Life sometimes up-skills us in strange ways.
Whoever has had some interaction with me would recall that I am a reluctant student. Reasonably, life’s lessons were always a wee bit difficult and repetitive for me. But then there are certain times, certain encounters, that leaves us with very refreshing revelations, without putting much effort into it. Something like that happened yesterday. (Hmm. It’s debatable if the accidental coach found the encounter refreshing though. That’s a story for another day)
I love short and sweet stuff in life. Reading blogs is one of those kinds of stuff. One of the bloggers who I used to avidly follow revived his blog after a short break. But then the new posts lacked some zing. I couldn’t engross myself with gusto. Being a pompous netizen with a coveted desire to make my opinion heard, I knocked on the doors. I didn’t really knock on the doors for I don’t know where he lives, and it would be considered rude, with a likely possibility of finding myself in federal prison. I did the next best thing I could do - messaged him. I made my concerns clear, and he solicited.
‘You used to write refined stories, that I could drink from it. But the recent ones look like is written in a hurry.’
He concurred. ’I am writing in a hurry.’
‘But you used to write really good, I believe putting more effort would really pay off.’ I persisted
‘Everything is written in a hurry. If I spend too much time on a single article, I will lose interest and will never publish. So there is an optimum effort. More than that, the effort I put in is not worth it. Secondly, the more you write the better you become.’
‘You could perfect the art and post them, still’. Like a small kid-appealing for candy, I lingered on.
‘That obsession with perfection would prevent starting things.’
And that concluded the conversation. Left with no more arrows in my quiver, and I decided to sleep on it.
I love sleeping, me too you might be admitting, but believe me, I love sleeping with a greater passion. Maybe because I zealously slept, that my alter ego and my general-purpose ego decided to analyze the chat. Now, you might be wondering how I know that my two egoistic selves reviewed the whole thing. Because, when I woke up I had an epiphany, and I don’t get insights so easily with my pea-sized EQ.
So, the epiphany
When I am not procrastinating, I would be perfecting. I wait for me to have the right skillset in the right amount so that I can decide to fly before ‘life’ decides to push me off the cliff. It may not be only that, it could have also been because the reward is not good enough. When the effort is too much and the reward is not too great, we put off things. The revelation that we can reduce the effort to match the reward, and get things done more, it was new to me. I know it is a pretty straight forward axiom, but I was simply not aware of it.
I decided to put it in action today. I wrote a POC with whatever small information I had and gave that out for a review. I cleaned up a part of the house, keeping time as the limit against impeccability. And I kick-started an online course as well.
Point to ponder. Are you a victim of perfection as well?
No comments:
Post a Comment