In each of our minds is a gradient of activities, ranging from things we definitely won’t do (finance a Ferrari), things we’ll definitely do (drink water today), and everything else in between. There’s something special about those things at the extremes, the things we will and won’t definitely do. It’s nearly impossible that theey won’t be as predicted. Can we use that to our advantage?
It’s not that we won’t lease Ferraris because we don’t want to. It would be a lot of fun to get a Ferrari, at least until I ran out of money and it got repossessed. We don’t do it because we’ve drawn a hard line somewhere shy of that sort of expense. I’ll buy an apple without thinking about it, a new camera after a bunch of thought and research, but a Ferrari is so contrary to my goals that it never gets thought about.
When we consider something to be impossible, by our own standards at least, not doing it becomes easy. When we consider something impossible not to do, doing it becomes easy. We get to bypass the whole thought loop of should-I-or-shouldn’t-I, which invites temptation to the bargaining table.
The trick is to take things that don’t have an impossible component to them and build that in. There are two ways to do that.
The first is to create devastating consequences for failure. In isolation, it doesn’t really matter if I don’t write a blog post. Because I know that failure isn’t that bad, it’s easy to convince myself that I shouldn’t write today. It’s late, I’m uninspired, I don’t feel like it. To add devastating consequences, Sebastian and I put $10,000 on the line. If either of us fails to write every day for the next two years, we pay the other $10,000. That’s devastating. As a result, though, there’s no bargaining with myself. What could my internal monologue say? Don’t write this post– I’ll pay ten thousand dollars to avoid the discomfort of coming up with a topic? That’s so absurd that it’s impossible. So I write every day without much fuss or stress. It’s impossible for me not to.
The other way to build impossibility in is to change your mind about something. I used to treat weekends like the weekly vacations most people see them as, until I thought about how arbitrary that was. Should I always take three day weekends? One? None? When I thought about my goals and priorities, I realized that I didn’t need weekends. In fact, they were incompatible with my view on how my life should be. Now my internal monologue is on my side. If someone tried to make me take weekends, temptation would push me to skip them. When logic and temptation agree, it’s impossible to disobey them.
In general, my MO is to try to do as many hard things as possible, and make it as easy as I can to do them. I work from both ends, increasing my capacity to push myself while simultaneously trying to make each thing I push myself to do easier. As best I know, that’s how you compress a lot into one lifetime. With so many mental directives and habits, one of the key tools I have is to clear mental clutter and free up willpower by making undesirable actions impossible.
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Photo is the tidepools at the island. Heading out there tomorrow!
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