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2003.Dec.21 Sun
"What am I resisting doing, right now?" From reading Mark Forster's weblog, that seems to be the key to his Resistance Principle. The other half of the equation is, after asking yourself this question, and coming up with an answer, actually doing the thing I know I should be doing. We usually know what we need to be doing "now" to fulfill our desired life-plan (or just get the house clean), and we don't need to buy a DayTimer™ and make a list to figure out that one thing.
At work, I can get myself (and others) to do the things that need doing, even though sometimes it's hard. At home, sometimes I know what I'm resisting doing, and yet I still watch TV or whatever. I can have an excuse like "I'm tired", but I know it's an excuse. I'm not convinced that I need to search for deeper reasons -- for some resisted tasks, I'm comfortable enough with things the way they are now; for others, there's some discomfort involved, or I don't perceive enough benefit for the effort.
Mark has a few tricks to help yourself get started, like "I'll just open the file" (or get out whatever materials you need to do the task)... once it's easy to get started on the task, you often do the task. This trick sounds like something Theodore Sturgeon once did to get over his frequent bouts of writer's block: he put a piece of paper in the typewriter, and would write something, anything until the paper was filled. He ended up writing a story this way, and he said about this experience: "it was so effective, that I never did it again."
I was a bit worried that Mark Forster had died or gotten sick (he's not a young man); he had been putting something in his blog every day, but nothing had appeared for over a week! Finally he wrote this:
Thanks to everyone who has written in asking where I have been for the last ten days. The answer is that I have been experimenting to see what happened if I stopped using the Resistance Principle. [...].
Using the Resistance Principle, I had survived the difficult period after breaking my hip at the beginning of November, built up my web traffic to be the highest rated coaching website on the net, attracted many new clients, and produced a daily weblog and a weekly newsletter without fail. All without any form of to do list or goal setting.
As soon as I gave up using the Resistance Principle all this went into reverse!
By the way, I have a place to put blogging ideas, a "to blog" file, but so far, I have just about never written a blog entry based on something in my "to blog" file. Maybe putting something in the "to blog" file gives me just enough feeling of "having taken care of it" that I never take care of it for real.
I'm going to blog every day, and if I can't think of something to blog about, I will dig into the "to blog" file. And if I see something I want to put into the "to blog" file, I will instead blog about it immediately, instead. So you may be see me blog more than once a day.
Grumble. There are about three or four non-blogging writing tasks I am resisting doing... maybe I should just open the file, right now...