What’s so scary about creating a checklist?
It’s easier to create a checklist for others to do than yourself, why?
The same reason most people do not write down short term, long term or any type of goals for that matter.
If you have no goals or objectives, you do not know when you have failed.
General Patton was famously quoted as saying:
“A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.”
Perfection kills plans.
Fear of failure kills plans.
Fear of loss kills plans.
These things not only kill plans, they stomp out any momentum. Driving you back in to the same vicious cycle.
Fear of loss is the worst of all. Humans will sacrifice so much opportunity and time to avoid loss of meaningless things.
When you’re afraid to lose opportunities because you’re doing something else, to the point that you do a bad job at the task you ultimately choose, everyone loses.
You’re working out, but you could be watching TV now. So you watch TV while working out. But you’re working out somewhat hard to the point that you cant fully get the benefit of the TV show, and you’re trying to not work out too hard so that you can watch TV. But you’re only doing a half assed job at working out, and watching TV.
When you go to a buffet and you sacrifice your health and ensure that you feel like trash the whole rest of the day because you want to get your money’s worth. Or you go to an open bar and sacrifice your next day with a massive hangover because you ‘want to get your moneys worth’
How many areas do you split time or sacrifice your health like this? And weren’t we talking about how we fail checklists?
Checklists and Goals fail because they are not specific enough, never stated, or if the checklist/goals are stated they stop from being followed.
There’s a reason they are not followed. It could be that you think they are no longer needed because the process has been internalized. Or you cannot take the abject failure staring you in the face day after day.
Either way, sometimes it’s not you, it’s the checklist. It’s the goal. Both need to be simple and able to be followed or advanced upon.
Start absurdly simple and build from there. Your workout plan can be as simple as do 1 pushup when you get up.
Your book writing plan can be write 1 crappy page a day.
Your parenting plan can be clearly communicate expectations to the kids and give them the best tools I can at this moment.
It’s better than nothing, and it’s a start. Like a massive snowball going downhill it starts very small and then builds momentum.
That momentum has to start somewhere. And it can’t be too small.
Get the ball rolling.
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