A garden in the dark

If you want to go to Venice, you won’t get there without a plane ticket (unless you’re traveling by boat). (Image by Paul Henri Degrande)

“I can’t get anyone to buy from me!”

“Did you ask anyone to buy from you? Did you offer them something to buy?”

“…No.”

I might chuckle about people missing these basics, except I know I’ve missed them, too. For example, I would always fall behind on my bookkeeping—like doing an entire year’s worth two weeks before the tax deadline—and I wondered why. The reason was incredibly simple: I wasn’t making any room on my schedule to do this work. Now I set aside ten minutes a day to update my books and budget, adding an hour at the start of each new month. The solution is so straightforward it’s embarrassing, but I really didn’t see it until I saw it.

A lot of the work we have to do doesn’t take willpower and it doesn’t take brains. We simply have to identify what it takes to get our desired result and make time to do it. The dread and angst melts away as a result of clear and obvious tasks made routine and anodyne.

If we don’t identify the necessary actions and schedule the time to do them, our project is like a garden in the dark. Despite all of the work of planting and watering we’ve done, what little we grow will be sickly and pallid.

When I taught guitar, there would always be people who dutifully showed up without having cracked their instrument case in between lessons. They’d be apologetic about it, and then a few months later they’d quit without having achieved their goal of learning to play. Why did they fail? Because they never actually played guitar. If you want to get better at guitar, you just have to play it. It really is that simple. If they had taken the guitar out of its case and played around for ten minutes before bed each night, they would have experienced enough progress and fun to keep them going. They made it more complicated than that, as so many of us do.

If we want someone to know how we feel, we can tell them. If don’t want dishes to pile up in the sink, we can empty the dishwasher first thing. If we want more time off, we have to plan for it. If we want the phone charger to work, we have to plug it in. We will be frustrated if we expect things to happen on their own.

Plants need light and people need a sense of progress. If we don’t feel it, we might need to look harder for evidence; if we don’t have it, we might need to do something differently. We may have overlooked something fundamental that, once restored, will change our results dramatically. I’m not promising that it will be easy to implement and follow through on the solution, but progress will be much easier once it’s in place. And when the results are clear and evident, motivation increases in a virtuous cycle that makes the work feel easier, too. The suffering will be over, and we’ll get to enjoy the fruits of our labor.