When I was starting my company, I had to cold-call a few dozen people to test a hypothesis. I delayed it for weeks, and when I finally forced myself to pick up the phone, I dreaded dialing every digit.
Today, three years into running the company, picking up the phone to call a dozen people is peanuts. I don't like doing it, I'm not very good at it, I delegate it whenever I can, but if call I must, I'll do it, I'll be efficient at it, and I'll get results.
Saying "you didn't do it because you weren't meant to" is nonsense. Get your act together, stop making excuses for yourself, and do the uncomfortable thing that must be done, even if you lose sleep over it. If you do it long enough, it will seize being uncomfortable and become second nature. Shakespeare said it best through Hamlet:
Assume a virtue, if you have it not.
That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat,
Of habits devil, is angel yet in this,
That to the use of actions fair and good
He likewise gives a frock or livery,
That aptly is put on. Refrain to-night;
And that shall lend a kind of easiness
To the next abstinence: the next more easy;
For use almost can change the stamp of nature,
And master ev’n the devil or throw him out
With wondrous potency.
I think the argument is less about "don't do the (relatively) minor uncomfortable things", and more about aligning yourself so that the major part of your work is something you love. Love writing, not being an author. Love running a business, not the title of CEO. And if you don't love either of those, find what you love, and put yourself in a situation where that is what you do.
Your sticking to the narrative and not what actually happens in a practical sense.
You dont get to be CEO till your company has happy customers paying you moeny and your making a tidy profit. Till then you'll do anything and evertyhign thats necessary - most of it is unpleasent. 10% is fun.
In my experience, pleasantness and unpleasantness are day to day feelings that sometimes work in my favor and sometimes don't. Many times I have a responsibility which requires unpleasant things, and it makes it more difficult to do, and might make me unhappy if my happiness is based on daily frustrations and successes. That type of happiness tends to have very little to do with our goals. Since it's also very unpredictable, seeking this form of happiness is elusive and error prone.
Maybe there's a different emotion I could seek in my life. Potentially that feeling of accomplishment. Accomplishing something feels great. A lot of people have realized this, single player video games were based on the idea. It is, however, not hapiness. Happiness comes and goes.
If I allow my happiness to flow and fluctuate and act as it always does, and rather focus on getting that feeling of accomplishment, my attitudes change. When I approach a challenge, I don't focus on whether it will make me happy. When I do that, I think about the immediate perks, but also about all the potential frustrations that accompaygne the task.
So I think about it as accomplishment. If I do this task, I will accomplish something. Taking out the trash, 10 points. I don't care about the actual points I have, as the points aren't what I seek. So I don't even keep track. But as games are goals and games have points, it might be easier to connect in your mind with some points.
Go out running. Don't think about how long you have to run for, or how fast you have to run. Don't even worry about the clothes you're in. Just get on your street, and run in a direction. Any speed. Any pace. Now that you've started, and you've jogged enough to get warmed up, pick an object a short distance away and race to it as fast as you can. When you get there you'll be winded, and tired, and you might even vomit. Vomiting is just some random frustration though, it has nothing to do with the accomplishment that you just ran faster than you have in the past x years.
If you do decide you like accomplishing things, then this pattern of setting goals and reaching them can be done with tasks lists and check boxes. Build a momentum of doing it.
The next step is to align your goals to your dreams. Then take that momentum and checklists, and you'll feel more energy than ever to getting what you want done.
I'm not specifically referring to you keeptrying, I was simply writing some ideas down and ended up switching to second person since it was more natural for me to write that way.
I am also going to point out something else that the author of the article misses that you get.
When I was just out of college, I worked in a cafeteria for a year, serving food. Sometimes I washed dishes (300 people per meal to one dishwasher for dishes and one for pots and pans). One thing I found was that this was boring work, but there were ways I could make it fun. What was my limit in washing dishes? (with the mechanical help, about 450 people per meal before I had to ask for help).
Serving food? I'd identify all the foreign students and try to learn the food terms in as many languages as I could. Cutting turkey with a carving knife for sandwiches? I'd see if I could do as well as a deli slicer in thinness and consistency, as long as I could do it fast enough not to allow a line to form. Heck I even had Saudi students make up signs in Arabic to indicate pork and wine in dishes.
