where you tell yourself that you’re too tired to actively participate in something other than the usual weekday work. Which inevitably leads to the final brick wall, “What’s the point of all this anyway? Not like it’d make a difference.”. I grow a Nietzsche moustache and twirl it while isolated by my nihilistic thought.
And that, friends, is how you murder motivation. (or action…i think)
Fetch that bottle from the fridge, tear open the bag of salty goodness and switch on some Netflix. It’s time to get passive!
On one such downhill tumble, I decided to rewatch the documentary Free Solo. (Rewatching, so my brain doesn’t have to process new things). For the uninitiated, Free Solo is a documentary about a climber who attempts to conquer a 3000 foot rock (El Capitan) sans ropes. (Highly recommended watching it!)
Somehow every viewing of that movie gets me pumped. I start feeling the need to find my metaphorical wall and scale it. Ironically, the thought pops up while I’m fishing my hand through the second pack of cheesy nacho chips. So most of these thoughts stop being grounded in reality from all the dopamine rush my brain gets bombarded with.
But there’s one problem here. Free Solo stresses on how that singular focus is what drives Alex Honnold to achieve what was earlier thought to be impossible. That tunnel vision where the peripherals blur into nullity, in order to have that razor sharp focus on the one thing that lies ahead.
Meanwhile I’ve been driving through one tunnel, thinking about the light at the end of the other tunnel and the road quality + lighting that’s far more superior in the third tunnel. I really craved for the type of focus that Alex had in Free Solo.
So like any fellow human, I went down the path of googling How do I achieve greater focus?. Read tonnes of self help. Kept Cal Newports book Deep Work on a pedestal, as if it were the bible. Started meditation. Started using pomodoro in EVERYTHING i do. Threatened to quit social media several times. Read up 3 days on nootropics.
It worked. For a bit. But i realised the problem didn’t lie with my ability to focus. A surprising discovery considering the attention economy that we live in now.
The problem was that I wanted to do so many things, that I wasn’t ready to give up on any. And the worst was, the reason I wanted to do them. A lot of the skills that I was aiming to pile up on my personal résumé was purely to gain some social cred. It wasn’t motivated from what I exactly wanted. It relied more on seeking external validation of what people would think I should be. And hence I started focussing on being that person, instead of the one I wanted to be.
Did Alex Honnold give two shits about what people thought about him scaling El Cap. Maybe? Not like I can get inside his head. Although it didn’t look he was doing it for any external validation. It was more of a milestone that was set internally. For himself. By himself.
In this day and age of social living where our lives are judged by the highlight reels that we put up online, it gets very easy to lose that sense of self. The way your identity gets moulded is the basis of a lot of your actions. I’m in no way saying that you need to give up society, go into the woods and pull off your own version of Into the wild. It’s just that we sometimes really need to think harder about what WE want.
Now, if you’re like me, there’s probably a laundry list of things that you feel your future self should accomplish. And since we’re ever so optimistic about the future, our future versions usually end up being the ripped, rich and super skilled versions of ourself. Well that’s what led to the whole study behind what’s called Affective Forecasting.
But a better way I found to tackle this issue of wanting to do too many things, is probably to rephrase the question itself. Since I was used to asking myself “What all can I do?”, it was always met with this myriad of possibilities that end up taking more and more space on that optimistic to do list.
But clutching the principles of minimalism a bit closer towards logic, I started asking “What do I really need to do?”. Okay, to be honest, that might sound a lot more philosophical than what was intended. But the idea being to understand what is truly essential amidst the things we want to do. Cause there’s no point in wanting to do everything and overloading yourself. Put under the pressure of achieving constantly without actually having the time to appreciate yourself for doing that.
The idea is to eliminate things from that list as much as possible to the point where you realise…”yeah that’s all I think I need”. And yes, this is easier said than done. Cause each decision to say no to something, is quite a sacrifice. But that sacrifice comes at the cost of you being able to focus more on the things that mean something.
Before you go all “So basically you just reiterated Marie Kondo?”, please don’t!
