The Practicing Mind

The Practicing Mind shows you how to cultivate patience, focus, and discipline for working towards your biggest goals, by going back to the basic principles of practice, embracing a child-like trial-and-error attitude again and thus make working hard towards mastery a fulfilling process in itself.

Wait, what? Did I seriously just suggest that you should forget what you’re working towards?! Yes and no. What you shouldn’t forget is what you’re doing right now, what the end goal of any given day is, what your final output before you drop the pen, close the laptop or punch out on the clock is.

What you can gleefully hand over to the “forgotten” folder in your brain for that day though, is the ultimate, long-term, final outcome. The monthly salary goal you’re shooting for, the revenue goal you’re working towards or the novel title appearing on Amazon.

Because here’s how procrastination happens:

You realize what you’re doing right now isn’t that much fun. You remind yourself that it’s part of something bigger. You remember what that bigger thing is. You realize how far away you are from it. You get discouraged and frustrated. You need something easy, light and fun to console yourself. You open Youtube.

But if you can manage to shut out that bigger thing for an hour or two and just focus on the process, that’s when real work gets done.

So yes, forget about your end goal while you work.

Another area where your big aspirations do more damage than good is when looking at your overall progress bar. Not the daily one, but the monthly, annual or even multi-year measuring stick you use to compare your current success to your former, past self. Here’s how: Let’s say you’ve graduated college and started a job that pays $40,000 a year. Of course, that’s just the beginning, so you decide to work hard and get promoted as fast as possible, which gets you a position that pays $60,000 two years later. Once you have that, it’ll feel natural to set the next goal to earning $80,000 or $100,000 a year – but where do you go from there? If you assess how far you’ve come by looking at where you want to go next, you’re setting yourself up for a very miserable life. Setting bigger and more ambitious goals as you go along is good, it’s just the natural way any upwards curve follows, but if they become self-serving, a way for you to determine your success by, you’ll just be in a bad mood constantly, because you’re never there yet. That’s why it’s sometimes good to take a second, step back, turn around and actually look back, not forward.…