Guit-A-Grip Podcast Episode #14 – Book Excerpt And Some Project Management Tips

Posted on November 13, 2013 by GuitArchitecture

Hello everyone!

Episode #14

Guit-A-Grip podcast episode #14 “Nothing Ever Got Done With An Excuse Excerpt #3″ is out and available for download/streaming.

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Show Notes:

The Book

Much of this section of the book came from experiences that I had in, first, getting my Melodic Patterns book written and then, secondly, getting the book in a month project off of the ground.

I’m using that book as a case study, but I believe that the steps behind it help form a reasonable approach to working on any large project that’s unfamiliar (or largely unfamiliar) to you.

The steps to follow:

I made a reference to various pieces of advice. The overall categories of this are:

Build off of past experiences (or go with what you know)
Whenever possible start with the heavy lifting
Beware of the rope swing
Be realistic about what you can do
Break up overwhelming things into small chunks
Contortion doesn’t hurt if you’re limber
Projects have a tendency to run wild on their own – so plan on constantly monitoring their growth
Be prepared to go a lot of it on your own
Be ready to make a lot of mistakes
Be ready to improvise because you can’t plan for everything
Have a deadline and/or know when you’re done
You really can’t do it alone

Here are a few specifics related to the above:

Beware of the rope swing
The advice I gave for this was a little too vague so here’s a qualifier. It’s all about balance. If you jump into something with no research, knowledge or plan, it will generally go badly. If you put too much energy into research, you may face paralysis in actually acting.

Deadlines
I’d write more about this but I’ve already written on it here.

That’s it for now!

As always, I hope this helps you with your own goals.

See you soon and thanks again for listening/reading!

-SC

Limiting Options Is A Key To Productivity

Posted on October 29, 2013 by GuitArchitecture

One of the benefits of living in the 21st century is that we have more options in every aspect of our lives than ever.

Consider music for a moment. In Beethoven’s day, If you wanted to hear Bach’s St. Matthews Passion, you had one of two choices. You could either go to where a choir was performing the work, or acquire sheet music for the piece and organize your own choir to perform it. ”Hearing” a piece performed for anyone living outside of a city meant that you could have been traveling for days or weeks to get somewhere where it was being performed. Your “favorite” orchestral works may be something that you only heard 3-4 times in your lifetime.

If you have an internet connection, you can listen to any one of a hundred versions of the work instantly. You can listen to it anywhere at anytime – even while driving. That’s an amazing thing.

But too much of anything is a bad thing.

When faced with too many options people generally shut down. If you’ve ever watched an episode of Kitchen Nightmares, one of the first things Gordon Ramsay does is cut down the menu. This not only focus the diners on a few select dishes but also ensures that the kitchen doesn’t get overwhelmed in preparing dishes. When a kitchen can focus on a one page menu rather than a ten page menu – their chances of getting the dishes sent out the way they’re supposed to be climb dramatically.

Relating this to practicing – it’s easy to fall into this harmless looking trap. You decide to sit down to practice and the first thing you think is, “Ok time to practice! I should practice scales, and comping – I have to make sure I work on improv – oh and reading – wow I really need to work on reading, and…”

…and…and…and soon it’s an hour later and nothing is done.

I’ve already posted about the importance of defining practice sessions and maintaining a practice log here, and about developing practicing as a habit rather than an event here, but I think it’s important to note that in whatever you do

the end result of too many options isn’t freedom

it’s paralysis

Have you every woken up with a goal for the day and not gotten it done because too many other things got in the way? ”I wanted to go to the gym, but I had to get groceries and then while I was out I had to run some other errands and then…” (insert infinite number of events that go until the conclusion of the day making going to the gym impossible). This is an example of getting overwhelmed with too many ways to spend time instead of just picking one thing at a time a focusing on that.

Here’s a related productivity secret that may help you focus on your priorities:

The important things in life are the things you do

You can tell me that going to the gym and getting in shape is important to you – but if you spend the day watching TV instead of going to the gym than being comfortable is more important that being in shape. In college you see people who blow off classes and then pull a week of all nighters to pass the term. This shows me it’s important to them. Their priorities may have gotten skewed over the course of the term but, at the end of the day, they made themselves very uncomfortable to achieve a goal and that shows where their priorities are. This is in contrast to the people who say that they’re going to pull all nighter to get the paper done and take the F instead.

Here are a couple of inter-related strategies to getting things done:

If you are not getting things done – Identify what you want to be important and then make it a habit by doing it – a lot.

