During j-school, whenever I didn’t feel like going for a run, a friend used to remind me:
The more you don’t feel like doing it, the more you probably should.
I thought of those words when I read Tim Ferris’ book, The 4-Hour Workweek. “Usually, what we most fear doing is what we most need to do,” he writes.
So today I ask you: What do you most fear doing? What don’t you feel like doing today?
And how can you make that ONE thing your priority?
I most fear waking up with a huge spider on my face, and I sure don’t feel like doing that today… And no thanks, I’m not going to make it my priority. But I’m pretty sure that’s not quite what you meant. 🙂
Homework. I fear getting it wrong, but I need to do it today, and today I made it a priority by not allowing myself to stay online until a decent amount of it was done. That was about an hour or two.
Funny you should mention the running thing. That is how I motivate myself to workout. But as for other things, I’m not as good at pushing myself as I am to go for a run. I think it’s because something like running is a personal thing. No one has to know if my time was absolutely awful or if I had to walk up the final hill. Right now I’m working on a piece for a writing contest and, though I am excited about it, I find it so terrifying because submitting it takes my writing from personal to public, and if it’s not as good as I think, it won’t just be me that knows. But my goal today is to just push through and give it my best. After all, you can’t succeed if you never try.
What I most fear is what I should spend a good part of every day doing: writing. The fact that I haven’t made money off my writing yet makes me more reluctant to get to it than I should be. Because of that I don’t get things done. What I’m trying is to set specific times of day to write after work. Also, I’m telling myself writing is rewriting, so don’t be too upset if the work needs a lot of polishing.
I’ve neglected my writing for the last few weeks due to some family issues and I know I need to get back to it, but it feels daunting since I’ve been away for it for a while. I know its what I need and now I need to make it a priority again.
Losing my motivation to write is my biggest fear. I’m working very hard at the moment, and I’m about to celebrate my book’s first birthday on the 16th April :). Right now I’ve almost finished my second novel – a novel that’s twice as long as my first one and it’s taken me half the time to write :).
This is a good reminder, thanks! I think I’ve been trying so hard to do and keep up with all those things that I want to do–writing, publishing things–that I’ve started to neglect having fun. Almost to the point that I’m not sure how to have fun anymore. It’s like the common attitude has switched, for me, so I need to work on not working and enjoy myself. It’s Sunday night, for crying out loud–Monday morning is coming.