Action vs Results

There’s a really good post about process, goals, and identity over on LitReactor at the moment. It’s worth taking a gander at the entire thing, but I’ve grabbed the key take-away here:

You can never take the process away, but once you attach your identity to goals and results you can’t control, it’s a recipe for disaster.

Dying on the Mountain: How Goals Will Kill You and How to Focus on the Process, Fred Venturini @ LitReactor

Or, to phrase it as one of my writing mentors did: you have no control over whether you get published or read. You do have control over how much you write and how much you submit.

I keep circling around that particular idea, because it’s so similar to the key takeaway when I was seeing my psychiatrist about anxiety: don’t focus on what you think or feel, focus on what you do.

So much of my anxiety is predicated on what Ellen Hendrickson has dubbed The Reveal — the fear that we’ll be judged, and that those judgements are right. It’s a fear that a thing that is fundamental to who we are will be taken away, because we don’t truly believe that we are that person.

It’s a measuring of success against results, rather than action.

(For more, you can check out my original post about Hendrickson’s book and the lessons it taught me about writing).

One of my recent reads was James Clear’s Atomic Habits, which comes at this from a different direction. In among his advocacy of small, iterative changes and being 1% better at something every day is a kernel that acknowledges the importance of identity and focusing on systems rather than results.

Changing habits, he argues, is a lot like voting for a new identity:

Each habit is like a suggestion: “Hey, maybe this is who I am.” If you finish a book, then perhaps you are the type of person who likes reading. If you go to the gym, then perhaps you are the type of person who likes exercise. If you practice playing the guitar, perhaps you are the type of person who likes music.

Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity.

Atomic Habits (p. 38), James Clear

Part of taking a regrouping week last week was giving myself space to figure out what habits I needed to re-set. Part of it was looking for the stuff that delivers value I’m somewhat blind to–for instance, while I don’t think of myself as a blogger, one of the recurring themes when I look for things that make me happy revolves around the application of research and knowledge.

Similarly, I dig sharing things with people–books I’ve loved, films I’ve enjoyed, ideas that lit me up with their usefulness–especially when there’s a chance to illuminate things that might be overlooked.

And so the blogging begins again, along with the habits that support it, trying to get back into a routine. I spend my morning diary time sketching out rough timelines to strive for as I figure out what falls in where.

(It’s only now, here at the end of this post, that I realise how many of these details may be misconstrued if you don’t recognise that we have a very exuberant cat who tends to start the morning with very full litter tray)