Clearly define your goals.

Make daily steps toward achieving those goals.

Realize that as each day is different – the results you get each day will be different.

When facing discouragement – keep your eye on long term goals.

Periodically assess your progress and adjust your actions accordingly.

And finally, some related quotes:

“If you always do what you always did you will always get what you always got”

(Unknown but I did see one reference that attributed it to J. “Moms” Mabley)

“If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing well. If it is worth having, it is worth waiting for. If it is worth attaining, it is worth fighting for. If it is worth experiencing, it is worth putting aside time for.”

– Susan Jeffries

I hope this helps! As always, thanks for dropping by.

– SC

Don’t Let Time Become An Excuse For Not Starting Something

Posted on October 20, 2013 by GuitArchitecture

Hi everybody!

I just wanted to add a post to go with the new series I’m running on my podcast. (if you like this post you might want to check it out if you haven’t already!)

Time and Fear

It can be scary to start a new project, take on a new initiative or choose a new direction. One fear-based response I hear from people consistently for why they don’t want to take on something new is some variation of this:

“Well…what if I put all of this time and energy into it and it doesn’t go anywhere?”

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The Tough Love Part Of The Post

Here is the reality check for this line of thinking:

Your time has no fixed economic value before you start something.

Let me clarify this. If you’re currently making six figures a year in your day job, you are sorely mistaken (or outright delusional) if you’re taking on something new at the ground level and assuming that your time in your new venture will initially have the same value as what you’re currently making.

If you open a hot dog stand and sell five hot dogs in your first hour, SOME portion of that wage (and given the cost of supplies will be a negative figure in this case) will be your new (hopefully temporary) hourly wage.

While it doesn’t mean that’s what you’re worth – it does mean that’s what you’re making at this moment. Five years from now your artisan dogs might support a dozen stands selling hundreds an hour and bringing in real money – but at this moment – in the simplest equation – your business is valued at the dollar value generated when expenses are subtracted from assets and revenue.

Later on, once your project has inertia, your time will have a definitive value and there will be numerous things fighting for your time. But initially, it’s like going to court in that just as you don’t get compensated for your time to appear in court – you don’t get back the time or energy in a project that went bust. It’s gone. Eat the loss and let it go.

Sometimes you take a step back to move forward.

When I realized that my fretting hand technique was holding back my playing I had to re-learn about 1/2 of what I “knew” how to play.

It was a drag, and initially it felt like a huge waste of time taking a step that far back and I resisted it for a year because I didn’t want to wast my time taking a step back when there was already a lot I could do on guitar.

But what I could already do wasn’t getting me any further ahead in the long run. The process of revamping my technique made me re-evaluate my relationship to the instrument and to music as a whole. I began to hear my playing differently and began to hear other people’s playing differently. Ultimately it got me the fluidity and clarity that I admired in so many other players playing that I was always wondering why it was missing from mine.

I sometimes wonder if people get frustrated when they talk about whatever they saw on the internet or TV (i.e. “if your time is so valuable how exactly are you spending it now?”) and then go on to ask the initial question:

“Well…what if I put all of this time and energy into it and it doesn’t go anywhere?”

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Here’s the answer:

The good news is that if the project is a bust (and if you haven’t invested EVERYTHING into it) you can quit and take what you’ve learned from this venture to move on to the next one.

I copped this from Seth Godin who once said that quitting is undervalued and that the problem with quitting is that most people quit something when it’s too late. The time to quit is in the early stages BEFORE you take the second mortgage, empty the bank account and realize that if this doesn’t work out that you and your family need to move back in with your folks.

And now the caveat!

If this website has a one word core idea, it’s “balance“.

Before I played guitar, I started off as a drummer in junior high school. If I didn’t quit drums in my first year and later switched to guitar I never would have stayed in music because by the time I had enough time in on drums in high school I wouldn’t have had the energy or interest to transition to learning guitar.

If I quit my pursuit to revamp my technique too early, I never would have made the progress in my playing that I did.

The balance is the hardest thing because the onus of understanding and maintaining that balance falls on you, the individual.

Balance will play a huge role in the posts and podcasts ahead!

Starting any new project will take inertia to keep it going. Once you get the project going you’ll have plenty of opportunities to evaluate your use of time and address it’s value in a real way, but don’t let that short circuit your plans for starting something.

More content coming soon. As always, thanks for reading!

-SC

Re-contextualizing Time

Posted on July 12, 2013 by GuitArchitecture

Here’s an obvious statement, with a not-so-obvious ramification.

