I am not good at fixing thing that are broken. Hence, there are two or three items in my car that remain in a state of disrepair. I just leave them broken. For some people fixing broken items is usually easy. I truly envy such people.
But in life there are issues that cannot get fixed with just one work of repair. Many challenges in life manifest themselves as large, insurmountable amorphous blobs of potential failure.
Like a complex and bug-riddled system needs to be overhauled. Your career is stagnating by the minute. You are steadily letting your sedentary desk-bound lifestyle turn your body into mush (ahem! am I talking about myself?).
All of these problems are much bigger and harder to just fix than a broken chair. They’re all complex, hard to measure, and comprised of many different small solutions–some of which will fail to work!
Because of this complexity, we easily become demotivated by the bigger issues and turn our attention instead to things that are easier to measure and easier to quickly fix. This is why we procrastinate. That’s why I am procrastinating fixing those broken items in my car. To me they are too complex. They are beyond me. And the procrastination generates guilt, which makes us feel bad and therefore procrastinate some more.
Here is another area I’ve been procrastinating. I’ve struggled with ‘serious’ exercising for a long time. To get rid of that guilt I walk some and climb stairs some but I should do better. I can do better.
The point of demotivation here is the notion that just getting into rigorous exercise for a week or two does not guarantee that you get into shape. That is what makes it harder - if you do something toward improving, you can’t tell immediately or even after a week that anything has changed. In fact, you could spend all day working on getting in shape, and a week later you might have nothing at all to show for it.
This is the kind of demotivator that can jump right up and beat you into resignation before you even get started. It does me! It has happened to me before. Even after you have followed a serious, disciplined regime of exercise, it’s hard to see the results.
So how do you overcome the discouragement? How do you go pass the demotivators to press on?
There is a simple solution I have learnt from dealing with the problems of life. The secret is to focus on making whatever it is you’re trying to improve and make better today than it was yesterday. That’s it. It’s easy. And, it’s possible to be enthusiastic about taking real, tangible steps toward a distant goal by taking one small step at a time.
So, you trudge along making small fix after small fix, and over time, the fixes become faster, and easier. This is because you make the decision to live a day at a time and seek to simply make today a little better than yesterday.
You might not be able to see a noticeable difference in the whole with each incremental change, though. When you’re trying to become more Christ-like in your workplace or be healthier, the individual improvements you make each day often won’t lead immediately and directly to tangible results. This is the reason big goals like these become so demotivating. So, for most of the big, difficult goals you’re committed to, it’s important to think not about getting closer each day to the goal, but rather, to think about doing better in your efforts toward that goal than yesterday. And to thank God for helping you to win today’s battle leading on to eventually win the war.
I can’t, for example, guarantee that I’ll be less fat today than yesterday, but I can control whether I do more today to lose some weight. And if I do, I have a right to feel good about what I’ve done. This consistent, measurable improvement in my actions frees me from the cycle of guilt and procrastination that most of us are ultimately defeated by when we try to do Big Important Things.
You also need to be happy and grateful with small amounts of “better.” So, make your improvements small and incremental but make them daily. Small improvements also decrease the cost of failure. If you miss a day, you have a new baseline for tomorrow.
The Lord told the Israelites: “Little by little I will drive them out from before you, until you have increased, and you inherit the land.” Ex 23:30
It’s little by little, in small increments. Just aim at making today better than yesterday.
ps. I am writing this from my annual Personal Retreat. This reflection came from one of the questions I asked myself today: What is the one area where I feel like a failure this year?
