Don’t wait. Strike. Strike now. This is the moment.
You could spend ten minutes or an hour or two browsing the web, checking your email, settling in. Don’t. Get comfortable with the immediate strike. The lightening strike. The strike that gets it done now, not later.
There is always later. There is only one now.
Strike.
Pain is not something we invite. Pain is not something we wish to experience.
There are levels to pain. Mild discomfort to excruciating.
Yet pain is not an enemy, it is merely a warning. We must learn to see it as a warning and deal with it in kind.
The fear of embarrassment at the thought of public speaking is a legitimate pain. But it is just a warning, one that allows us, ahead of time, to improve ourselves, to become better at speaking publicly.
Pain is just a way of letting us know we are stretching ourselves. Without it we run the risk of running head long into danger.
It is safe to do the things we’ve always done. Stopping at that line though means we don’t grow. We have to stretch beyond it. To improve, to grow, we have to reach beyond the line we know. Stretch past the safety of what we know.
By stretching we change where the line is. Stretching just a little bit at a time. We redraw it in ever increasing circles. Like rings in a tree trunk. In time we can look back and see how much we’ve grown. How much more we are capable of now than when we started.
Stretch yourself today. A small stretch, just a small stretch.
Right now I have 39 open tabs in Chrome, my browser of choice. Most have been open for weeks waiting for me to get time to read them. And, of course, I have no idea what’s in most of those tabs.
I hope you don’t browse like me.
It drains your focus. It divides it.
I can’t help but see it as a useful lesson for work or life. The more tabs you have open the less gets done. The more tabs you have open the less likely you are to know what to work on.
Do yourself a favour. Close off the majority of those tabs or save them to a service (Pocket, Diigo, etc) so you can go through them at another time.
Time to close 39 tabs.
When it’s time to start, just start.
Don’t grumble cause it’s Monday. Rejoice in it and start. You have the whole week ahead.
If you have something against Monday, the problem isn’t with the day, it’s with what you do on the day. If Monday’s a problem then change what you do.
The whole week’s ahead.
Seth Godin wrote:
When you discover that the job is in the way of the work, consider changing your job enough that you can go back to creating value.
Anything less is hiding.
But it’s not the only way to hide.
Procrastinating is hiding.
Social media is hiding.
Not communicating is hiding.
However you’re hiding, stop. There’s no one counting to one hundred. There’s no one coming to find you. You’re not hiding from anyone but yourself.
Stop hiding.