My bosses hated the fact that I played all these games. They also hated the fact that I would step in to help out the lunch cook when needed if it didn't mean totally abandoning my post. They said it wasn't my job and I was helping someone else be lazy. I said I was having fun and improving building skills at the same time. That said more about them than about me.
If there is one thing that has served me well in starting my business it's that approach. There is nothing so dull that it cannot be made a game out of, where I cannot challenge myself to do it better.
I would say though that it is important to have goals that don't always align with your dreams. Sometimes one has to make grunt-work interesting in seemingly meaningless ways, but those ways are never meaningless. For example (when I am living alone, which I sometimes do), I might challenge myself as to how little I can spend on food in a month while eating a healthy diet. Sometimes out of all this some degree of creativity is born, and that makes all the difference. Sometimes that creativity comes back to my business.
And so.....
Self-improvement is not something to be learned from a book. It comes from making actions into challenges, first a few, then many.... until it becomes a habit. When we exercise we get stronger. When we exercise our overall capacities we become greater.
I like this perspective. There's just one problem with it: while many would likely find it sensible, most don't share your ability act in a rational fashion.
I'm of the mind that most people are overwhelmed by impulses; therefore, they choose what's immediately desirable, over what they know to be the right thing to do.
Then of course, my post isn't altogether that different from yours, in terms of its applicability to the common person. While I can ask folks to reconsider their motivations, and seek out the things they love, few will in fact do so.
You don't start out this way with it being a habit. You start out by saying "I want to make this interesting. What game can I play while I do it?" Maybe it's seeing how fast you can take out the garbage. Maybe it's something just picked up for the sake of the challenge (the GP used running as an example).
The point though is that if you do this a few times, it will start to happen more and more and eventually you will make a habit out of it.
I don't think anyone is incapable of learning. I'd say the reasons more people don't do it are (it's not easy) and (there's no hard evidence, therefore it's easy to dismiss).
At the end of the day, there's one solid evidence of advice that I've ignored one too many times.
I agree that you cant think in terms of pleasantness/unpleasantness but we are human and we will feel good or bad about anything we do. Its inbuilt.
When I say 90% of being an entrepreneur is unpleasant - I mean it in a good way :). Ie, its unpleasant because its new to me and therefore I'm learning and I would still do all this crap than be at my old 9-to-5 where I was chasing other people's dreams - namely my bosses dream of getting promoted.
There's a huge difference between unpleasant and unhappy. :)
My whole point is that too many people keep thinking of finding that great job where you do what you love. But the whole point is the only way you can get to that point is by being successful in the first place - enough so that you can pay others to do what you don't like.
So while building up that capital of success your going to be doing heckuva lot of stuff you don't like.
I think a lot of people don't get this.
YOU CANT GET TO DO WHAT YOU LOVE WITHOUT HUGE PAIN aka SACRIFICE.
Exactly. I am using a lot of my time figuring out how to get on a more impactful project.
But I think even that would be better served by me judst launching my tiny damn site already!
The argument isn't one of never doing unpleasant things. (I don't like changing the oil on my car, but I know it needs to be done.)
Instead, I suggest examining why a desire seems important, and whether it might be more of a societal (or ego-driven) thing.
Additionally, I believe that if you take the time to find out what you really enjoy, some things will sort themselves out.
I've been really good at getting off my ass and doing things, as you suggest. In spite of this willingness to act, some of those things weren't as necessary as I had once believed.
I still have a problem with the statement "...make time to find out what you really enjoy". Sure, everybody wants that.
But take the example of running, or writing. Well like many people, I hated running at first, I really did. But I sticked to it because, well maybe it was some kind of challenge I had set to myself. And I got better at it. And I started to enjoy the feeling, to understand the messages from my body.
This is a classic example and I'm sure I'm not the only one to whom that happened. But let's now take the example of writing. I'm no writer, just a casual blogger (at best). I write by periods, but there is something I noticed: when I write often, inspiration and creativity flows more easily, and I tend to enjoy the activity more, while when I'm writing sporadicly, inspiration just doesn't come, and writing becomes a chore.
The opposite works too. I've always loved playing video games. This is something I really enjoyed doing. But you know what? When I turned 20, I decided that I would no longer play on a regular basis because I had better things to do with my life. Now I only play about 20 days a year, during the holidays. And that's it. And I'm happy because while I wasn't playing video games, well I got better at programming, I read Nietzsche, spent some time with friends (all things that I used to enjoy less that playing video games), and learnt how to love these things more than playing games.
