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Diving into difficulty

I find pretty often that I’m in constant pursuit of the best, or the easiest way to do something.  The way I justify this to myself is that I want to put all my concerted effort into a thing one time and knock it out of the park the best way the first time.

This, I think, was drilled into me when working with other hard-nosed perfectionists.  These bosses were the best and worst to work with – real assholes when you failed, but made you dig inside of yourself to pull out the best.  I generally did it to spite them, and we’d have a great relationship after I met their level of completeness.

The major problem with the expectation from these people is that, they never gave me the freedom to fail.  Thus I don’t regularly give myself the freedom to fail.  I also don’t have the desire to fail.

I feel like it’s just wasting time.

But who has ever ridden a bike right the first time?  Who didn’t fall down once the training wheels were off?

If you can’t ride a bike and you’re an adult – what stops you from learning?  I can tell you – falling on your ass and looking like an idiot.  It’s not fun to tell coworkers that over the weekend you tried to learn to ride a bike (awkward enough) and fell on your ass a bunch (SUPER awkward).

At the core of that story is the same thing that keeps me from pulling the trigger on something difficult until I know I can succeed – I don’t want to fall down.  I tell myself it has to do with “not wasting time”, but that’s very literally just procrastination talking.

You have to fall down, because it’s truly the only way you learn to gain your balance and stay upright.

You’ll find that once you go for it – the other people who want to do the same thing become awestruck and seek out your help (or they call you names, and you ignore them because they’re just envious idiots).  Those who have gone before you and succeeded are generally more than happy to help you move even faster!

So there’s no room for procrastination.

When you find something hard, that you really want to succeed on but you keep putting off – set a date and do it.  Not everything you want to do to succeed in life will be fun.  A lot of it will suck.  A lot of it you won’t have passion for.  But if you do it, you’ll get where you want to go.

Seek out the hard things, and kick their ass.  You’ll be super proud of yourself when you do.


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