SUMMARY: After writing yesterday’s post, I push into “the mountain” of resistance. It’s taking longer than I thought, but I am trying to strike a balance between the complexities of my own character and find a line of reasoning that leads to action.

Yesterday I wrote down a list of resistances to figure out why I was procrastinating on my self-improvement goals. That was exhausting in itself, so I procrastinated a little more and rested for today. All that rationalizing yesterday will not have done a lick of good if I don’t make progress today. It’s time to summon everything I know about getting the ball rolling. The first step was yesterday’s mental cleansing. This is sometimes followed by physical cleansing of my workspace, but my workspace is currently Starbucks, and so I’m skipping it. Which leaves me facing the mountain: that seemingly massive wall of resistance that I’m not particularly looking forward to running into.

I know a number of motivational tricks I could apply, but like a child who’s been fooled one time too many by parents promoting healthy-but-yucky foods, I have become resistant to ploys like:

• “It goes down smooth once you start”…and you conveniently left out that it’s going to taste terrible.
• “It’s really good for you”…ok, I can buy that possibility, but my gag reflex says otherwise.
• “You can have ice cream if you clean your plate”…I can’t imagine any ice cream that overcomes the foulness that coats my plate.
• “Just eat the damn vegetables”…now it’s a battle of wills? I’m digging in my heels.

The one ploy that still works, though it takes a while still to get going is:

• “Astronauts eat this stuff, and you like astronauts!”…yeah, that’s true. If I want to become like an astronaut, then I can see emulating them.

While these principles are somewhat effective, I find that they don’t really motivate me for long. Just about the only time they work is when I am humoring someone’s attempt to apply them. I already understand the benefits of an unpleasant action, and if I’m faced with the need to stick it through then I can detach my mind from the pain, like the last time I was at the dentist getting a wisdom tooth extracted in 23 tiny sections with no less than 12 different tools (I have very grabby molars, apparently). But I don’t particularly look forward to it. I actually prefer strong experiences IF the characteristics are well-explained beforehand. For example, when I was being introduced to Scotch for the first time, I didn’t find them very interesting because the person selected very bland mainstream brands to start with. Meh. But then a few years later, someone had me try a single-malt Islay Scotch, which was incredibly strong by comparison and I had to grapple with it. And I liked it! Same thing goes for beer. I have a drink maybe 3-4 times a year, and when I have one I want the experience to be powerfully earthy.

This insight suggests something I already know about myself: I expect things to be worthwhile to also be difficult. It’s quite possible that the side effect of this expectation is that I make things harder than they need to be. Instead of deprogramming myself to believe the opposite, I can accept that this is part of my wiring and work with the existing mental circuitry. In this case, I think the appropriate circuits are my science circuits…perhaps I can deconstruct the mountain into a series of science experiments.

The Mountain’s Many Metaphors

As the Mountain is a metaphor, I’m going to indulge myself and consider a few ways that one “defeats” a mountain:

Climbing From past experience, I know that the Mountain is almost never as difficult as I think it is if I don’t think of reaching the summit on the first go. The first few stabs at climbing are really route mapping, and I find myself at interesting places on the mountain that are wonderful places to have a mental picnic. However, I really DO want to reach the pinnacle of this mountain, and maybe this is what’s freaking me out.

Moving Moving a mountain is readily accomplished with lots of time and a fleet of trucks. However, what you end up with is a pile of rubble afterwards, which isn’t particularly interesting to me.

Going Through This is more like how I’m feeling: I’m facing a barrier that is in the way of me getting to where I want to go. However, I think I want to reach the center of the mountain, not just pass through it. The hard way would be to blast through, the equivalent of “just do it”. I could somehow obtain an oscillation overthruster to pass through the spaces between the atomic substructure of the mountain, but going crazy is the likely side effect. And I don’t know where to get an oscillation overthruster in the first place. Or perhaps I can consider the mountain as a kind of non-Newtonian fluid that only appears solid because I insist on running into it as hard as I can. A shear-thickening fluid (STF) is a kind of liquid that changes how it reacts to movement in surprising ways. It acts like a liquid when something moves slowly through it, but acts like a solid when something tries to move fast through it. If you remember Dune, the idea is like the Holtzman shields that the aristocracy used as personal protection devices: bullets were stopped by the field, but slow-moving knives could pass through, which creates a whole different style of hand-to-hand combat: “The slow blade penetrates the shield.”

This last metaphor I find highly appealing, because I know that slow and steady progress yields results after time. If I was a more pragmatic person, that would be enough. However, I’ve got to make everything more difficult because–and this is an interesting insight–that is how I play. I love intricacy and swirly chains of logic when I can perceive the principles that drive them. So if I want to enjoy the Mountain, this is the kind of game I need to play. I also love writing stuff down, and so this blog post is part of the game too. I could see all this effort as a waste of 90 minutes or a necessary part of my process. I choose to see it in a positive light; I don’t need the emotional baggage weighing me down thinking I need to change the way I work. This is the way I work. What matters, ultimately, is that I get the work done.

Hm, perhaps one of my callings is Science Education, but that’s an exploration for another day.

Enough Chatter!

So the first thing I did was create a checklist running through the various named demons from yesterday’s post. Were they still in check? I believe so, with the exception of Reason (responsible for this post, I think).

The second thing I did was to address the great unknown that I thought should have been easy but ended up being harder than I thought: deciding what the digital download should be in the first place. It took all of five minutes to write down what was possible in the timeframe I have available:

• Immediately: Source Files in Adobe Illustrator Format, PNG format.
• Eventually: Source files in an Open Source graphics format

The source files are going to be downloadable editable versions of my current PCEO forms, fixed so they work with commonly-available fonts instead of the ones I’m using. The overall goal is to make them editable by anyone with mainstream graphics editing software, which is something of a tall order so I will defer it until I get this first bit done.

Thirdly, I need to know how I’m going to deploy the forms:

• Digital download for sale means using a service like eJunkie.
• I need a place to offer the downloads for sale in the first place. which means building a website. Which means choosing a web development technology.

The simplest thing I can think of now is to build a static HTML page that does the layout for me for a single product to begin with, and after I get it looking the way I want I’ll convert it to a content management system and build out the collection from there.

Just so I am honest with myself, the very simplest thing I could do, however, is just to subscribe to eJunkie, sell the forms as-is at a set price, and post on my existing blog. But I think strategically I would be selling myself short, and I would rather have a separate line of similar forms that also look good but have their own identity. The Printable CEO forms are like my concept cars, and the new download versions will be the production models. I can feel the “Purity” instinct bucking at the very thought of doing this, and my chest actually feels tense because it feels wrong. But I’m pushing through and will see what happens. I want to have a business that sells useful things for people, and part of that is accepting that money is part of the deal.