You have been doing things all your life. You do let yourself have some things happening, some not.
Sweep the floor, even if you don’t like to do it, you will eventually realize yourself, annoyed by going through filth every day.
Just like things like groceries, sleeping, taking out garbage and getting clothes. Whether you are excited to do these things or not, don’t do them quickly and become intolerable so they are done.
Certain activities also disengage yourself from habits rather than necessary, such as flipping on a TV, sliding out your phone or checking your email. The mind and the body do these things unconsciously.
We can call all these self-triggering actions Default activity. Unless you don’t try, you’ll do them because they’re what the current situation in your life drives you to do. You won’t slip away without buying groceries or tying your shoes.
Not everything you do triggers this way. If you’ve ever done things like writing scripts, building attention online, learning woodworking or growing a vegetable garden, you’ll know that these things don’t just happen out of momentum or habit. You have to make them implement. You have to deviate from the process of default activities and deliberately build new activities in your life. You have to at least declare internally “Okay, I do it now!” I’m going to take a singing class today! I’m going to start my YouTube channel this weekend, that’s it!
We can call it these things Elective activities. These are what you want to do, but they don’t happen like the default activity.
Of course, there is only so much time – a few hours in your days and life. Therefore, there is a competition for both types of doing.
These two activities have different characteristics. If you compare the default activity to the elective activity you have completed or want to do, you may notice:
Default activity
- Positive to maintain things on the current trajectory
- Usually driven by habits, instincts, or obligations
- Assert your own life (i.e. they basically make themselves a reality)
Elective activities
- Positive to expand your choices to achieve new trajectories
- It is usually driven by the desire to do things yourself
- Don’t stick to your own life (i.e., you have to make them happen)
Default activities can also be crucial and fulfilling, but for the most part they simply place the ship on the current route, for better or worse.
Elective activities are often things that make life truly shine because they are chosen based on your personal sensitivity. That’s why everyone engages in similar default activities, but chooses very different electives.
If they can
“The trouble is, you think you have time.“
-Jack Kornfield
In the competition for your time and attention, the default activity has a huge advantage, that is, the elective activity is Distant It is easier to ignore and postpone it later. It’s not because elective activities are less important or meaningful – they are often the most fulfilling part of people’s lives. It’s because no Unlike many default activities, doing so will never become intolerable. Your unseeded vegetable garden won’t bother you as the IRS does with unpaid taxes. Of course, you’ll do it later – after all, it’s important to you!
But what is important to you doesn’t make it happen. Suppose learning another language or making a short film is your main dream. You have a real affinity for this matter. You’ve been reading about it, dancing on the edge of it, and enjoying other people who really do it. You haven’t tried completely yet, but it feels like your future. However, more urgent concerns dominate your schedule, and life has unfolded so far and nothing important has happened.
Once you have mastered the default activity, it’s easy to believe you’ll do it later. However, it is not the case, as the default activity is endless. To use the analogy of high school chemistry courses, the default activity behaves like gases: they extend to take the shape of the container they are in.
Of course, the “containers” they extend to are the days and years that make up your life. Life does require a lot of default activities, but most of them are just overflows of momentum. If you don’t give up and defend the space for the really important electives, the default stuff will completely fill your container.
This is the life-satisfaction version of the old business motto: “Pay first.” If you try everything else before you go on an elective, then nothing is there.
Put some bets on the ground
So, how do you implement it if you don’t let yourself implement it?
As I’ve seen, there are three things you need to do to make an activity go from wishful thinking to what actually happens in real life:
- Find out what this is. Write it in a feasible form. It’s not “learning guitar,” but “being able to play these five Beatles songs without error.” There’s no way to really start without that clarity at least because it’s too abstract.
- Make it clear when you start and when you finish. No start date means it won’t start. No end date means you can put it on hold indefinitely once you reach the tricky part. Must be feasible, it must be feasible.
- Always know the next thing to do. Once you don’t know the next thing to do, you start taking the time and then it doesn’t happen again.
If you have these three, you can go from here to start to finish. You have a rope that can run the entire road.
After the same attraction has stalled, I have developed a system to ensure you always have three clarity, at least for a medium-sized goal that takes weeks or months.
So far I have mastered the two people who use the system, each participant decides to achieve something specific in their lives: finishing their novels, online websites, having the basement sorted out, applying for graduate school, recording demo albums, and other activities that cannot achieve their own.
We first put some bets on the ground: make sure what your goal is (or we like to call it), and then choose your start date. You then develop a “life plan” – focusing on the first, most obvious steps to get you really doing this and regularly update your plan as you understand what is necessary. If the next step is not clear yet, there is a list that will get you back to clear immediately within minutes.
This is A big victory Programs, you may have realized it. I’ll open a third queue soon.
The size of the group is always limited because I personally interact with participants and follow everyone’s projects. If you want to learn more about OBW, get the email list now. You will notify you immediately after it is open and get a first lesson for free so you can decide whether you want to do so.
You have one simple thing – you think you have enough time. If you think your life will last forever, what are you waiting for? Why hesitate to change?
– Don Juan, journey to Ixtlan
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Freepik and Unsplash photos. Illustrations by David Cain.
