What kind of commitment is required to move a mountain?

Let’s take Joe.  He’s committed to moving the sucker, so he wakes up, checks his email, rolls up his sleeves, moves a few rocks, hops online to check the news, moves a few more rocks, has lunch and reads a couple of articles on solar power and politics while he eats, moves a few more rocks, heads to his 5:30 cooking class, etc…..

Then there’s Joanne.  She wakes up and attacks the mountain.  She moves rocks until she has to stop for lunch.  While she’s eating she runs through the move in her head, playing out all the possible problems she might encounter and sketching out solutions.  After her meal she gets right back to moving the rocks and doesn’t stop until well after dark.  At dinner she opens her laptop and reads up on the latest rock-moving technology, takes some notes for the next day, then collapses into bed.

Who are you going to put your money on?

Joanne’s focus is going to get her to the finish line first.  Her social life is going to suck and she’s not going to be very well-versed on anything other than mountain-moving, but she will reach her goal long before Joe does, if he even gets there at all.

To do something big and audacious you must focus on that thing and nothing else.  Every day, every thought must be about your task.  No hobbies, no outside entertainment, nothing.  Distractions will slow you down.

If you’re shaking your head and thinking, “That’s a crappy way to live life,” you’re right.  No one can be happy living that way their entire life.

But it’s certainly something you can do for a couple of weeks.  Or months.  Or a year.

How long can you work on your goal as if nothing else exists?  How long can you shut out distractions and keep plunging ahead like your hair is on fire?

Then take a break, take some time to appreciate your accomplishment or evaluate your failure for future success, and begin again.

Time is short.  What will you use it for?

Sometimes pain isn’t the worst thing you can endure.

It can be worse – much worse – to sit around wondering if you could have done something special if you’d only pushed through the pain.

Pain is discomfort.  Regret, on the other hand, is an ever-present agony that takes a long, long time to go away.

Register the pain for what it is and drive out regret.

In the vacuum of our solitary lives, when faced with an extremely difficult or scary task we usually quit partway through or don’t even bother starting.

Diets are abandoned.  Gym memberships go unused.  Projects languish.

The dropout rate for online classes is around 96%.  That’s not a typo.  Only 4% of people who start an online course from their cozy, quiet living room go on to complete the course.

However, that changes when everyone’s watching you.  It’s much harder to quit.  Social pressure can be powerful fuel for surmounting the difficult and scary.

So use it to your advantage.  Commit publicly to a new task or goal and be sure that friends and family who will keep you accountable know about it.

Give a friend $100 and tell her she can keep it if you don’t drop 5% of your body fat in eight weeks.

Announce a new project on your favorite social network and give your friends permission to get on your case if you don’t post weekly updates.

If you’re unable to finish difficult things, perhaps the pressure you put on yourself isn’t enough.  The pressure your networks can put on you may be just the thing.

The last time you stood in line at the grocery store checkout, did you struggle to avoid reading the headlines of the various trashy magazines racked in front of you?  If you haven’t noticed how difficult it is, give it a try the next time you’re in the store.

It’s the same with billboards on the side of the road, or advertisements on a city bus or taxi.

Humans (at least those that are literate) are drawn to reading stuff.  Why?

It turns out our brains are voracious learning machines.  They have evolved to consume and process information, and when it’s offered the brain will gobble it up like a greedy kid stuffing his face with candy after a successful trick-or-treating expedition.

That’s why it’s so difficult to resist reading all those tabloid headlines:  our brain is itching to learn more about why Brad and Angelina are choosing family over fame, and what went on inside Beyonce’s wedding.

[Well, that and the fact that our brains love stories, but that’s a tale for another time.]

Marketers know this and exploit it.  Take a spin through any city or mid-sized town and you’ll be barraged with words, images, and symbols designed for the dual purpose of:

1. Satisfying your brain’s craving for more information, and
2. Getting you to buy endless quantities of stuff

But there’s no reason why you can’t exploit it as well.

Social media is addictive for the very same reason.  Your brain loves to chow down for countless hours on pictures, stories, and memes about your friends, friends of friends, and people you don’t even know.  It’s all new information, and your brain luuurves new information.

It’s not terribly useful information, of course, and in that way social media is more like M&M’s for the brain than it is protein and veggies.

So provide your mind with a little discipline.  When you find yourself craving some Facebook or Instagram, instead try consuming something both new and useful.

A few M&M’s once in awhile won’t kill you.  But filling up on them day after day will leave you restless and unfulfilled.