To do:
- Pay the bills
- Make a plan to get out of bad debt
- Write something good
- Don’t drink
too much - Work out – every day, — EAT HEALTHY
- Finish the books & Get the fuck out of here ASAP
I am a master of To-Do lists. I manage to squeeze into a day something that would take a week, even to Chuck Norris. Of course, I never succeed in accomplishing it in the time given. I procrastinate on tasks, forever.
For instance, I don’t like paying the bills. It breaks my heart when I see how much it all costs. I know that you have no choice and you have to do it eventually but I procrastinate on it as long as they don’t come to cut the electricity.
Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney write in their book that a road to success – happy family, good friends, a satisfying career, robust health, financial security, the freedom to pursue your passions – tends to be accompanied by a couple of qualities that predict “positive outcomes” in life: intelligence and self-control.
I must lack either the former or the latter or possibly both, because things in my life have always been somewhere here but never really in place. Or is it a common occurrence? I was perplexed for a long time why I fail to make right choices and lack strength to finish the things, do them rightly. This is one of the main focuses of the book I’m currently writing, The Second Choice Life.
Like Benjamin Franklin, I was good at making resolutions but had a hard time at their execution. I find it easy to come up with new things, fresh ideas or inspiring thoughts, but I’ve never succeeded in going regularly to gym for more than a month or two. The same was with booze. When I tried to quit it I managed a month at most. Usually some stupid party, or friends barging to my house would draw me out of my zen. Should I lay the blame on them?
Benjamin Franklin kept an ivory book where he listed 13 virtues he tried to live by. Every day he would put a black X below a virtue he wasn’t completing satisfyingly – according to his standards. He often complained how hard it was to keep up to it. To me, exactly his failings, give me the strength. If he could fail and still remain Benjamin Franklin, then maybe I can do it too, and still be Fran Hersh.
He was a perfectionist, very much like me, and was doing 100 things at a time: lobbying the French to back George Washington, practicing virtues of temperance, silence, order, etc., flying kite in storm, flirting with fine Parisian ladies and editing the Declaration of Independence. He also led extremely hedonistic life. He loved women, adored food and booze and was at least one part of his life overweight. (Probably the Paris years :-))
It’s widely known that you fill your resolutions with the virtues you lack, not the ones you already have and Benjamin Franklin named probably all of them (Catholic church usually mentions 7, and Franklin had 13). When he was working on a specific virtue, he would succumb to some others. It was impossible to be focused all the time on each one of them.
Mark Manson, another not-so-bad self-help author I read recently, said that the reason the things go wrong and you constantly fail is because me, like you and like Benjamin Franklin, give too much fuck about everything. He expressed himself stoically, but I guess he made a point. His model eclatante was Charles Bukowski.
So, can one focus on so many things at a time?
Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney don’t recommend it. They say that it draws too much willpower and if you constantly do it, you deplete your reserve and you don’t have it when you need it the most. Furthermore Dr Alice Boyd remarked that multitasking could be a cause or effect of anxiety syndrome. For that matter some of the Benjamin Franklin quotes caught my attention:
Do not anticipate trouble, or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight.
Evils come not, then our fears are vain; And if they do fear but augments the pain.
Covetousness is ever attended with solicitude and anxiety.
Was he possibly suffering from anxiety?
Lack of self control, anxiety, drinking, hesitance as well as impulsiveness and sometimes avoidance, and yet here we have a great man. One of the Founding fathers.
I wonder if we just push ourselves too much sometimes, when we try to excel on various fields at the same time and when our standards become more rigid than the standards for the scrutiny of historical greatness?