Time is cumulative.

As a society, we’re trained to think of time in specific blocks. We take an hour for lunch. We work from 9-5 (if you’re lucky). Television shows are either a ½ hour or an hour.

So we’re trained to think that if we don’t do anything for the full hour that nothing is getting done.

Here’s an experiment.

Can you do a 100 push ups in a sitting?

If not, can you do 10?

If you could do 10 consecutive push ups with perfect form how long would that take? Maybe 30 seconds? Now let’s say you did that 10 times a day. That’s 300 seconds (aka 5 minutes). But you can’t do anything with 5 minutes of exercise a day, right?

Wrong.

Try it every day for 5 weeks. Try adding 1 push up per set every week (and more if you can). That pushes you up to 15 per set or 150 a day. By sheer increase in number you’ll notice that you’re getting stronger. You’ll probably notice physical changes as well.

Guess what happens when you apply this to practicing a difficult passage with a metronome?

Reclaim those shorter time increments in your day by reprogramming your brain for what they mean! Those minutes add up over the course of the days, weeks and months ahead.

You can get a lot done in a lunch hour and those hours add up. Set a timer and work on things for 20 minute increments. But when you work on them, really work on them. Don’t half-ass them. If you do this multiple times a day, you will get a lot more done than you might think.

If you have a strong understanding for why you are doing something, you will do whatever you have to to overcome any obstacles associated with how.

I hope this helps! More posts soon (and more podcasts as soon as I can stop running my air conditioner long enough to record one!) Thanks for reading.

-SC

PS: If you play guitar you may be interested in a book I just released yesterday!

The Scott Collins Fretboard Visualization Series: The Pentatonic Minor Scale

: You can read all about that here or see excerpts and order the book here.

Finding The Deeper Lesson

Posted on April 15, 2013 by GuitArchitecture

Finding mastery in strange places….

One person who’s fascinating to me is Gordon Ramsay (in spite of a celebrity chef status). I remember years ago, on an early season of Hell’s Kitchen, a Cambridge resident that competed on the show and interviewed by the local Fox affiliate after she was voted off. When asked about how mean or callous he was, the woman replied that he was really neither. She said he was a world-class chef who maintained high standards since his name was going out on everything and that his demands were in line with what was expected from any professional kitchen.

Another thing that fascinates me about Chef Ramsay (other than the fact that he came from a working class background and parlayed a career ending soccer injury into a pursuit of cooking) is that his mastery shines through on everything he does. The next time you get a chance to see him do a cooking demonstration, watch the ease and speed he moves at. Everything he does on camera is graceful, seamless and effortless. If you’ve ever tried to pull off a video demonstration of something – you know how hard getting everything right really is (much less doing it on a sound stage in front of a national audience).

Reaching a level of technical precision where the technique is invisible is a sign of true mastery.

According to those who know, at the highest level the mastery of one thing is the same as the mastery of all things. In other words, the focus, skill set and mental space that one needs to enter to be a master musician – is the same that it takes to be a great chef, a great athlete or anything great.

Once you learn how to master something, you’ve gained a skill set in mastery and, ultimately, that lesson can be the greater take away.

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Years ago, when I was at my undergrad I wanted to get into martial arts. I went to study kickboxing (since I had no aptitude for kicking) and my lesson was with a guy who was nationally ranked. When I went for the introductory lesson – we did a little bag work and when it was done I asked some questions about the martial arts as a philosophy and he replied that there was no philosophy, it was just about hitting the bag. (That should have been a huge warning sign but instead I stuck it out for about 3 months). I remember a class he was teaching where he was doing a weight lifting routine during a full class session of about 20 people. We were working on kicks and he was teaching us by doing bench presses on a universal weight machine.

Some of the classes were taught by a student of his and while the student teacher was not at the technical skill level level of the main instructor, these were the most informative classes that I had there. This teacher was attentive and really helped me address specific technical things and applications. He might not have been at the technical level of the main teacher, but he was the much better teacher of the two.

Needless to say, I didn’t learn a lot from the main teacher about kickboxing (other than the fact that he was a lot better at it than I was). But I did learn more than I thought I did.

The initial conclusions I took away from this experience were:

kickboxing sucks and/or
I suck at kickboxing

Obviously kickboxing doesn’t suck and neither of these were the real lessons for me. They were just faulty conclusions that I came to.

