You're gonna have to actually do something

You have the tools to make things — and to make things happen. (Image by cm_dasilva)

It’s a pretty standard assignment: You read a chapter and then answer questions about it.

Most of the time, you won’t remember what you read well enough to discuss it if you read it only once. You have to take notes and refer to them. You might need to read the chapter, or parts of it, more than once.

Yet my students resist this reality. They attempt to answer the questions off the top of their head, as though the knowledge is already in their long-term memory. This results in all kinds of weird, off-the-mark responses that leave me scratching my head in confusion until I realize what the problem is.

If we want to grow — if we want to learn something or change an aspect of ourselves — we’ve got to actually make a move. We can’t be like the kid who tries to write the research paper without doing any research. We have to actually do something.

The thing that we do doesn’t have to be some dramatic hero’s journey. It doesn’t have to require pain or intensity or trying hard against all odds. It takes a moment of discomfort as you decide to do the thing, then something like three to thirty minutes while you actually do it. Done.

We fight against these actions because they compete with our self-concept.

“If I have to read it again, that must mean I’m stupid.”

“I’m trying so hard already! How can I possibly try harder?”

“It’s already too late. I’m just going to mess it up like always. What’s the point?”

With our unwillingness to break things down, we’re like Lane Meyer in Better off Dead, who simply wrote “DO HOMEWORK” on a piece of paper that he later folded some chewing gum into. We’ve made the work into a mountain we’re trying to magically leap to the top of, so of course we fail.

What I learned from good old David Allen is that you can’t really do a project — you can only do tasks related to a project. And those tasks are always physical actions that are recognizable to a child: Write the email. Make the phone call. Make a list. Attend the meeting. Mundane, ordinary, uncomfortable — nothing dramatic or heroic at all. Doable.

A lot of the necessary tasks on the road to competence and excellence are not that fun or interesting. They wouldn’t look good in a movie training montage and they aren’t going to be in the part of your memoir that you read aloud at your book signing. They almost seem like tasks that you could skip — except that these everyday challenges are the foundation of your greater accomplishments and the training ground for your grit.

So instead of proclaiming to the world how hard we work and how much we try, let’s just practice doing the next boring thing on the list…and then the next, and the next.

There is risk involved. Maybe we’ll get less sympathy and less attention — or maybe people will start actually expecting things of us. Maybe we’ll have to acknowledge that we can do the things we claimed we couldn’t do, and then we’ll have to do something even harder. Maybe we’ll put our full effort into something and still struggle.

But the upside is that we might start to feel really amazing about ourselves and discover capabilities we never realized that we possessed. We might do more than we ever thought we could, and have more fun along the way.

At the very least, we might get the boring tasks out of the way and make room for more interesting ones. And we might discover that we have a lot more control than we had previously believed over which tasks we get to do and the impact that we get to make in the world. We might just wander into our hero’s journey after all — complete with upbeat training montage.

What tasks do you balk at? What might you have to do differently in order to actually get them done? What could be holding you back? Feel free to share in the comments.