Mar/101
A Vow of Silence
I’ve always been a dreamer and I’ve always been a talker. Even as a youngin’ I’d blabber on about all the great ideas I had. Like a toy Ghostbuster’s trap that would actually open and light up when you stepped on the pedal. Boy was I sure sore when they came out with it and didn’t give me any credit. Lots of these big ideas have come and gone over the years. Lots of other people beat me to the punch because I wasn’t even swinging.
Having a great idea feels like having a secret: it wants to be shared. A pressure starts to well up inside me and it burst forth at the slightest indication that someone might listen. It’s occurred to me more than once that my plans seem to go better if I keep them to myself, but I never thought to ask why. I’m sure there’s some fluffy new-age explanation that ties in with The Secret™. Perhaps talking about an idea reduces the vibrational strength of my intention. I can’t keep it all straight.
Learning When to Shut Up
It seems like talking shit about plans instead of talking shit about results undermines my efforts in two ways: it increases the perceived pressure to succeed and it undermines motivation. The first one’s pretty obvious I think. The more people I tell about my awesome idea for a screenplay, the more pressure I feel to pump it out.
I hate being told what to do to a pathological degree. In fact, I’m so daft that I will actually infer demands and expectations that aren’t necessarily even real. If I think people expect something from me, my initial gut reaction is often to spite them by not doing it. I’ve gotten a lot better at avoiding and overcoming that reaction, but it certainly can take a toll.
As I mentioned, I like talking about my ideas. If you know me well, you’d probably qualify that with “a lot” (emphasis in original). By not blabbering on about my next big thing until I’ve done it, I actually feel more motivated to work so that I can eventually get back to talking about how awesome all of my thoughts and opinions really are. Of course, if I’m collaborating with someone we need to talk about next steps, but my mom, dad, girlfriend, drinking buddies, roommate’s dog, and blog reader (yep, you’re the only one) don’t need to know the gory details straight away.
On that note, I’m going to go work on this awesome project I just started. I’ll tell you about it later, when it’s done.
Sep/090
Greeting Ra – Update
7:24
After the better part of a month, I might actually have the hang of waking up when my alarm goes off. I’ve started the last phase of my trial by setting my alarm for 5:55 a.m. and getting out of bed before my daily wake-up call. The sequence has become fairly fixed: wake-up, shower, write. It’s not all smooth sailing though; I can be a tenaciously stubborn sonuvabitch.
I still don’t get to sleep early enough most of the time. Sometimes I get caught up reading blags on the interwebs, sometimes people talking through paper thin walls keep me up. Suffice it to say, my planned bedtime of 10:30 doesn’t happen on a frequent basis. That would be fine if I didn’t get tired around then, but I do. As a result, I have on more than one occasion gone back to bed after going through the sequence above for a quick nap before heading into work. Once or twice I failed to write.
A Great Success?
In my original post, I said that “doing something more with my time is the whole point of this exercise”. To get a little more specific, I wanted to change the structure of my daily routine, in a sustainable way, to yield a block of concentrated time for pursuing my own interests. Sounds dry, I know.
If you strictly adhere to the criteria for success indicated at the start of the experiment, then I’ve failed because I didn’t completely fulfill them: I haven’t gotten up and written every day. I say bollocks to that.
Having a clear definition of success and metrics to track your progress create motiviation and help you plan small, doable next steps. In the end though, metrics don’t count for shit, results do. My screenplay isn’t done yet, but (including discarded parts) I’ve written about a page a day. When my alarm goes off in the morning, I don’t feel the same visceral urge to get immediately back in bed. If I do go back to sleep at some point, it’s because I’ve weighed it as an option.
That’s a huge change from 24 days ago. I’ll take it.