We're Off To The Races!

Or- Finding an enemy bigger than your apathy

Think.

We’ve finally made our way through the 6 Lines of Effort. Now it’s time to put it all together.

Today’s subtitle comes from Mr. Marcus Mumford’s song, I Gave You All. The full line is: “If only I had an enemy bigger than my apathy I could have won.” I think this is one of the most profound lyrics in all of music, and apropos when it comes to talking about making time for the things that we say are important to us.

I like to think of the LOEs as the old carnival horserace game in the picture above.

To play, you use a hose to squirt a stream of water at a small target which made your horse move forward toward the finish line.

The difference is that instead of competing against other players, each horse represents a sub-LOE (boulder), and you are responsible for moving each of them forward incrementally.

How you move the horses is up to you. The goal is not to get them all to the finish line at the same time, but to keep each moving by applying the proper amount of attention to each horse based on its current priority.

At different times in the race, you will need to prioritize one horse as the main effort, while the others play supporting effort roles.

It’s your life, you have to prioritize, and sometimes that means riding one horse to the exclusion of others for a while.

If you are starting a new business you may have to let sleep, exercise, and even relationships slide. That is not optimal, but it is life. Prioritize as needed. Just realize that the longer you let a horse remain idle, the harder it will be to get it going again, or in the case of a relationship horse, it could decide to leave the race.

Or, let’s say you’re the stay-at-home parent of a newborn baby, the child is your LOE 4, 5 & 6. Those 3 LOEs move along nicely together. But be aware, you will definitely be making concessions on LOE 1 &; 2 (especially sleep).

Later, as the child grows, you will have to keep an eye on the LOE 1 nutrition boulder, because there is the tendency, as the parent of a toddler, to subsist almost solely on purloined spoon fulls of Kraft Mac and Cheese - because it’s the cheesiest.

The point is to recognize that in this horse race, you call the shots. You’re the jockey.

Be careful of becoming complacent riding one horse. It is easy for apathy to take over. When it does, learn from Marcus Mumford’s cautionary tale, set a goal, make it your enemy, and attack it to get out of your rut.

Read. Blind Spots by Max H. Bazerman & Ann E. Tenbrunsel

This is a great book about ethics. It examines the reasons we fail to do what is right. This same concept applies to our LOEs, why we fail to do the things that we know are good for us. Give it a read.

Write.

I’ve finally kicked my writer’s block in the ass, and am closing in on finishing my memoir, Tough Rugged Bastards, about my time in the Marine Corps’ first special operations unit assigned to USSOCOM.

While in the grips of writer’s block, or resistance as Steven Pressfield calls it, I found myself getting angry at myself for not writing, that anger made the possibility of productive work less likely. This process spiraled into a vile-tasting self-licking ice cream cone of frustration, and if left unchecked, it is easy for frustration to cool into apathy.

And so in keeping with our horse race theme, I remembered a great quote by Laurence Gonzalez in his book, Deep Survival,

“The jockey is reason, and the horse is emotion, a complex of systems which exists for your survival... They can make you do things you never think to do and can allow you to do things you’d never believe yourself capable of doing. The jockey can’t win without the horse and the horse can’t race alone.”

My resistance was a product of emotion. If my writing was devoid of emotion and reflection it wouldn’t be worth reading. There is also the emotion tied to how it will be received which is heightening as I near the finish. The key is to rely on the jockey of reason to do his job. To guide, not tame, the horse of emotion. To control the things I can control:

I can sit in the seat.

I can do the work.

I can do my best.

The rest is out of my hands and up to Fortuna.

Repeat. Words of wisdom from those who said it best.

"It's not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is, what are we busy about?" -- Henry David Thoreau

"The shorter way to do many things is to only do one thing at a time." - Mozart

"Don't be fooled by the calendar. There are only as many days in the year as you make use of. One man gets only a week's value out of a year while another man gets a full year's value out of a week." -- Charles Richards

"Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." - Abraham Lincoln

See you next Thursday!