How often do you end up in a bad situation, and at the end think "oh, yeah, I could totally have seen that coming"? More often than not, I bet. Part of the reason that surprise is useful in risk management is that so few problems are genuinely unpredictable. This is similar to but different from wet floors, where you know something's a problem but do nothing about it. This is when a little voice whispers "you know, I don't think this is a good idea" and you say "shut up, little voice, I'm doing it anyway".
It's the niggling feeling that maybe this person isn't actually compatible with you, but you ignore it and forge ahead into a bad relationship. It's when you catch yourself wondering "is this job killing my soul?" and immediately think about something – anything – else. It's when you're playing a game and all your strategic understanding says to wait, but you go all in anyway. It's when you say "ha ha isn't this a bad decision" while you make exactly that decision. It's the part of you that, every time you're near a ledge, wants to jump just to see what happens.
Where does this come from? I mean, what possible purpose could there be in an instinct that causes us to take what we know and throw it away? I think the problem comes down to something I touched on in Concentrate: we don't trust logic. That part of us that has to make the decision in the actual moment is emotive and instinctive – basically, a child – and to it our logical self sounds like a boring grown-up: "don't go there because blah blah danger responsibility something about mortgages".
So maybe one solution is to treat your logical ideas as a Higher Power and learn to trust them even when you don't feel like it. But I also wonder if there's a way to make those logical ideas more palatable to your instinctive self. In other words, maybe the right answer is to translate the things you learn logically into emotional or associative ideas so you can react instinctively to them in the moment. On the other hand, maybe all that's needed is to associate that "maybe this is a bad idea" feeling with actual negative consequences, and let that little voice speak out.
Can we get back to politics? (Please?)
— Hamilton, The Election of 1800
Thus concludes any and all America-related activity for the forseeable future. I mentioned in my last failure post that I'm growing increasingly concerned with my pattern this year of falling behind and catching up, and I have a plan to fix it, so here it is: don't fall behind.
Facile as that sounds, it makes a certain kind of sense. The idea of falling behind implies that I can miss a post on a certain day and then atone for it on subsequent days. But, really, both of those aspects are pretty bad, and so maybe the concept of falling behind needs to go away entirely.
I've previously mentioned that I quite like the idea of the "unbroken line" of posts stretching back. It's certainly something I take pride in, but at this point calling it unbroken is a little questionable. I have certainly made a number of posts equal to the number of days since I started, a fairly weak formulation of the original "write every day" goal.
To some extent, I think the various recovery options, failure posts, bird posts, catch-up writing binges and so on are just helping me maintain the bad habit of not always achieving my goal. Perhaps it makes more sense to rationalise and simplify a little, to return to a system where, well, either I write that day or I don't. Missing a day just means a big ugly gap in the unbroken line.
Of course, I don't think that just really bad incentives are sufficient; no matter how motivated I am not to miss a day, sometimes things happen. Worse still, if there's a cascade of missed days I may end up losing any connection to the original habit. "Write every day" becomes "write most days" becomes "write next time I get around to it". That is, unfortunately, a common pattern.
Still, if I'm not capable of writing each day, perhaps it's best that I learn that and make a new plan. And if I want to take the unbroken line seriously, that requires making systems to avoid, not ameliorate, failures.
What I'm thinking is that I need to set a day to take the training wheels off and let missed posts be missed posts. That'll give me time to work on systems and practice writing more reliably in the lead up to it.
I'd like for that day to be January 1st, but that may turn out to be unrealistic. To stop me from pushing it out indefinitely, though, the hard deadline is post #631, after 2 years worth of posts. If I haven't got it figured out by then, well, maybe I never will. Wish me luck!
