Two statements: same words, different lessons.

“Good is the enemy of great” and “Great gets in the way of good.”

If you operate at a good level and aren’t interested in overcoming the inertia it takes to be great, you’ll fall under the first category.

If you’re operating at a great level, but allow every detail to hold you back from sending out the things you’ve built, you’re in the second category.

The solution to the first problem (though it doesn’t feel like a problem) is to wake up. Turn on your antennae and wake up to life. Tune into the people, places, and things that inspire you, speak to your heart, and realize that you don’t have to be like everyone else. Mediocrity is everywhere and if you’re not careful about tuning in to the right frequencies, you’ll be left with white noise.

The solution to the second problem (it’s a problem though it doesn’t feel like it) is to turn off your censor. Fool it and tell it to go for a walk, that you won’t do anything while it’s gone. When it leaves, accomplish every last thing you haven’t allowed yourself to do while you worried about the details while it was standing behind you.

Tune in. Then, once you’re at the right frequency, tune out.

“I’m going to learn how to swim,” I’ve been saying to friends for the last month. I’ve looked up classes, found out which one is the right level and price for me, and wrote down the pool schedule. Dug up my bathing suit. Even went to Tim Ferris’s blog to find out how he learned to swim “effortlessly” in 10 days.

What haven’t I done?

Swim.

Not one hour in the pool, not one toe dipped into water.

I wondered about this. Why had something i was so excited about, something which i had a deep desire to learn, all of a sudden come to a standstill?

I remembered the hours of research i did about which classes were a good fit. Which facilities were near my house. Which route I would take to get there. As we got further into April (now almost over), work tasks piled up and I went deeper into one of my projects. Soon, even balancing my daily tasks was harder than normal. I had totally forgotten about swimming.

Or had I? Although it wasn’t at the forefront of my mind, the realization that I wasn’t swimming had definitely taken up a corner of mental space in my mind. I saw that
instead of it being an enjoyable tool for me to survive and have fun in water, I turned it into a looming task on my to-do list. Instead of looking at it as recreation and consciously BUILDING it into my life, I thought my work and other tasks took priority and put it on the backburner. It was no relief though, backburnering swimming. Instead I felt that I was missing out on fun, not accomplishing a goal, and had wasted time researching something I wasn’t doing.

What I should have done is given myself a strict time limit for research (instead of trying to get every last detail in place) and then started my classes. It took way more energy to think about my looming task instead of just spending one enjoyable hour in the pool.

Making the mental switch in my mind was key, as now it went from task, to something I wanted to do for myself that would bring satisfaction.

If I’m constantly telling people I’m going to do something, it’s obvious that I’m just not doing it.

Plus, if I learn how to swim, it’s one more thing off my to-do list!