The Way of Work

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Understanding discipline for doing difficult tasks.

Awhile has past since my last post on Medium, I’ve been contemplating what I think is important, and what’s important to write about. This post is more of a reminder to myself — a reminder of why I do what I do, especially when I don’t feel up to it.

1. Hard Work

First, how do you make hard work starting working? How can essential tasks transition from unlikeable to exciting? Personally, the answer to this question came from the revelation that life is work. There is no way around this. Trying to put things off, in reality, only adds to the amount of work that will need to be done in the future.

Many people enjoy waiting until the last minute to begin — narrowly avoiding a deadline can build pressure and be motivating — but what if there’s a task with no fixed date? What about all the things in life you want to start, on a mental level, but never do because you get so preoccupied with what you need to get done in your day-to-day.

This is where balance is essential.

The neuroplasticity of our minds only diminishes with time. Our ability to learn new things declines with age. Each day we waste is a day we cannot gain back. As cliché as it is, you cannot wait for someday to arrive. You need to begin today.

2. Self-forgiveness

“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”_ 
— Chinese Proverb_

You may have been putting a lot of things off. You may have wasted a lot of time so far. That’s okay. The worst thing that people do is harbor guilt and self-deprecation due to the fact they’ve been neglecting to start what they’ve always wanted to do.

Shake off the dust, and start right now. Time is an arbitrary thing — it’s irrelevant if today is — the important thing is you start today. You figure out what the first step is and you take it.

This doesn’t mean you immediately plunge head-first into something new, as tempting as that might be. We are creatures of habit, and as such, we fall back into our regular routines after the novelty of a particular stimuli diminishes. The faster you try to commit to larger things, the faster you will inevitably burn out and become demotivated once again.

This is where balance is essential.

So begin today, but start small — baby steps. Think of what you can do not just today — but what you can repeat doing tomorrow, and the next day. What’s an activity that would only take fifteen to thirty minutes per day?

The hard part is doing it every day, the task itself gets easier, but you still need to do it every day. That’s what remains difficult.

3. Lack of Purpose

There are many of us alive today that have a radical amount of freedom, the kind that would be unimaginable to most people throughout history. As glorious as this can sound on an idealistic level, the reality is that most people find anxiety with this radical freedom, and will distract themselves from it.

People often create arbitrary restrictions around their life to avoid the lack of comfort there is in having so much choice in navigating it. With this freedom, they are also rarely prescribed any sort of purpose — or in other words, any sort of reason to do hard work in the first place.

We are all Sisyphus — forced to roll an immense boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down at the end of the day, for us to start our work again tomorrow. With this, I choose happiness, out of spite for the task ahead of me.

Any motivation, or purpose, for doing hard work can be ever-fleeting. You may never get the deserved recognition or money, you may never even become that good at something. But if you find peace with doing a task simply for the sake of doing it, you’ll be unstoppable. No amount of lack of results, or exhaustion, or criticism will be able to deter you, because it’ll all be irrelevant.

About B. Kenneth Brown