Eventually, I realized that I had learned some other things:

I learned a lot about teaching – both good and bad practices.
I learned some things about myself like my threshold for frustration and the value of discipline and focus.
I started thinking about how training affects performance which opened some doors for practicing later on.

The take away

If someone plays something better than you, it doesn’t mean you’re hopeless as a guitar player – but it does mean that person devoted more time to something than you did.

It’s easy to fall into those mental traps and it’s also easy to take the wrong lesson from any given experience away with you.

Try to find the lessons in whatever you do and then dig deeper into them and see if they have a broader application.

The wrong lessons are the self-defeating lessons.

The right lessons are the self-empowering lessons.

Thanks for reading!

-SC

Melville, Madness and Practicing – Or Finding The Deeper Lesson Part 2

Posted on November 23, 2011 by GuitArchitecture

Condensed Cliff Notes

Years ago, I found a back issue of National Lampoon that had a faux ad for Condensed Cliff Notes (“for people who didn’t have time to read the original”). The joke was that major literary works were just boiled down into one sentence descriptions that couldn’t possibly encompass the scope of the book. The Condensed Cliff Notes for Moby Dick was, “A whale bites off a man’s leg and he can’t forget about it.”

I don’t know how many of you have read Moby Dick. I hated it when I had to read it in high school but really got to appreciate it when I was in college and read it again. One of the central characters in the book was Captain Ahab, a man who not only couldn’t forget about the whale that bit his leg off – but was on monomaniacal mission of revenge that enveloped everyone around him in its wake. At the end of the book, it’s also his undoing.

The Ahab effect and practicing

The nature of practicing music (seemingly endless repetition) makes it easy to fall into the Ahab role of obsessively trying to get a musical passage under your fingers. I once had a lick I couldn’t get down. It was challenging, but it certainly was something that was well with in my skill set.

But the more I worked at it – the worse it got.

I’d work on this lick everyday for hours and get the metronome to a certain point. When I came back to it, I’d have to knock the metronome back down 20 bpm – often 10 bpm lower than where I started the lick the day before!

You can imagine what this did for my sanity.

After a week of this – I started noticing a few things:

My goal line kept changing. As I was working on the lick, I kept finding things wrong that I wanted to correct. I was playing it clean, and then hear other technical issues when I switched to distortion. I was flubbing certain notes, and would go back to fix those. I was rushing the parts where there were position changes. I was over thinking it and the more energy I was putting into it the worse it got. I was actually getting better at playing it, but because I kept adjusting the standard of what I was hearing I seemed further and further away from the goal.

I was in a rush. I was putting all of this emphasis on this lick because I wanted to use it in a live context and (finally)

I was hung up about the fact that I SHOULD be able to play it.

The operative terms here are, “hung up” and “should”.

Should is a faulty term. It implies value judgements that are hard, if not impossible to live up to and negates reality. This might sound really touchy-feely to some people but this is the type of mindset that trips up musicians. It’s why people get carpel tunnel (or Focal Dystonia) – because they go all Ahab on something and assume that if they just work harder, that they’re going to get results quicker.

Everyone is different and this approach may work. for some people but it never worked for me.

Here’s what did work for me.

I got some distance and took a break. I stopped playing for a couple fo days and came back to it fresh.

When did come back to it I had the lick down, but it taught me to try to approach all practicing more meditatively. I noticed things that were wrong and worked on adjusting them rather than beating myself up about why I couldn’t do something. When I did slip up and get angry or riled up – I made a note of that and tried smiling instead.

I found that I was really listening on a deeper level than I was before and using practicing to get to a deeper part of myself. I was really getting into the nuances of what I was playing and digging deeper into the pocket than I every had. I noticed technical things that weren’t working and ultimately – I made a series of changes that had major technical ramifications for me in the long run.

All from one lick.

Anything has that potential to open the door to deeper expression. But you won’t find it if all of your energy and attention is fixated on something.

In the next post, I’ll have some lesson material that uses approaches from my Melodic Patterns book, and we’ll get a glimpse into just how tricky playing 4 notes can be.

Thanks for reading!

-SC

If you like this post – you may also like:

Don’t Be Afraid Of the Work

Posted on September 26, 2011 by GuitArchitecture

Hello!

Thanks for visiting this page!

This post has been moved to my other site Guit-A-Grip.com.

You can read it here.

Thanks again!

