As many of you know, I hate mowing my lawn. I used to think this was because I actually hated the act of mowing the lawn, which was a thoroughly miserable experience growing up — my hay fever was so bad that after sitting on the tractor for an hour I was a fountain of snot and sneezing — but now I realize what I hate is the obligation more than the act, which means my issues with mowing the lawn are the same as my issues with everything else: I don’t like stuff looming over me, I don’t like being accountable for doing stuff at some particular time and place, I don’t like the pressure of having to produce something amazing, or even something adequate, or even the pressure to produce anything at all. If you’re thinking that that attitude sounds pathological, and incompatible with success of any kind whatever, then I think you’re right.
Yesterday DDB came over and essentially guilted me into mowing the lawn, or rather doing a part of the lawncare, by beginning to do another part himself. Before this shaming began, he said something like: just do it now, and then you’ll have the whole Saturday to yourself, and you’ll feel better.
It should come as no surprise that, when the weed wacker was put away and the grass was beat back, I did feel better. I always feel better, in fact, whenever this happens wrt anything — writing, programming, studying, cleaning. Anything. The effect has never been anything less than 100% correlated with intense psychological relief. And yet, my default is to put things off, to struggle with them, to avoid starting something until I’ve achieved some other milestone, which is always idiotic.
Another example: on Thursday after a meeting Dan asked how one might go about getting a histogram of the number of papers published on “bayesion models of vision” over the years. His hypothesis was that topic popularity rises exponentially and then drops off. I told him how I would solve the problem: write Python code to crawl Google Scholar, mine the abstract text for the publication date, keep a hash count based on year, find the “Next” link for the next set of results, etc. etc. Dan was a little disappointed that so many steps would be required, and said something like: well, maybe that will be an excuse to learn Python sometime.
Now, I knew all the tools for accomplishing this task, as evidenced by my detailed plan for accomplishing it. But I hadn’t used some of the tools in a while, it would require re-learning how to walk an HTML tree and programatically submitting forms, etc. etc., and of course I had other stuff to do. But Dan’s disappointment inspired me to screw around a little, and once I started screwing around a little I got into it, and once I got into it I managed, in short order, to throw together something that almost worked, and once I got that far I decided that I would finish it, as a surprise to Dan. So I finished it, sent him some graphs, and he was delighted and surprised, which made me feel great.
Which got me to thinking about how many things follow that same pattern. In just the world of software development there are a seemingly infinite number of projects I’ve been talking about building, which I’ve spent years thinking about how best to build them, so that I could have built at least a preliminary version ten times over if I’d just thrown myself into the job of doing it. And for stories, I think about writing them instead of writing them, I plan how I will write them, scribble down the ever-expanding list of things I need to know before I can begin writing them, with the result that I don’t ever write anything, except every so often when circumstances force me into avoiding all of that ‘groundwork’ and I do something that would have seemed inconceivable at any other time, like writing 5 stories in five weeks, or seventy stories in three months, or whatever.
I know that all of this sounds simple, and is simple, motivationally it’s simple, but of course things that seem simple are really not simple underneath the covers, even very smart people often mistake surface-simplicity for deep simplicity, like the researchers at MIT who came up with a computer vision problem they figured would take a few students three months to solve and which has rather taken an entire research community fifty-something years, and counting.
So what to do?
One thing that doesn’t work is making complicated plans and schemes, I’ve learned that lesson. But sometimes plans and schemes that are so simple as to almost defy the labels “plans” and “schemes” _can_ actually work. So here is my very simple plan: this summer, I’m going to accomplish the smallest amount possible. Instead of favoring getting something magnificent done, instead of titanic war efforts that harness every available resource, I’m going to harness the barest minimum of resources, with one caveat: I will do so little that doing _something_ becmes automatic. If I automatically make some tiny effort, if by default I write a sentence instead of waiting and mustering all my energy to write a 10k story, maybe that will shake something loose, effect a fundamental change in how I think about taking action, in what it costs me to do so.
So I’ll eat a handful of leaves when I don’t feel like making one of my fancy salads; I’ll solve one math problem when I can’t bear to settle down for two hours and beat myself over the head; I’ll write one line of code, I’ll make one Evernote note for my literature review, I’ll do one plank, one pull-up. I will ooze forward like a slug, but at least I’ll be oozing forward. That’s my scheme, the totality of my ambitions. I know mowing the lawn isn’t that hard. I just want to become the kind of person who really understands that in his bones.
