Be the Tortoise

You know the story about the tortoise and the hare? Slow and steady wins the race. Well I'm not the tortoise. I don't do slow and steady. I do fast and erratic. Mostly erratic. A tortoise will do a little bit every day and put a check mark on their list of to do items. I will do that for about three days and then forget I even made a list.

This is a challenge in my life that I haven't completely mastered. From the outside it looks like laziness, and honestly sometimes it does from the inside too. Saying I'm lazy doesn't really do me justice though. I will work hard if the circumstances are right.

I do my job diligently every day. I'm not saying I never slack because I do when things are slow. But if I have work do do I tear through it. I'm not going to goof off while someone is paying me.

If there is a deadline I will generally meet it. It has be a real deadline though. No fake deadline will do. A great example of this iswhen my parents brought down my dad's old truck. There was a massive amount of work to do to make room in the garage. I did it though because the truck was coming and I wasn't backing down. I felt like they would get rid of it if I didn't get it in to my garage and that was not acceptable. Since then the garage has descended into a form of chaos worthy of televising on Hoarders.

Recently I had a bit of an epiphany on this subject.

Just like my bit about the rough draft I think we have to lay down some initial work in order to have huge breakthrough moments, We have to be the tortoise. As a friend of mine that deals with the same kind of cyclical nature told me it's all about discipline. When he told me that I didn't really want to hear it. Honestly I still don't, but I think I can work with it if I approach it like a rough draft. My point is that if you don't do the day to day work when you get that burst of creative energy you will have nothing to work with. Say I wrote a page of a novel a day. It's crap but I do it. Then one night I get a burst of energy and revise it into a beautiful narrative. If I hadn't taken the time to write the crap draft I wouldn't have had anything to work with when the burst came.

I think this can apply to your whole life. Take my closet for instance. I have two filing cabinets setting in the closet. My plan is to organize all my papers, Mackenzie's art and so on in these cabinets. I never do this because the closet is a total disaster. I can't even get to the filing cabinets. If I had the discipline to clean out the closet I would have some place to put everything when the overpowering urge to clean off my desk came Right now all the stuff from my desk just gets shoved in another pile and the cycle continues.

Now where did that list go?