Most days I wake up and just try to do the things I want to do. Not in a selfish sense. I just mean I try to accomplish the things on my list that I want to accomplish for work or personal projects.
But more often than I like, that doesn’t happen. I accomplish something, but it’s not the something I was hoping for.
Sure, things happen and we have to be flexible sometimes, but what I’m talking about here is giving in to the Resistance. Those times when I don’t do the hard work to make sure the good work gets done.
Most of my life has been marked by not doing things I want to do because of fear, laziness, or lack of will power. It sucks, but it’s true. I was that way for much of my childhood and into early adulthood.
So now, when I try to wrangle the Resistance and do work that matters I have to fight back years of training in the opposite direction.
A big fear of mine is that when I look back at the end of my life I won’t be able to say I did what I wanted to do (which is simply what God wants me to do). That’s a healthy fear in some ways. It forces me to make short lists like I did the other night when I noticed myself drifting from taking the small steps and doing the hard things.
The funny part about me (and maybe you too) is that I usually know exactly what I want to do and I know what to do to get there. But somehow I still manage to screw that up. Luckily, I’m in good company. The apostle Paul noted the same in Romans 7:15 when he said,
“I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.”
I can show you exactly what you’re doing wrong in your golf swing to hit the ball better. Clear your hips, leave your head down, rotate your hands over on the club a little bit. But if you asked me to show you how to do all that…well let’s just say I couldn’t deliver.
It’s the same with blogging for me. I can tell you how to have a successful blog, how to design it, what to write about, how often to show up, and so on. But when it comes time to do it, I do the opposite of my advice. I don’t write about one particular thing, I change the look too much for any brand to stick, I post sporadically. Maybe that’s just who I am and I should embrace it, I don’t know.
Mostly I just think it’s the old me coming back to haunt. They say it takes a long time to be good at anything, let alone successful. I’ve been blogging here for two and a half years now. That sounds like a long time, but I’m really just beginning to push through all the ways I try to run from what I want to do.
Anyways, I’m rambling now. This sounded great in my head. I knew what I wanted to do…