It’s
called the “do-something principle.”
Strelka
Institute for Media, Architecture and
Design/flickr
This post is an excerpt from “THE
SUBTLE ART OF NOT GIVING A F*CK: A Counterintuitive Approach to
Living a Good Life“ by Mark Manson.
In 2008, after holding down a day job for all of six weeks, I
gave up on the whole job thing to pursue an online business.
At the time, I had absolutely no clue what I was doing, but I
figured if I was going to be broke and miserable, I might as well
be while working on my own terms. And at that time, all I seemed
to really care about was chasing girls. So f-ck it, I decided to
start a blog about my crazy dating life.
That first morning that I woke up self-employed, terror quickly
consumed me. I found myself sitting with my laptop and realized,
for the first time, that I was entirely responsible for all of my
own decisions, as well as the consequences of those decisions. I
was responsible for teaching myself web design, Internet
marketing, search engine optimization, and other esoteric topics.
It was all on my shoulders now.
And so I did what any 24-year-old who’d just quit his job and had
no idea what he was doing would do: I downloaded some computer
games and avoided work like it was the Ebola virus.
As the weeks went on and my bank account turned from black to
red, it was clear that I needed to come up with some sort of
strategy to get myself to put in the twelve-or fourteen-hour days
that were necessary to get a new business off the ground. And
that plan came from an unexpected place.
When I was in high school, my math teacher Mr. Packwood used to
say, “If you’re stuck on a problem, don’t sit there and think
about it; just start working on it. Even if you don’t know what
you’re doing, the simple act of working on it will eventually
cause the right ideas to show up in your head.”
During that early self-employment period, when I struggled every
day, completely clueless about what to do and terrified of the
results (or lack thereof), Mr. Packwood’s advice started
beckoning me from the recesses of my mind. I heard it like a
mantra:
Don’t just sit there. Do something. The answers will
follow.
In the course of applying Mr. Packwood’s advice, I learned a
powerful lesson about motivation. It took about eight years for
this lesson to sink in, but what I discovered, over those long,
grueling months of bombed product launches, laughable advice
columns, uncomfortable nights on friends’ couches, overdrawn bank
accounts, and hundreds of thousands of words written (most of
them unread), was perhaps the most important thing I’ve ever
learned in my life:
Action isn’t just the effect of motivation; it’s also the
cause of it.
If
you want to accomplish something but don’t feel motivated, you
might wrongly assume you’re screwed.
Greg
Whalin/Flickr
Most of us commit to action only if we feel a certain level of
motivation. And we feel motivation only when we feel enough
emotional inspiration. We assume that these steps occur in a sort
of chain reaction, like this:
Emotional inspiration → Motivation → Desirable action
If you want to accomplish something but don’t feel motivated or
inspired, then you assume you’re just screwed. There’s nothing
you can do about it. It’s not until a major emotional life event
occurs that you can generate enough motivation to actually get
off the couch and do something.
The thing about motivation is that it’s not only a three-part
chain, but an endless loop:
Inspiration → Motivation → Action → Inspiration → Motivation
→ Action → Etc.
Your actions create further emotional reactions and inspirations
and move on to motivate your future actions. Taking advantage of
this knowledge, we can actually reorient our mindset in the
following way:
Action → Inspiration → Motivation
If you lack the motivation to make an important change in
your life, do something — anything, really — and then harness the
reaction to that action as a way to begin motivating
yourself.
I call this the “do something” principle. After using it myself
to build my business, I began teaching it to readers who came to
me perplexed by their own VCR questions: “How do I apply for a job?” or
“How do I tell this guy I want to be his girlfriend?” and the
like.
During the first couple years I worked for myself, entire weeks
would go by without my accomplishing much, for no other reason
than that I was anxious and stressed about what I had to do, and
it was too easy to put everything off. I quickly learned, though,
that forcing myself to do something, even the most menial of
tasks, quickly made the larger tasks seem much easier.
If I had to redesign an entire website, I’d force myself to sit
down and would say, “Okay, I’ll just design the header right
now.” But after the header was done, I’d find myself moving on to
other parts of the site. And before I knew it, I’d be energized
and engaged in the project.
The author Tim Ferriss relates a story he once heard about a
novelist who had written over 70 novels. Someone asked the
novelist how he was able to write so consistently and remain
inspired and motivated. He replied, “Two hundred crappy words per
day, that’s it.” The idea was that if he forced himself to write
two hundred crappy words, more often than not the act of writing
would inspire him; and before he knew it, he’d have thousands of
words down on the page.
If we follow the “do something” principle, failure feels
unimportant. When the standard of success becomes merely
acting — when any result is regarded as progress and important,
when inspiration is seen as a reward rather than a prerequisite —
we propel ourselves ahead. We feel free to fail, and that failure
moves us forward.
If
you want to develop more compassion for others, start by
listening to one person’s problem.
Familjen
Helsingborg/Flickr
The “do something” principle not only helps us overcome
procrastination, but it’s also the process by which we adopt new
values.
If you’re in the midst of an existential sh–storm and everything
feels meaningless — if all the ways you used to measure yourself
have come up short and you have no idea what’s next, if you know
that you’ve been hurting yourself chasing false dreams, or if you
know that there’s some better metric you should be measuring
yourself with but you don’t know how—the answer is the same:
Do something.
That “something” can be the smallest viable action toward
something else. It can be anything.
Recognize that you’ve been an entitled prick in all of your
relationships and want to start developing more compassion for
others? Do something. Start simple. Make it a goal to listen to
someone’s problem and give some of your time to helping that
person. Just do it once. Or promise yourself that you will assume
that you are the root of your problems next time you get upset.
Just try on the idea and see how it feels.
That’s often all that’s necessary to get the snowball rolling,
the action needed to inspire the motivation to keep going. You
can become your own source of inspiration. You can become your
own source of motivation. Action is always within reach. And with
simply doing something as your only metric for success—well, then
even failure pushes you forward.
From “THE SUBTLE ART OF NOT GIVING A F*CK: A
Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life” by Mark
Manson. Copyright ©2016 by Mark Manson, published by HarperOne,
an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.