-Scott

Some Observations On Inertia And A Cool Online App For Getting Things Done

Posted on September 16, 2011 by GuitArchitecture

A routine can be a powerful thing in productivity. It helps instil a sense of inertia and, as I’ve talked about in posts like this, or this one , keeping the ball rolling is usually a lot easier than initially getting it to roll. The counter-intuitive reality behind doing things is that:

Activity leads to other activity. It creates its own inertia.

Bodies at rest tend to stay at rest.

The counter-intuitive part of this is when you’re sitting on a sofa and think, “I’m really tired. I just have to rest for a second and mentally gear myself up for this”. Inertia is working at keeping you sitting on the couch. If there’s a TV on or an internet connection – it’s working double time.

The reality is that just getting up and doing the thing actually takes less energy that expending the energy debating with yourself about whether or not you have the tools or the energy to do something.

The caveat is that this assumes we’re talking about moderate activity. If you’ve just run a marathon, I’m not advocating staying on your feet if you need to rest. I’m talking about procrastination versus physical exhaustion.

Procrastination is an energy suck

Completing projects is invigorating. It’s that energy that comes from getting something done and thinking, “All right – what’s next?” It takes way more mental energy to keep putting something off than to just deal with it.

Here are some tips that may be helpful:

Have goals. If you don’t know what you’re trying to do – you’re not likely to figure out the how.

If you have something you’re procrastinating – try to tackle small parts of if consistently. You’re going to get more mileage out of small daily improvements than trying to cram something into a marathon session.

Monitor progress. This goes along with goal setting but it’s important to check back and see how you’re progressing.

Be accountable but pragmatic. Either to yourself or other people, to get things done, it’s important to be held to your goals. Along with monitoring progress, being pragmatic (rather than judgemental) about your progress will help as well. If things aren’t progressing they way you’d like – beating yourself up isn’t going to help the process. By monitoring things you can see what works and what doesn’t work and adjust as necessary.

I Done This

Neither a typo or an obscure pop reference, I want to thank my friend Daren Burns for bringing this to my attention. I done this.com is a cool free online productivity tool that combines some of the tips that I’ve mentioned above, Here’s a quote from the web page:

“iDoneThis is an email-based productivity log. This evening, you’ll receive your first email from us asking, “What’d you get done today?” Just respond to our email and we record what you wrote into your calendar. Use your progress from yesterday to motivate you today.”

By helping to monitor progress and helping keep consistency and accountability, this could be something to help get the ball rolling for you. If you have something you’ve been putting off doing (like practicing) try it for a week and see what happens.

I hope this helps! Thanks for reading.

-SC

On “It is what it is”

Posted on July 18, 2011 by GuitArchitecture

I had a moment to catch up on some things this weekend, and returned a call from a friend of mine at CalArts. We had a very nice conversation catching up and discussing Higher Education funding, trends, pedagogy and the like and she was kind enough to tell me this:

“You know, in a conversation we had once – you gave me some advice and told me that, ‘it is what it is’. I thought about that a lot – and about how you’ve brought it up a number of times in our conversations – and it’s something I find myself coming back to as a mantra when I’m facing something difficult.”

She had asked me about where that mindset came from, and I’m sure it’s rooted in growing up in a working class small town in upstate New York. Compared to many people around me I had it relatively easy. My parents both worked hard – my dad taught middle school and my mom worked in a factory – and they owned the house we lived in. (A note: Despite a lot of nonsense talk generated in the media earlier in the year, as people living on an educator’s salary, we did not live high on the hog. We burned wood for fuel (that we cut stacked and dried on our own), did all our own repairs and (for a while) raised animals for food. The two-story house I grew up in with a garage and a 2 story workshop on a 1/2 acre of land sold for well under 40k if that tells you anything about the economics of the region.)

Other people I knew had it really hard. Farmers (and often their children) who worked from dawn to dusk with spouses working additional odd jobs just to make ends meet. We had “valley runners” – a term of no endearment reserved for families who would relocate multiple times a year to stay one step ahead of the law. I’d always see the kids in my classes; they’d show up for a couple of months and then be gone to the next county. When I’d see them months, or years later, they had always changed for the worse. They picked up a number of skills they needed to survive when you’re always on the run (typically manipulation, but sometimes cons or petty theft), that were depressing enough for an adult to have to rely on to get by – much less a child.

Mainly though, I knew a lot of good people who worked hard and were often presented with really difficult situations. And the response to those situations was to work through it. I can’t count the number of times that I heard variations of, “No use crying about it – let’s get to work.”

