Passive Persistance
We are all way over booked. I don't know if it's actually worse now than say twenty years ago or if it's like child kidnapping statistics, just more obvious. The fact remains though, we have more that we want to do than we can. To make it worse it seems our minds want to do less than we ourselves want. We easily let those things which take a bit of work to get into and will benefit us drop off the radar, where those things close to heart will blip away in our consciousness.
Persistence is how we manage to break through these barriers. We make notes, we schedule time, we sign up for programs, we commit ourselves to making new endeavors break though the inertia of what already exists in our lives. This is a very macro approach, but it works. It requires we decide on and commit to one thing, then actively pursue it with regular time and usually money. But what if we just don't have the energy for that, or the time, or the desire to work this way?
Hold that thought. It has recently been shown that one's social circle affects them more than we may think. People with thin or overweight friends have a higher incidence of becoming the same. I think it's fairly obvious here that if your friends eat out a lot, you likely will too and will gain wait, as well as vice versa, however I think there's a subtler as well a finer point here. While eating out is a fairly macro aspect of this, consider the part where you instead get more exercise because your friends do active things and they invite you along. Or even finer, that you start basket weaving because your friends already known how to and not only teach you but have the right materials for you to borrow. These simple barriers are often the hurdles that keep us from entering new domains, and it is our friends who can easiest let us slip over them. If your friend asks if you want to weave baskets with them, you know you have that 'in' waiting for you if/when you're ready. ( I would argue that this is why a lot of successful people are successful. Networking, social nepotism, being with the right people at the right time. And sadly, being able to be with the right people at the right time. )
Now back to the first point. If the problem you have is getting into something you know you want to do, then just go find a friend right? It's not that hard to meet people.... hmmmm Ok Perhaps meeting a basket weaver and striking up a conversation that doesn't involve "Teach me to weave baskets!" is not really going to happen. But there's something to be learned from what would come from that connection. It's the small things that get in our way, and having a friend who can give us a leg up over the hurdles is great, but when we're left to our own devices I think there is still hope on our own.
By collecting small pieces of what we want around us I think we can create a simple path for passive persistence. By keeping your goal in mind through each and every day we're more likely to achieve our goals. When your bored we often latch on to those things at the top of our minds or even more so which we don't think will require a lot of work to just start doing. So if we have a steady influx of familiarity with what we want, we'll more likely let our minds wander to it and want to pursue it in our free time. What can constitute this? Pretty much anything I would think. If appropriate I think podcasts are a great tool. They auto update and get synced to your music player with everything else, so you always have a little bit of information just waiting for you. Magazine's can work, or even just setting your home page/portal to an appropriate site, preferably one that is dynamic so there's always something new for your mind to process.
Persistence is how we manage to break through these barriers. We make notes, we schedule time, we sign up for programs, we commit ourselves to making new endeavors break though the inertia of what already exists in our lives. This is a very macro approach, but it works. It requires we decide on and commit to one thing, then actively pursue it with regular time and usually money. But what if we just don't have the energy for that, or the time, or the desire to work this way?
Hold that thought. It has recently been shown that one's social circle affects them more than we may think. People with thin or overweight friends have a higher incidence of becoming the same. I think it's fairly obvious here that if your friends eat out a lot, you likely will too and will gain wait, as well as vice versa, however I think there's a subtler as well a finer point here. While eating out is a fairly macro aspect of this, consider the part where you instead get more exercise because your friends do active things and they invite you along. Or even finer, that you start basket weaving because your friends already known how to and not only teach you but have the right materials for you to borrow. These simple barriers are often the hurdles that keep us from entering new domains, and it is our friends who can easiest let us slip over them. If your friend asks if you want to weave baskets with them, you know you have that 'in' waiting for you if/when you're ready. ( I would argue that this is why a lot of successful people are successful. Networking, social nepotism, being with the right people at the right time. And sadly, being able to be with the right people at the right time. )
Now back to the first point. If the problem you have is getting into something you know you want to do, then just go find a friend right? It's not that hard to meet people.... hmmmm Ok Perhaps meeting a basket weaver and striking up a conversation that doesn't involve "Teach me to weave baskets!" is not really going to happen. But there's something to be learned from what would come from that connection. It's the small things that get in our way, and having a friend who can give us a leg up over the hurdles is great, but when we're left to our own devices I think there is still hope on our own.
By collecting small pieces of what we want around us I think we can create a simple path for passive persistence. By keeping your goal in mind through each and every day we're more likely to achieve our goals. When your bored we often latch on to those things at the top of our minds or even more so which we don't think will require a lot of work to just start doing. So if we have a steady influx of familiarity with what we want, we'll more likely let our minds wander to it and want to pursue it in our free time. What can constitute this? Pretty much anything I would think. If appropriate I think podcasts are a great tool. They auto update and get synced to your music player with everything else, so you always have a little bit of information just waiting for you. Magazine's can work, or even just setting your home page/portal to an appropriate site, preferably one that is dynamic so there's always something new for your mind to process.