Distractions, excuses, and challenges will always be right at your doorstep.
Don’t wait for the fear to go away, because it won’t.
Don’t wait for the risk to disappear, because there will always be risk.
Show up every day when it’s frightful. When it’s risky. When it’s tense. When it hurts. Because it will always be that way — the “finally” moment never comes.
This is such an easy trap to slip into. I feel the pull of it every day. Once I launch Outshape maybe people will know about me and I’ll finally feel good about myself as a developer. Once I’ve saved enough to buy the home I want, I’ll finally feel at rest.
We love to hope. Because hope is awesome. No matter how good or bad the current moment is, hope says the next one will be better. And that’s pretty exciting. But that hope can easily turn into something insatiable in unpleasant forms like greed and workaholism. The key is to embrace the fears and challenges and find joy in them. Find joy in the every day struggle and keep working and find satisfaction in resting and looking back on a day’s work.
It’s this reason that I’m super intrigued by Shawn Blanc’s Focus Course. There are a lot of video series/courses/cat videos/minecraft hacks on the internet dedicated to improving yourself, but I have to think Shawn’s is the best. It’s not about making a million bucks before you’re thirty, or how you can hack your body to run 5 marathons a year. It’s simply about how diligence and focus can be learned to do more meaningful work.