If you haven’t heard, I’m in the process of writing a book, and so far it’s actually fun. From all that I had read about writing I figured I would be tormented, anguished, and attempting to gouge out my eyes with a grapefruit spoon after the first week.
It’s been fun to this point, and I’ve enjoyed creating the outline, writing every day, and I didn’t even mind when I had to stop to do research because I realized that my knowledge was woefully inadequate in several key areas.
By yesterday I had compiled nearly 80 pages of notes on just a few of the research topics that I had in mind, so I stopped to review them and my manuscript.
Suddenly things got difficult. The manuscript had more holes in it than a cheese grater so I had to constantly stop, flip over to the research notes, read until I found something useful, flip back to the manuscript, and then realize I had lost my place.
Within minutes I had the powerful urge to surf over to Facebook and see what my friends were up to. “Gee, I wonder what’s happening on Instagram today?” Even the New York Times was a tantalizing distraction.
I was experiencing some heavy-duty discomfort and was desperately trying to squirm out of it.
I took a deep breath and pressed on. Slowly, painstakingly, I worked out a process: read the manuscript, flip back and forth between it and my research notes when necessary, and take notes on other ideas in a third document. After I finished a section, I went back through the third set of notes to figure out whether or not I should add them to the manuscript itself, pull quotes from the research into the manuscript, or move on.
Check Out – It’s Expensive to Leave the Nomad Life
I got the work done, but what stuck with me was how powerful the urge to abandon it was, and why I felt it: I had pushed into an area of discomfort and my mind wanted to get the hell out of there.
Thousands of years ago our ancestors were rewarded for avoiding hard work. Sure, they would band together once in a while to hunt a giant sloth or a mastodon so they could have a solid supply of snacks, and later in human history larger groups would throw in together to build giant structures (a large number of them as unwilling slaves), but you’d never catch Dave the Neanderthal out training for a half-marathon on a sunny day.
Calories were hard to come by and individuals that burned them freely were less likely to live long enough to pass on their happy-go-lucky, frivolous-calorie-burning genes. Instead, the calorie-conserving individuals survived to pass theirs on and presto! Here we are.
Hundreds of millennia later those behaviors don’t help quite as much. Today’s fast-paced world requires significant changes to our minds and skills: learning a trade, teaching ourselves how to fiscally responsible, studying photography, or slowly and painstakingly figuring out how to change our nutrition to get the most out of our bodies.
Plowing through difficult material is painful work, and the discomfort that you feel in the course of that work is a signal. Embrace it.
Sure, your inner Cro-Magnon would love to take a break, chill out under a tree, and eat an orange. Instead, stay with that difficult task and keep hammering away at it. Have faith that it will lead somewhere special, that you will, as a result of all that effort, come out on the other side a different, more capable human being.
Sticking in the “discomfort zone” leads to tremendous growth, and the longer you can keep yourself there, the better. If you’re feeling a little pain while working on something hard, simply say Thank you, genes, but I’m going to press on a while longer, and keep pushing towards something better.