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You are what you repeatedly do. The path of least resistance
What you repeatedly do because it is the path of least resistance is called habits.
And just like water will not willingly flow uphill… habits, what you do, is difficult to change.
And yet… we want a different life. We want to feel differently about ourselves. And we want a different body, different work, different relationships.
But what keeps everything the same is the glue:
When push comes to shove you’ll go on the path of least resistance… meaning you habits kick in.
For some people earlier than for others.
In the Completion Challenge people are (supposedly!) working on attempting to complete incidents, ideas, unfinished business.
The guide to it, at this point, is the ‘incomplete cycles’ document I have started 36 years ago. It’s been a habit of mine to occasionally complete one of those on the list… while other people would, by the path of least resistance, sweep it under the rug, and not deal with it.
The items on the list are really all encompassing…
One of them is ‘Things I wanted to experience and never did’
It takes real work, it takes real awareness to complete those things you didn’t do, didn’t have, never BEEN.
But if you don’t, they suck the energy out of your life… and you don’t even know what is killing you.
The more incompletions you have the less energy you have for life. The less your life can work.
Because, in some weird way, incompletions are all out of integrity… And without integrity nothing can work.
And although the list comes form a course that was called ‘More Time Workshop‘ that could have been called more accurately ‘Be more productive!’ workshop…
I am certain that back in 1987 I didn’t even know the word ‘integrity’… even though I worked on integrity, diligently, through that course… for years.
For me that was the best course ever, and probably the most impactful.
I was an architect when I did the course… and was a magazine publisher a year later. And that magazine had a good run: I ran it for 11 years until I was too ill to do it.
But I pulled out from all the sinkholes with what I developed back in 1987-1988 through that program.
And just so you know, the course was one day and an evening session… It cost $250… A puny sum compared to the Return on Investment for me.
Productivity, in any area, is a function of habits. Habits in thinking. Habits in doing. And, of course, habits in everything.
The framework of that course was what I used to DEVELOP habits that have been serving me ever since.
One of the most important habit I have developed is this:
I envision a result. Not a flash of brilliance… no, I actually spend time seeing it. And seeing at least some of the path to getting to it.
I work, mentally, on about 10 different visions… and maybe act on one of those…
So just because I have a vision, I won’t necessarily act on it.
Some of them may be business related, but not necessarily.
If you don’t use the capacity of seeing, the capacity of envisioning, the capacity or forging a path, you won’t ever be able to move from where you are to where you could be.
If you think that it will happen just because you can see it, you misunderstand the memes: seeing is crucial, as is taking the appropriate steps.
Seeing is the most important capacity for humans… and many are blind…
Helen Keller astutely said: The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision
When I look at my students, clients, readers, this is the biggest missing.
And when I look what is there that blocks having vision, I see one thing… that is surprising: your about-me score.
A vision, unfortunately, needs to be greater than your self-interest… or it is not a vision.
For the most part it needs to include a problem that is not yours, or not entirely yours… and unless you can feel others’ pain, others’ need, you won’t have a vision.
And that takes us to the entirely human capacity that is completely atrophied for today’s humans. The capacity that empathy, compassion, entrepreneurship, etc. are built on: the ability to see the world through another’s eyes.
I call that capacity Driftwood… stupid sounding name, but very astute.
Imagine yourself being a driftwood on a river. You are surrounded by other driftwood like yourself. You feel hemmed in… there is no place to go, unless the others go too.
But if you looked from the side of the river, up on the banks of the river, you would see that you are in the middle of a cluster of driftwood, and the rest of the river is free of obstacles… So you could nudge your way out of your predicament, and actually go…
That second perspective is what’s missing. I have it open 70%. But to my dismay, only one of my students has it 10% open… the rest… never even attempted to open it.
I suspect that they cannot even fathom that they, and their circumstances look different from the side, even though they hear me telling them… but they don’t believe me.
Even leaving the comfortable place of seeing the world and themselves through their own eyes is too scary to take the leap…
It feels like dying. It feels like falling into the abyss. So they don’t do it.
They don’t want to see what can only be seen from the side… Not about themselves, not about the world.
I say, and I might be wrong in YOUR case, but what I see: there is lack of trust.
You don’t trust yourself. You don’t trust life. Because you are unwilling, even for a moment, to be without… You are stingy. You are greedy. And you are a taker.
And for trust to be there you need to be, at least some of the time, a giver for no selfish reason. At least partially…
I am not saying to have no selfish reasons… I am saying to have ONLY selfish reasons, robs you of a full life, of vision, of trust, of a life worth living.
Through every generation of the human race there has been a constant war, a war with fear. Those who have the courage to conquer it are made free and those who are conquered by it are made to suffer until they have the courage to defeat it, or death takes them. ~ Alexander the Great
But acting on fear is a habit.
Really. And can only be conquered with the methods that habits can be conquered.
And the way to go about it comes also from Alexander the Great:
there is nothing impossible to him who will try
Mind you, not try, the way my students use the word. Alexander’s try is more ‘go for it’ that YOUR try… Your try, if you actually looked from the side, looks like doing nothing. Not doing.
You didn’t go for it.
You think I have never ‘tried’, pretended, lied, ran a racket?
But not habitually. And that is the difference.
I occasionally act on my fear… I occasionally run a racket. And I occasionally justify, avoid, blah blah blah.
But NOT habitually. When I even just notice choosing the path of least resistance, I stop and course-correct.
But I notice it because I have identified the trigger… fear, comfort, not wanting to rock the boat, not wanting to take the responsibility.
Now, many books have been written about habits, all useless in my humble opinion.
Why? Because knowing about habits, knowing about stuff is useless.
And more importantly: the habits you’ll start dealing with through those books are the visible habits… the fruits of a poisonous tree.
What is underneath each habit is a narrow cone of vision, a ‘it’s all about me‘ self-concern, entitlement and massive desire to avoid any responsibility.
So unless you start dealing with those habits, nothing else will matter. Not.a.thing.
In the three challenges, Reality, Reframing, Completion, the goal, MY goal has been to lead you to see your habitual way of being, to start owning it, and to start looking for ways to not have them continue to control your life.
The process works for some, and doesn’t work for others.
The more you are a ‘smart rat’, the less it works. Smart rats are avoiding kings and queens. And avoiding is the real enemy… whether it is fueled by fear or fueled by greed.
Avoiding is also a habit.
Some avoid by lying. Some avoid by making themselves blind, deaf, foggy, stupid. The most harmful is ‘wanting to avoid getting caught’ that you are lying, cheating, making airs instead of a life.
So if you wanted to take on a skill
So if you wanted to take on a skill that is more useful than typing faster, or learning ChatGPT, or falling asleep faster, you may want to go to all the way to the root: to avoiding. As a habit.
And work on that. However long it takes. Every 1% can count if you build on that.
According to some calculations I haven’t checked, if you get 1% better a day while retaining the previous gains, at the end of the year you’ll get four times better.
Does it take a year to change the avoidance habit? It probably does.
Is it worth paying $5 a week to be kept accountable? What do you think? Can you think of anything that you would want but now can’t have?
Think of that, and then make your decision.
I used that $250 course for three years to lift myself from no power, nothing to owning a successful business. But the first year was the most crucial: I needed to change a ton of habits… and I did. And then I maintained them.
Would I have been willing to pay someone $5 a week to keep me straight? Yeah.
And just so you know, that $250 at today’s prices is $625… so yeah, it would have paid for all that.
Pick the habit of avoidance to change in the skill challenge
PS: What if you don’t learn to change the habit? If all your life you live in fear, and you live in ‘I should have’
I have a current example, mine.
I live on the second floor of a house the owner bought some 40 years ago. He used to live in the apartment I live in, but left and bought a house to live in some 35 years ago.
He now would like to get rid of the house. But he doesn’t want to be a landlord any more.
I am not strong enough to move… maybe ever.
He doesn’t want to throw me out… after all I am an old woman. But he is, ultimately, waiting for me to die. But since he has decided that, I have gotten better, much better. Still not able to move, but not dying either.
In the meantime raccoons moved into the walls… and maybe into the attic as well.
I SHOULD tell him, I should warn him, but I am afraid he will tell me to get out… or something like that.
And here I am, writing this article, and my insides are weeping. Miserable…
And I only have one ‘should’ I have been avoiding. Maybe two. How many do YOU have?
PPS: I found a report I wrote almost ten years ago…
it’s a PDF… Do you want it?
I’ll send it out to every person who subscribes to my mailing list. Please know: I send out an email every day. Some, few days, two.
If you are not a subscriber, you can subscribe now.
