[2022-04-18] Look for the thing you CAN do
I recently came across a quote by psychologist and author Glenn Doyle that did a great job at representing a principle I try to adhere to:
Can't clean up the whole room? Clean a corner of it. Can't do all the dishes? Do a dish. Can't get in the shower? Wash your face. Always look for the thing you CAN do, with the energy and focus you DO have. Little wins pave the way for bigger wins. 1% beats 0%.
This is similar to what James Clear advises in his excellent book Atomic Habits. As I wrote in my post Tiny improvements, Clear states:
Too often, we convince ourselves that massive success requires massive action. Whether it is losing weight, building a business, writing a book, winning a championship, or achieving any other goal, we put pressure on ourselves to make some earth-shattering improvement that everyone will talk about.
Meanwhile, improving by 1 percent isn't particularly notable―sometimes it isn't even noticeable―but it can be far more meaningful, especially in the long run. The difference a tiny improvement can make over time is astounding.
Each stride forward, however small, contributes to the journey of a thousand steps.
The greater challenge, I believe, is coping with limited output when our past productivity was so much higher. When cleaning a room used to be a breeze, cleaning a corner can feel like a huge setback. Changes in our capacity to get things done can occur for a variety of reasons: disability, injury, illness, surgery, pain, adjustment to new medication, mental illness, burnout, ageing, having a child. Accepting our limitations can be difficult, even more so if those around us don't understand our constraints. As Christine Miserando, creator of the Spoon theory, explained, the difference between being sick and being healthy is the amount of energy we have to spend on everyday activities. To help her friend understand what it felt like to have a debilitating disease, Miserando gave her lunch companion a fistful of restaurant spoons, each one representing a unit of energy needed to complete a task, such as getting ready in the morning, working and preparing meals. "I wanted something for her to actually hold, for me to then take away, since most people who get sick feel a 'loss' of a life they once knew," said Miserando." If I was in control of taking away the spoons, then she would know what it feels like to have someone or something else, in this case Lupus, being in control."
Another psychological trick our minds can play on us is the myth of perfectionism. It's easy to fall into the distorted thinking that something is worth doing only if we can do it perfectly or to some standard we were able to meet in the past. As I admitted in Put on your shoes, I wrote three years ago "When you've run marathons, a short jog seems hardly worth it." I wrote those words when I was struggling to find time to write posts for my first blog, Café Jen. I knew that I didn't have the time to produce the kind of articles I loved to write: well researched and in depth. I was afraid that something shorter and less detailed would be viewed as a fluff piece. Today, by comparison, I run that risk every day. But my personal commitment to daily writing has, so far, overridden my fear that a given post isn't good enough.
One way to trick our brains into achieving more than we might otherwise have done is to set an impossibly simple goal. As I shared in Just clean the vanity, sometimes I'll set a goal to wash the vanity in my bathroom. Nothing more. But once I get started, the Zeigarnik effect―the desire to complete a task once begun―kicks in, and I end up doing more than I had planned.
What I like about Doyle's quote is that it's an antidote to all-or-nothing thinking―the feeling that if we can't clean all the dishes, we haven't succeeded. We might ask ourselves, why bother doing even a single dish? I like Doyle's statement that even 1% is better than 0%. As I wrote recently in my post about my Accomplishments log, "Capturing my achievements reminds me of what I did accomplish in a day when I might otherwise feel like I haven't gotten a lot done." Even now, when I've largely recovered from cancer treatment, I can take pride in meeting the simplest of goals, such as getting to bed by 11:00 PM. I love Doyle's advice: "Always look for the thing you CAN do, with the energy and focus you DO have."
