Start Small or Not At All

A vital lesson in goal achievement

My descent out of the SSH was accompanied by increasing personal dysfunctions that hindered my ability fulfill basic life responsibilities, much less interact succesfully with others. As a result, a significant portion of my self-development journey has revolved around ending personal, harmful habits, and replacing them with new, helpful ones. This process has been arduous and extremely frustrating. I erroneously believed that habits could be ended more or less as easily as they began. That assumption has been thoroughly shattered by years of experience with trying and failing to change.

Thanks to the teachings of Mark Queppet, I have now learned how to resolve bad habits by using his revolutionary metascript method. Despite this great progress, some old problems do crop up from time to time. One of the most insidious of these is the issue of poor pacing or biting off more than you can chew. It is a problem that seems so silly once you see it for what it really is, but it had kept me trapped for years. I would get some app to track my habit progress, finally hoping to break through all of them, ideally in one fell swoop. Over time though, I noticed that as I tried to track all of the twenty or thirty habits I was trying to build, progress was not really being made on any of them.

Days would pass, and no matter how much I wanted to change, nothing would get better. Hundreds of hours were still lost to video games, internet scrolling, and other vices. The worse the situation got, the more determined I became to change things. However, the faulty tactics stayed the same. Every day the habit tracking app would report that I had failed to follow through on almost all of my goals. It was so easy to forget them or simply ignore them when they seemed too hard to carry out. Ultimately, the path of least resistance was winning.

It would be absurd to ask a total beginner to start lifting with anything even near a quarter of his own body weight

After three or four years of consistent failure, Mark Queppet help me realize that my ego and zealotry for change was getting in the way of real progress. The idea of having to pace myself had crossed my mind, but it was too disgusting to entertain. Starting much smaller than where I wanted to meant I had serious limitations, and that was too uncomfortable to acknowledge. It felt more rewarding to intellectually and emotionally masturbate about change by dreaming of great plans, writing down habit changes, and organizing my productivity tools than working with where I was. It was no different than a first-time gym goer trying to bicep curl with two fifty pound dumbells when they cannot even do a single pull-up. It was after slowing down and tackling issues one-at-a-time, in a consistent, focused manner, did I start to make real progress in defeating those bad habits.

I thought I had a handle on this idea by now, however, this old lesson has shown itself again. Recently, I detailed a plan to get socializing more and more, but was running into a lot of emotional resistance. Once again, I overestimated my willingness and skill and neglected to account for reality. As a result, more time was spent figuring out how to socialize, speak properly, and track progress than actually getting out there and talking to people. Remembering the lesson of proper pacing, I had to reach an acceptable compromise with myself that made sense logically and felt emotionally sustainable. My first forrays into socialization this summer have been relegated to smaller church events and online conversations. It is just enough to be tangible and to build off of in the future, and I look forward to updating you all on my progress.

It is ultimately more discouraging to ignore your limitations than to accept and deal with them

This mentality of proper pacing can be summarized by this short quote, a favorite of Queppet:

"Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast."
-Unknown

Apparently, he had it printed and hung up on his wall.

In keeping with building upon the idea of creating better status narratives, here is what my new win-fail conditions look like in light of this important lesson:

Old Narrative:
Going slow is failing.
The faster you go, the better.
Success is found in the ultimate outcome.

New Narrative:
Going too fast is failing.
The more consistent you are, the better.
Success is found in engaging in the process as well as achieving the outcome.