Another point I'd like to raise is the fact that some things are more difficult to appreciate than others. Take wine for instance. Very few people like wine when they first try it, but when you get better at distinguishing the flavors, it is something amazing. The same goes with coffee (I mean coffee without sugar, cream, and other spoilers). Same with Jazz or Classic music. You have to learn how to appreciate these things.
I guess what I'm trying to say is: don't trust your first impression. Or the second. Or the third. You can only know what you really enjoy if you try different things, and stick to them long enough.
So what you're saying is that we all need to make time to find out what we really enjoy? tongue in cheek
I agree and I can mention many examples of my own in this regard where I didn't enjoy something until I tried for a while.
What a luxury to have the time and resources to "find what you really enjoy." It seems to be a first world problem kinda thing and coming from 1st/3rd (South Africa) it's a little paradigm shift (whilst reading) to appreciate where everyone is coming from.
It's a point that really does need refinement, though. Even if only for the first-world young adult with the luxury of misinterpreting it and wasting years of first attempts.
"Taking time to find out what we really enjoy" by default sounds like taking the time to try lots of different things, assuming that when you try "the right one" you'll know instantly that you've found it.
That's a first-world problem to be sure -- think of kids in their early 20's (still kids...) trying out entry-level job after entry-level job and finding them all tedious and boring (well, yeah, you're not going to get a really interesting job in any industry until you're capable of it). Or traveling the world on Daddy's dime to "find themselves", but still not really finding much besides how to ask for a beer in 7 languages.
Too much choice is a bad thing psychologically, on the whole. Too little sucks more, to be sure, but the sweet spot is not "always higher".
"What you really enjoy" (like "your true love") isn't some fated truth that needs to be found, and you'll know it instantly on sight. There are tons of things that could be "what you really enjoy", and tons of people who might be "your true love", but either way it's going to take prolonged effort to make that come true.
"Enjoyable" can also be a frame of mind. While doing a task that on the surface seems unenjoyable focus on the enjoyable parts and/or the final destination ("finishing the race").
This is very true. If starting a company is something you've always wanted to do (like me) then when you do it you'll find so much crap that you dislike or even hate but still have to do.
Some examples:
1. reading through all your contracts, legalese, terms of service and everything else you need a lawyer for. Mind numbingly boring but also real important.
2. writing copy for your site.
3. pitching your company in a bar at the end of a 80 hour week where you just want a drink in peace.
4. dealing with psycho customers who troll you for no good reason on forums where your promoting your company
5. Accounting.
Starting a company is probably the most extreme example though. Most profressions are just that - ie made up of 1 profession.
Starting a company is a multi-profession profession. Most of which you'd have never done before.
I've been a partner in our agency for 12 years now. It's been a hell of a lot of work. Additionally, the fun and interesting parts have always outweighed the bad.
Again, my point isn't to avoid anything uncomfortable. It's to do it for the right reasons, and to ensure that you aren't procrastinating at something you dislike, when you could be getting ahead at what you do like.
1. Doing cold-calls because you have the discipline to do it.
2. Doing cold calls because you love to do it.
It's obviously (2).
Therefore, when possible, love what you do.
I see myself as very lazy but looking back the past 4 years in university, I've done well because I "work hard". I spend ~20 hours a week programming and learning new skills, not because I have the discipline to do it, but because it is simply what I do. Classmates who rely only on discipline alone don't stand a chance.
IMHO1 sometimes discipline is necessary to achieve your goals, but try not to depend on it too much.
I used to hate making hamburgers at McDonald's. After many months it became second nature. Three years later I asked myself: "Why am I doing this besides for the $15 an hour, which I can easily get programming for other people". When I couldn't come up with an answer, I quit. The worst thing one can do is to have mediocrity becoming second nature without it having helped achieve any of one's goals.
IMHO2 if you must rely on discipline to do something, make it something worthwhile.
Today, three years into running the company, picking up the phone to call a dozen people is peanuts. I don't like doing it, I'm not very good at it, I delegate it whenever I can, but if call I must, I'll do it, I'll be efficient at it, and I'll get results.
Saying "you didn't do it because you weren't meant to" is nonsense. Get your act together, stop making excuses for yourself, and do the uncomfortable thing that must be done, even if you lose sleep over it. If you do it long enough, it will seize being uncomfortable and become second nature. Shakespeare said it best through Hamlet: