A bigger problem
I imagine that driving a car feels like a relief after driving a bus. (Image by Gordon Johnson)
I’ve talked to so many parents who say that they finally got organized and focused after they had a kid.
They had no time, so they had no time to waste. And that’s when they wrote their novel, started their business, or got sober.
The new parents weren’t just highly motivated to provide for their families. The additional logistical constraints forced them to use their resources more wisely.
I’ve observed this phenomenon on a smaller scale when it comes to learning new skills.
When I’m supposed to just hit the ball over the net in a tennis drill, I’m sloppy. When my instructor asks me to hit it up the alley, or cross court past the service line, my level of focus increases and I’m able to do the harder thing more easily.
When I ask a piano student to play a particular tricky rhythm with the metronome, the precision required forces her to count correctly.
And when the group of students is concentrating hard on tossing the ball to each other across the circle, adding a second ball intensifies their concentration. They actually perform better than they did with just one ball.
It used to feel so difficult to write a blog post every day. Now, I’m starting a new creative project in a new medium. It is so big and scary that writing for my blog doesn’t seem so hard any more. The work that I used to balk at doing is now the work that I use to procrastinate on doing the even harder work.
We don’t need to go out and look for a bigger problem to put our previous problems in perspective. Stuff comes up all the time in daily life, from mild inconvenience to mortal danger. We can see these challenges as an invitation to appreciate how easy life feels once we are free of them — or, if the more difficult circumstances become the status quo, to permanently increase our capacity.
That said, if we find ourselves whining over something we have to do and how harrrrd it is, we can intentionally up the ante. There are a few different ways we can do that.
We can set a goal that is big enough to be exciting, along with a commensurate reward. For example, I might set a revenue goal for my business and promise myself a celebratory international trip upon reaching it.
We can give ourselves a challenge tricky enough to be engaging. One day, my nephew refused to get dressed and was lounging around in his pajamas. I told him that I was setting a timer for one minute. Could he beat it? Twenty minutes of nagging was not enough to get him to put on real clothes, but the timer made it a game, and he instantly sprang into action.
Another option is to put ourselves through a training regimen designed to make our normal existence seem like a vacation. There’s nothing like getting home from a brutal workout on a Saturday morning to find an entire day of leisure ahead of you, well earned.
Of course, the flip side of giving ourselves a bigger problem is summed up by that Jim Gaffigan joke: “You know what it's like having five kids? Imagine you're drowning. And someone hands you a baby.” There’s a line between busy and overwhelmed, and we don’t always have to push ourselves to the limit. We need to allow ourselves time for rest and recovery — and if we happen to have five kids, we don’t need gratuitous obstacles.
Still, for those of us who have gotten a little too comfortable with what we’ve got going on, a bigger problem could be just the thing to stretch us toward growth. This approach can help us accomplish something that’s meaningful to us while building our strength and capability. And after we’ve tackled that problem, we might find that we have the appetite for even more.
