"Five minutes each week that might change your life."
When I was living in New York, my mind was a mess. I had lost track of my meditation habit and felt like I never had time to do it. Frustrated, one day, I called up an old friend who is a professional meditation teacher.
“So what’s stopping you?” he asked me.
“I’m too busy, not enough time, always stressed out. You know, the usual.”
“Can you do 10 seconds?”
“Well, yeah, anybody can do 10 seconds.”
“OK, then do 10 seconds.”
“What? What’s the point of meditating for 10 seconds?”
“Well, for one, it’s better than meditating for zero seconds. But my guess is that once you sit down, close your eyes and get situated, you’re not going to want to stop after 10 seconds, so before you know it, you’ll be meditating.”
“Oh, come on, dude.” I realized he was right. I was an idiot.
I'd been telling people—and myself—that I couldn't meditate anymore.
Wrong.
I had just imagined meditating “didn’t count” unless I was doing it for like 30 minutes every morning. It was an unnecessary and self-imposed constraint.
We do this all the time. We imagine that to eat healthy we have to eat perfectly, so we never start. We imagine that to get into shape, we need to workout for 3 hours a day, so we never start. We imagine that to write a book, we need to write 20 pages every morning before breakfast, so we never start.
We do none of it, and then you tell yourself some nonsense story about discipline.
But a high bar you never clear is a pretty convenient way to never find out if you're actually any good.
So I say lower your bar. Find your minimum viable action, and go.
See you Monday,
Mark
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