So it’s been two months since I started my entrepreneurship journey full time. And in these months, I have been noticing my own operating system to understand deeply why I do what I do and why I think what I think. I am trying to be completely intellectually honest with myself in order to become the best self.
In these months, I have had a few realizations – I have identified some things that I need to learn and some things that I need to unlearn. From past few days, I have been thinking to write about a learning that I am unlearning currently. So here we go!
I have realized that I know what are the things that I need to do, but most of the time I spend hours in perfecting the situation and my environment in order to be ready to do the thing I know I should be doing.
My brain follows a pattern where it tries to optimize for the environment and the situation that I am in. It will try to convince me to have a perfect routine, have a perfect mindset and have a perfect situation before I actually start doing the thing.
And this entire pre-doing-the-thing-optimization phase involves a lot of thinking, planning and plotting. This sucks a lot of energy, time and mental bandwidth and eventually reduces the energy I need to actually do the thing that I should be doing. For example, if I know that I have to research on some topic and do deep thinking about it to decide the further course of action, my brain will lean towards first ensuring I have a perfect routine before I start doing the activity – I will spend some time meditating; I will spend 30-40 mins perfecting a Notion document or organizing my calendar etc.
I suspect my brain does this because these activities are familiar to me – I know how I feel when I do those things and brain kind of leans towards doing things that it already knows and shows resistance to doing the new/ unfamiliar things.
Since I have started noticing this pattern, I consciously move towards doing the thing I know I should be doing, no matter how much resistance my brain shows. It has been and is tough to always do this. But in order to be productive this is very crucial for me.
Since I have started doing this, I have seen there is some kind of simplicity, humbleness and clarity that come in when I only think and do the thing that I am supposed to do rather than optimize for the environment and my routine before doing it.
The realization is that: Action always creates clarity. Planning pretends to do it!
azeem panjwani 