For those of you who resonate with this sentiment, and have never read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, it might be worth a moment of your time. One point Aurelius’ (and other Stoics like Epictetus) bring up repeatedly is the value of seeing things for what they are. That often means removing the emotional issues associated with the matters at hand and trying to deal with them objectively. (Albert Ellis made an entire career out of this method of inquiry with his REBT (Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy) approach).

Getting emotional about certain things (particularly difficult things) only adds to their difficultly.

In my world view, some things are simply facts andviewing those things as such makes it easier to see them for what they are.

For example:

2+2=4.

How do you feel about that? (or do you feel anything?)

It’s difficult to get emotionally invested in it because it’s merely a fact.

Now here’s the idea applied: where a student might hear, “You’re going to have to put a lot of time in to getting those sweep arpeggios down the way you want.” I hear “2+2=4”. There’s no emotional involvement and so there’s less to get tripped up on.

There are a million reasons to procrastinate, and generally only one or two to get something done. If you’re facing something really daunting there’s a several part process I can share to help make it manageable.

Getting it done

Know why you need to do what you’re doing. As Viktor Frankl once said, “He who has a why can bear almost any how”.
Deal with problems individually. Many problems are multi-tiered so break them down into individual components to make them easier to manage.
See the problem for what it is. Gain a scope of what it is you are trying to do and prioritize what has to happen to complete it. (For example: If you’re trying to get better at sight-reading – you’re going to have to work on it a lot over a longer period of time. If you’re trying to get two bars of a solo down – it will probably be a much shorter over-all time investment).
Have milestones and a deadline. Know what you’re going to complete by when.
Prioritize and address what you can. Don’t get hung up on big steps here, this stage is all about the specifics of each step (i.e. the grunt work).
Reassess and return. As milestones are reached verify your progress and start again.

I remember reading a David Lee Roth interview where he was talking about how having a drive was the only thing that was going to get you through endless vocal practicing in your bedroom.

There’s nothing glamorous in the work that goes into doing anything well, but it’s necessary to acquire the skills needed to do those things.

In other words, it is what it is.

Thanks for reading.

-SC

“When You Come To A Fork In The Road Take It”

Posted on June 23, 2011 by GuitArchitecture

A number of the motivational posts I’ve posted here center around a few key concepts:

Having a clear vision of what you want to do (goals)

Aligning perception with reality (having an honest assessment of what needs to happen to reach those goals)

Daily work on those goals

Limiting distractions, and obstacles in the way

The reason I come back to these posts to the extent that I do (and why I address it with myself as much as I can), is because it’s incredibly important to make the most of your time and enjoy it because time is all you’ve got. All the talent, skill, strength, brains or money in the world won’t stop you from dying eventually. Since all those things (talent, skill, strength, brains and money ) are acquired over time, in the end all you have is your time and how you’ve used it.

Life is short and the only thing of value. Don’t waste it away.

We live in the most technologically advanced era the world the world has ever seen, but despite (and/or because of) that technology we also live increasingly isolated existences. As a society, we often equate texting with talking and surfing the web to connecting with someone (or something).

All we’re really doing is staring at a TV with an infinite number of channels and typing.

There’s only limited interaction and a one way transmission of data. It’s addicting, comfortable and seductive and brings about the complacency and relaxation everyone looks for at one time or another. I’m not saying you shouldn’t relax, but I am saying that being sedentary in anything you do carries it’s own inertia (physical and psychological). The more you turn off your brain, the more likely you are to turn off your brain – even when you don’t want to.

My father’s grandfather worked coal for the railroad every day of his teenage and adult life. It was long hours of backbreaking labor and by all accounts, he was an incredibly powerful man. When he retired, he decided that he was going to retire from everything. He sat in his favorite chair and went from someone who was active and engaged to someone with very minimal physical exertion and no real goals for the future other than not working. He died a couple of years later. I can’t prove that they’re related, by in my mind they are. By my dad’s account, he basically just decided to stopped living.

“When You Come To A Fork In The Road – Take It”

And this brings me back to meaningful living and navigating the overwhelming number of options available to us. Indecision is a natural byproduct of being overwhelmed. While I’m all for making an informed decision before taking action, if you spend too much time informing yourself, you won’t have any inertia to carry out what you initially wanted to do. The unexamined life may not be worth living – but the over-examined isn’t either.

In any battle with indecision, at a certain point you have to punt. If you get overwhelmed with options, pick one and run with it until you have to switch to another. If you have a good grasp of what it is that you want to do, you’ll make changes in direction as you require to get back on track.

It’s less important what thing you do first as long as you do something.