Not every problem in life requires overwhelming force applied to it, but I find that the best way to resolve issues that keep cropping up is to go totally overboard and crush them completely.
I used to always try to post blog posts in the beginning of the week. Then that soft deadline slid to the middle of the week. Recently I’ve had a few too many weeks where I was scrambling to get something posted over the weekend.
This is only really a problem because it annoys me, but in my world that’s enough to do something drastic about it.
My solution isn’t to reset the deadline or to block out time to write blog posts. Those would be incremental solutions and would likely erode over time. Instead I have decided to write an entire year’s worth of posts in two weeks and to queue them up.
I am considering doing this every six months so that eventually I will have many years of posts ready to go. Of course, I will still have posts about current projects, discoveries, and thoughts. These prewritten posts are simply to provide me with such a large backlog of good posts that I will never miss a deadline again.
If I keep this habit up, it also means that my blog could live on for years after I die, which is a strangely exciting idea.
This is how I’ve solved a lot of persistent problems. I was chronically shy and bad at talking to girls, so I dedicated a year to pickup and learned from the best in the world, going out nearly every night. I wasn’t happy with my diet, so I took more than a year off from any sugar or flour or other unhealthy food. I hadn’t traveled as much as I thought I should have, so I sold everything and went around the world for nine months. I was worried about my poor work habits, so I forced myself to work like crazy for about three years. I wasn’t doing my marketing tasks on CruiseSheet so I forbade myself from working on anything that didn’t produce revenue.
How do you know when a problem is a good candidate for crushing? Pick something that has bothered you for years and that you’ve tried to solve with more reasonable methods. There’s no point in putting in huge effort to crush some problem that could be adequately fixed with a small tweak.
Design a solution that leaves absolutely no possibility of failure. Burn bridges if necessary. When I traveled, I sold everything. I’m writing five posts a day for ten days. I’ve never written that much before, but I know it’s possible, so I give myself no excuse not to do it.
(This was the 11th post I wrote and, ironically, is the last one from that batch. Next week’s post will be from the next year of posts I wrote)
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Photo is the cutest dog I’ve ever seen. I don’t like dogs and have probably never even taken a picture of a dog before. This little guy was in Taiwan.
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