Following Through

... on my 19th weekly blog post in a row

This is my 19th nervous breakdown weekly blog post in a row — an achievement of sorts given how speculative the project was at the outset. While some posts are better than others (last week’s final paragraph was dashed off 2 minutes before the ‘deadline’), the goal is to publish something, anything, to meet the commitment I set myself.

Reader Lesley asked a good question: “How do you maintain the motivation for these self-set tasks? I have a huge list of photo projects, writing ideas, fitness goals etc which fill me with enthusiasm at inception but quickly fizzle out - what's your secret to keeping going?”

My answer was something like “low standards.” And it's true that perfectionism is the enemy of progress, but there's more to it than just low standards, which can easily become demoralising. So I’ve put together a longer answer below. It is not so much advice—which I am really not qualified to give—as a collection of insights gleaned from years of procrastination.

Your map of reality

There's a guy I know who never meets a deadline, who is late for every meeting, and lives in a state of chaos. He’s always making excuses and feeling guilty. Actually, there are many guys I know like this, including myself at various points in my life. It's a miserable situation to be in.

We make plans, start projects, agree to do jobs, fantasise about goals, and then have to deal with reality. Man is the only animal that can torment himself with what he hasn't done but planned to do. Merlin Mann calls it 'expectational debt' - your psychic ledger of all the expectations you've created in other people: that novel that you never finished, that marathon you never ran. If you don't follow through, the psychic bailiffs will come for your mental health.

All those missed deadlines are, moreover, signals that your map of reality doesn't represent the world as it is. What's worse is that often people don't correct the map when they break a commitment, instead losing faith that maps have anything useful to offer in the first place. We become unmoored from reality, our minds incapable of plotting a course of meaningful action.

Jordan Peterson became a hero to distressed young people partly because he told them to clean their rooms. If you're living a chaotic life then this small intervention is an easy way to start training yourself to line-up your intentions with your reality. It's simple: if you make a commitment to do something and then you do that thing, you feel good. You feel good because your intention and the world correspond to one another. If you don't do what you intend, you feel bad because you can no longer trust your intentions.

In yoga they have the idea of Shraddha, which is the equivalent principle to following through. The Sanskrit etymology makes this clear, being derived from shrat meaning "truth" or "faithfulness," and dha, meaning "to direct one’s mind toward." It is faith: the faith in yourself that comes from following through.

Every time that you say you're going to do something and don't do it your faith in yourself - your self-esteem, or your ego - is undermined. We live in a time where it is easy to speculate, dream, try things out with no consequences. We need to understand that this speculations are like Faustian pacts for our sense of self.

Commitments with yourself

Imagine having someone in your life who continually lied, let you down, had no principles, no morals, did whatever they liked without reference to previous agreements. That person is sometimes you.

What does it mean to have agreements with yourself? It is a pact with reality. I have one where I say I am not going to check my phone until 11am. It is a simple thing but the minute you break it, you lose some faith in yourself. All these broken pacts, all these dead dreams, are the source of acute suffering.

If you could only reduce the scope of the task to the point where it is easily doable and have the humility to start small, your sense of self and ability to complete these tasks increases. Little by little your trust in yourself, your map, and the world increases. In short, follow through.