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You know, I’m not much of a tattoo guy. I mean- they’re very cool, but I never know what I’d get with permanence skin deep. It’s hard to predict where your head will be in 12 months, let alone 12 years.
That being said, I believe that one of my friends nailed it. He took the simple route, and chose a law of physics. Short, sweet, constant. Tattooed on his upper thigh is the equation for momentum:
A simple reminder to himself that one of the few constants in life is a variant of Newton’s first law, an object at rest will remain at rest unless acted upon by another force. Well, these last five months my writing has been at rest.
I could give you a million excuses- I started a new job, I moved cities, I got too busy. But these cop-outs are just that, excuses. The truth of the matter is that once I had broken the habit and strung together a couple weeks away from the (proverbial) typewriter, inertia took over. In the terms of the above equation, the mass of my habit was small. I’d been publishing a short piece per week for a few months, just enough to establish the beginnings of a habit. A small mass with a mediocre velocity (a weekly publishing cadence) does little to establish momentum, and once there was a slight pause.. Poof.
That’s the curse of inertia (now mixing equations, but holding ideas), with each day that you delay it becomes increasingly challenging to restart. Put in pseudo-statistical terms, I fell victim to the inverse of the Lindy Effect. I’ve discussed this elsewhere, but to rehash the idea: the longer something has existed (in a dispersion of probabilities), the more likely it is to persist. Ex: A hundred year old company has a higher likelihood of being in business tomorrow than a hundred day old startup.
Habits fall nicely into this framework. The longer you repeat an action, the deeper it entrenches itself, and the more easily you return to it.. But the challenge is the entrenchment.
Writing is something I enjoy doing, and the more I did it, the better I got (hopefully) and the more easily ideas flowed. The effect was pretty wild, actually. When I was really on a roll, I found that ideas came to me with less friction and more regularity, unprompted. Perhaps that was the tangible experience of my little neural pathways strengthening as I built my fledgling habit. So, why did I fall off?
When I look at myself honestly in a mirror, I pass through the excuses above and land on a sobering conclusion, a quotation that has manifested itself upon many a sticky note displayed on my desks over the years: “It’s not a priority.”
A fiendish little phrase to inject a little honesty into your self-assessments, this idea came from a Wall Street Journal piece that I stumbled upon about a decade ago entitled Are You As Busy As You Think? In it, the author suggests:
…Instead of saying "I don't have time" try saying "it's not a priority," and see how that feels. Often, that's a perfectly adequate explanation. I have time to iron my sheets, I just don't want to. But other things are harder. Try it: "I'm not going to edit your résumé, sweetie, because it's not a priority." "I don't go to the doctor because my health is not a priority." If these phrases don't sit well, that's the point. Changing our language reminds us that time is a choice. If we don't like how we're spending an hour, we can choose differently.
These past few months have been an insidious reminder of just how blurring time’s passing can be, especially as a working adult. A day becomes a week becomes a month becomes a year. These missed aspirations become astronomically, horrifically easier to accrue with each passing year of adulthood. Timelines expand, yet days contract. There are many things in my life that I’ve put off in this fashion, goals that have stubbornly sat atop my yearly aspirations for half a decade, unaccomplished and unapproached. This is, in part, why I keep records of my 1/3/5 year aspirations, as honest reminders of the places I fall short (and celebrations of progress, of course).
Anyway…
“In moments of turmoil and trouble, you must force yourself to be more determined. Call up the aggressive energy you need to overcome caution and inertia. Any mistakes you make, you can rectify with more energetic action still. Save your carefulness for the hours of preparation, but once the fighting begins, empty your mind of doubts. Ignore those who quail at any setback and call for retreat. Find joy in attack mode. Momentum will carry you through.” - Robert Greene, 33 Strategies of War (30)
Examine your priorities, get back in the saddle, and let ‘er rip.
- 🍋
