A great Wyrm lurks inside you: patient, powerful, and cunning. It suffers no disobedience and works to maintain the world it dominates. Your world. For countless millennia this tyrant has lorded over its domain and it will not allow threats to its position, its safety, or its comfort. The beast sees your plans and dreams as nothing but an inconvenience at best and a challenge for supremacy at worst.
What chance do you or I have against this foe?
The Body of the Beast
Obviously, there's not really an ancient dragon living inside your skull. Still, it's an apt metaphor for that part of your brain which evolved to keep you alive long enough to reproduce. In Linchpin, Seth Godin talks about this concept at length as your "lizard brain" or "the resistance". No matter what you choose to call it, this pre-human force plays a big part in your life, whether you like it or not.
The idea that someone could have a fear of success always confused me. Why would you be afraid of realizing your dreams? At the root, it's not really a fear of success, it's a fear of change. In the time before modern civilization, change was a very dangerous thing. New approaches could get you killed, exiled, or beaten. In order to fulfill the prime biological directive (make babies), the safe play was the smart play.
In the modern world, failure doesn't usually get you killed or injured (unless you're into flying wingsuits). Still, hitting on that girl, starting that business, and delivering that speech all can draw the wrath of the dragon. People aren't afraid of success, people are afraid of risk. This is not some pathology of the modern age, it's a primal reaction.
Becoming a Dragonslayer
Like the knights of legend, you have no chance of besting the beast in single combat, not in the long term anyway. Willpower is not enough. You need some powerful magic to win this fight. Assuming that you don't have any particularly powerful wizards in your LinkedIn network, your going to need some better weapons.
Face Your Fears
When you get that knot in the pit of your stomach that holds you back, the Wyrm thinks you're going to do something stupid that might get you killed. Thinking about quitting your job to travel the world and write? There's obviously risk of failure and ruin there, it seems sensible to be afraid. So, pick something you want to do that frightens you. Got it?
Without getting into the absurd, imagine your absolute worst case scenario. Write it down, in detail. Now go watch a movie or something and come back when you're done. I'll wait...
Read what you wrote. Not that bad right? Even if your worst case scenario would make your life shitty for a little while, would it really impact your life in the long run? Is it as bad as being confined to a wheelchair for the rest of your life? A year afterwards, paraplegics have the same general degree of happiness as lottery winners. If your worst case is not at least as bad as that, then you don't have a leg to stand on (sorry, I had to).
Once you've accepted the possible consequences of failure, trying won't seem so scary. Prove that your plan really isn't that dangerous.
Improve Your Systems
When willpower fails, you fall back on habits and instincts. If it's all that you've got going for you when you try to accomplish something big, your willpower will fail and the dragon will drag you back to your old, safe habits. To achieve major personal goals, you need to get ahead of the game. Steve Pavlina as a really great article that goes into more depth, but basically you can tackle this on two fronts: your environment and your habits.
Change your environment to make it more conducive to your goals. If you're trying to lose weight, take a day and get rid of all the bad foods in your house, replacing them with healthier alternatives. If you're trying to become more productive, turn off your phone and disable email notifications on your computer while you're working. You get the idea.
Changing your habits can be tougher, but committing to a 30 day trial is a great way to test out a change and see how it could work in your life. Common wisdom holds that it generally takes between 20 and 30 days to change a particular habit and your willpower probably won't hold out for that long, so it can be important to make environmental changes in support of changing a habit.
By making your environment more supportive of your goals, you reduce the amount of willpower you need to keep making progress. By changing your habits, you create a safety net that keeps you from undoing your work when things get tough.
Take Heart
Overcoming a part of yourself that seems to hold you back is a tremendous challenge, one that will probably last as long as you live. If you want a life of your own choosing instead of taking the easy path, it's a battle you must fight. I am not yet a dragonslayer, but I will work tirelessly towards that end.
If you have any thoughts, suggestions, or war stories, leave a comment. I'd love to hear them.
7:18
My head feels foggy and my bed looks warm. On a workday, I usually wake up around 9:30. Why then do I sit writing, having awoke at 6:00?
Time.
I've often heard the lament that the day has too few hours in it. And while, short of sleep deprivation, you or I can't make more time, we can make more effective use of the time we have. In this regard, getting up early creates a lot of bang for your buck. Having an uninterrupted block of time, while still fresh from a good night's sleep, will give me the opportunity to pursue numerous goals. That's the idea anyway.
Both yesterday and today I forced myself up at 6:00 and groggily made my way through the shower and into the waking world. It takes a strong will for me to resist the temptation to crawl back into bed for a few more hours. Without proper structure, this will not last.
The What, The Why, The How, and The When
I assume you already have some familiarity with the who.
Starting tomorrow (Aug. 26), I will wake up at 6:00 a.m. every day for 30 days, thus creating a new behavior I can use to pursue other goals. I will, upon awakening to my alarm, immediately get out of bed, engage in some physical exertion, and then head to the shower. The inability to consistently wake up early has given me trouble since before I can remember, so I want to get downright Pavlovian with this. As soon as the alarm rings, I should get out of bed without thinking and start my routine.
The notion that I (or anyone) could become so conditioned used to irritate me to no end. I had a deep belief in my free will and capacity to choose, which this sort of conditioning threatened. I realize now that this very reaction reflected my conditioning. Importantly, it was conditioning that I hadn't chosen or consented to.
I still deeply believe in my capacity to choose (I no longer think the quesiton of free will has any weight), but I know that I don't always have the ability to make good, informed decisions in the moment. Since I will have them one way or another, consciously cultivating my set of conditioned responses allows me to exercise choice ahead of time. Then, when the moment comes where I don't have time to choose, I can fall back on my reactions and trust the correctness of my response.
Since doing something more with my time is the whole point of this exercise, I will spend an hour every morning working on a screenplay I've wanted to write for some time, Dead West. It's a zombie thriller set in the old west. Why do that instead of just heading into the office earlier? I enjoy writing, and at the end of the month I'll have a significant accomplishment to show for my efforts. More positive reinforcement. While I have a pretty cool job, it's still a job and spending my newly carved out block of time on it would make me much less likely to succeed. Once I've soundly established the habit of getting up early, I can try and head in an hour or two earlier as needed.
Overwhelming Force
So far, I've neglected to mention one key player in my plan: my sister. What I laid out above sounds solid enough, and for some people with greater reserves of willpower, it might serve. As I've explained in the past, I have almost no willpower. To tip the odds in my favor, my sister will call me every day just before 6:00 and get my lazy ass out of bed. Since she already gets up early, I'm able to piggyback on her good habit to improve my bad habit.
My original plan was to hire someone in India to call me and start doing a bad Arnold Schwarzenegger impression. I think this will work better.
If you want more info on waking up early, check out Steve Pavlina's How to Become an Early Riser article.