Recently I had a realisation. I’ve spoken in my blog before about the essence of speed and the difficulty slowing down and being calm or gracious about it. This realisation relates to that.
It’s no secret that today’s society is a fast one. With immediate access, FOMO, ‘get in first or lose your opportunity’ sales marketing — honestly, everything being rushed and hectic is a truism. This isn’t the realisation.
I like reading productivity books. I hesitate to call them self-help books because, well, I don’t think of myself as a person who needs the aid of a book to figure out who I am, which probably says something about what I associate with the term ‘self-help’. Productivity and decluttering are my fascinations — using time efficiently and having less stuff. So when I talk about the books I read, those are the books I mean. This also isn’t the realisation.
Raise your hand if you’ve ever read a book in this broad genre which said something to the effect of ‘go ahead and do this now. I’ll wait.’
I’ll lay money that most books have some variation on the theme. And I get why it’s there: when something feels hard to begin, having someone, anyone, hold you accountable can ease some of the friction. I use the same technique myself sometimes, and so do my friends: “Tell me to do [x]” is a common if irregular refrain in our chat group.
This kind of command has become ubiquitous in these kinds of books. Trying to get your stuff organised? Almost certainly you’ll get the order. Reading a book about how to begin that big project you’ve been putting off? Chunk it, the books will tell you, and then get started on the smallest step right now. I’m pretty sure even my favourite book about habits, James Clear’s Atomic Habits, does the same thing — though it might do it less than some due to its premise.
The thing is that this kind of directive often ignores the root cause behind why people procrastinate. People aren’t lazy by nature. If they find something hard, it’s because there’s emotional baggage attached, or they aren’t neurotypical, or they’re simply exhausted from x other thing, or they have so many things already on their minds that paralysis has set in.
That’s a problem because, let’s be real, no one remembers the context. No one remembers that big projects are completed by many smaller steps. All they remember is ‘do it now, don’t put it off later’.
The implication therein being: if you put it off til later, you’ll never get it done.
If you put it off til later, you’ve already failed.
The only way to succeed at a task is to do it now.
That was the realisation: that the reason I get anxious about doing things fast, the reason I have the urge to do things now, is because I’ve internalised the idea that they cannot be done later. That later is, in itself, a failure. Marry that with the aforementioned societal speed and, well …
You can see how that’s a match made in hell.
Like I said, the directive is well-meaning. But it’s not enough to simply have someone order you to do one thing or another. It works incidentally, not as a solution — as soon as the book’s finished and shelved, the clutter begins, time begins to pass, the projects don’t get done. Things rarely end just because they’re finished. Making shit happen is a long-term process that cannot be solved by ‘do it now’. By continually focusing on ‘do a thing now’, these kinds of books inadvertently ingrain the idea that now is what matters most, not over lengths of time. Immediacy is still the value here.
Immediacy is the value in traditional publishing, too. Immediacy is why people think there’s no in-between for impoverished author or wealthy bestseller. Immediacy is why careers end if books don’t take off on release. Kris and Dean go into this substantially more, so I’ll put links to their blogs here and leave it at that.
This is what caused the realisation for me, however. I often get ideas about how to proceed on any given thing on my walk. Earlier this week I had several, all at once, and clamouring to be done as soon as I get home. The thing is that I have a routine after my walk. It’s a routine that starts my day and gets me settled, and gets the important stuff — writing — done first.
A starting routine shouldn’t make someone feel anxious or as if it’s getting in the way. A starting routine is the platform from which the rest of the day springs.
I shouldn’t have to feel like I’ve failed just for something not being done right now.
Publishing is a long-term business. Especially indie publishing. I’m now nearing the end of my first year, so I’m relatively new to many respects, mostly business-related. Learning doesn’t happen immediately: learning happens over time. The part of me that’s impatient to be at my goals already is tied with the sense that if I don’t go fast enough, if I don’t do everything now, I’m failing by proxy.
A career doesn’t happen upon orientation. A career is a span of time.
How many people see the well-meaning directive ‘do x thing now, don’t put it off’, and internalise that now is the only thing that matters? That putting something off is failure? That, regardless of their capability in the moment, they’re failing themselves not to overcome?
It’s a big mess that feeds into itself, and regardless of its intention, the focus on ‘don’t wait, act now’ dispowers the people who internalise the directive while being incapable of ‘acting now’.
I talk about power and empowerment a lot on this blog. That’s because I believe it’s one of the most important things a person can do for themselves. When you speak, think or act in a way which inadvertently removes power, it’s something worth examining. No one should ever be obliged to undermine their own agency. No one should ever have to stand for it being removed from them. Not even by themselves.
Relying on an external directive to do x thing can work, if it’s a rare incidental push from a friend. But the best way to make things happen, no matter the technique, is to find the causes behind why a person might not be doing it, and address them, in ways that work for them, not just because someone else said so. That brings agency back to the person. And that’s not always easy, or even possible, at any given time, because it can take a lot of energy — emotional, physical and mental — to examine oneself that deeply if it isn’t a realisation someone’s already made.
For me, right now, I struggle a lot with ‘now’ and ‘later’. I want to be successful now; I want to be earning a full income now. That’s not going to happen. Publishing is book by book, building reputation and readers and backlist. By necessity, it happens over time. Or at least, it does if you want the foundation to be solid and lasting.
But I’m slowly and surely managing to unwind my sense of immediacy with my sense of obligation and my sense of failure. If anything, it’s making me more determined to succeed: because I’m slowly internalising that success isn’t immediate. It’s one step after another, unstopping — even if, now and then, your direction has to change.
Aurichalcum Publishing 