Lovely article - Do something.

 http://markmanson.net/do-something

I‘ve been working with self development advice for a large percentage of my life. I’ve come across a lot of concepts and ideas as well as invented quite a few of my own. But the following is one of the most important ideas I’ve stumbled across in my life:

Action isn’t just the effect of motivation, but also the cause of it.

Most people only commit to action if they feel a certain level of motivation. And they only feel motivation when they feel an emotional inspiration.

People only become motivated to study for the exam when they’re afraid of the consequences. People only pick up and learn that instrument when they feel inspired by the people they can play for.

And we’ve all slacked off for lack of motivation before. Especially in times where we shouldn’t.  We feel lethargic and apathetic towards a certain goal that we’ve set for ourselves because we lack the motivation and we lack the motivation because we don’t feel any overarching emotional desire to accomplish something.

Emotional Inspiration → Motivation → Desirable Action

But there’s a problem with operating under this framework: often the changes and actions we most need in our lives are inspired by negative emotions which simultaneously hinder us from taking action.

If someone wants to fix their relationship with their mother, the emotions of the situation (hurt, resentment, avoidance) completely go against the necessary action to fix it (confrontation, honesty, communication). If someone wants to lose weight, but experiences massive amounts of shame about their body, then the act of going to the gym is apt to inspire in them the exact emotions that kept them at home on the couch in the first place. Past traumas, negative expectations, and feelings of guilt, shame and fear often motivate us away from the actions necessary to overcome those very traumas, negative expectations, and negative emotions.

It’s a Catch-22 of sorts. But the thing about the motivation chain is that it’s not only a three-part chain, but an endless loop:

Inspiration → Motivation → Action → Inspiration → Motivation → Action → Etc.

Your actions create further emotional reactions and inspirations and move on to motivate your future actions. Taking advantage of this knowledge, we can actually re-orient our mindset in the following way:

Action → Inspiration → Motivation

The conclusion is that if you lack the motivation to make an important change in your life, then do something, anything really, and then harness the reaction to that action as a way to begin motivating yourself.

I call this The “Do Something” Principle. And I developed it on accident back in my years as a consultant, helping people who were otherwise immobilized by fears, rationalizations, and apathy to take action.

It began out of simple pragmatism: you paid me to be here so you might as well do something. I don’t care, do anything!

What I found is that often once they did something, even the smallest of actions, it would soon give them the inspiration and motivation to do something else. They had sent a signal to themselves, “OK, I did that, I guess I can do more.” And slowly we could take it from there.

Over the years, I’ve applied the “Do Something” Principle in my own life as well.

The most obvious example is running this website and my business ventures online. I work for myself. I don’t have a boss telling me what to do and not to do. I also often have to take major calculated risks in which I’m personally invested, both financially and emotionally (spending months writing a book, re-branding my entire website, ceasing promotions of my past products, etc.). It’s been nerve-wracking at times, and major feelings of doubt and uncertainty arise. And when no one is around to push you, sitting around and watching TV reruns all day can quickly become a more appealing option.

The first couple years I worked for myself, entire weeks would go by without accomplishing much for no other reason than I was anxious and stressed about what I had to do, and it was too easy to put it off. I quickly learned that forcing myself to do something, even the most menial of tasks, quickly made the larger tasks seem much easier. If I had to redesign an entire website, then I’d force myself to sit down and would say, “OK, I’ll just design the header right now.” But after the header was done, I’d find myself moving on to other parts of it. And before I knew it, I’d be energized and engaged in the project.

I also use this regularly in my own life. If I’m about to tackle a large project that I’m anxious about, or if I’m in a new country and I need to give myself a little push to get out and meet people, I apply the Do Something Principle. Instead of expecting the moon, I just decide, “OK, I’ll start on the outline,” or “OK, I’ll just go out and have a beer and see what’s going on.” The mere action of doing this almost always spurs me on.

Inevitably, the appropriate action occurs at some point or another. The motivation is natural. The inspiration is genuine. It’s an overall far more pleasant way of accomplishing my goals.

My math teacher used to tell us in high school, “If you don’t know how to do a problem, start writing something down, your brain will begin to figure it out as you go.” And sure enough, to this day, this seems to be true. The mere action itself inspires new thoughts and ideas which lead us to solving the problems in our lives. But that new insight never comes if we simply sit around contemplating it.

I recently heard a story about a novelist who had written over 70 novels. Someone asked him how he was able to write so consistently and remain inspired and motivated every day, as writers are notorious for procrastination and for fighting through bouts of “writer’s block”. The novelist said, “200 crappy words per day, that’s it.” The idea is that if he forced himself to write 200 crappy words, more often than not, the act of writing would inspire him and before he knew it he’d have thousands down on the page.

You may recognize this concept among other writings in different guises. I’ve seen it mentioned in terms such as “failing forward” or “ready, fire, aim.” But no matter how you frame it to yourself, it’s an extremely useful mindset and habit to adopt. The more time goes on, the more I realize that success in anything is tied less to knowledge or talent, and tied more to action supplemented by knowledge and talent. You can become successful at something without knowing what you’re doing. You can become successful at something without having much particular talent at it. But you can never become successful at anything without taking action. Ever.

Manu Joseph's excellent article on the rise and fall of Anna Hazare

http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/nation/the-obituary-of-a-movement

The Obituary of a Movement

It was good, it was brief

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BY Manu Joseph EMAIL AUTHOR(S)

What killed the revolt was not its inherent hypocrisy but the fact that the movement could not escalate from a farce to something substantial. (Illustration: VIVEK THAKKAR)

There is a type of talented Indian who lives in the United States with his austere wife to whom he lost his virginity, and has two children who are good at spelling. He walks with a mild slouch. He is still intimidated by White waiters, but not Black waiters. In an elevator, chiefly in an elevator, he suspects he is probably small. He does not drive a Prius. He is acquainted with the word ‘generalise’ as something other people should not do. He is often a she. He is fundamentally a good person by almost all the definitions of that human condition—he is against genocide, burning people alive, including Muslims, and stabbing children, including Muslim children. And he loves Narendra Modi. ‘And’ not ‘but’, for ‘but’ will mean that he has considered all the facts and has made a moral decision. He loves Modi for honourable reasons. He loves the idea of a smart, tough and proud Hindu. He loves him because he loves Mother India. He was not always so traditional and patriotic.
He will give many reasons why he is so now, he will give abstract reasons. He will say love is abstract, love is inevitable. It is not, in reality. Love is calculated, always. In America’s caste system, he is nowhere at the top. In fact, at times he feels he is at the bottom. There are moments, he knows, when brown is the new black. Back home he was something by virtue of his birth, his lineage and education, which was clear to all in plain sight. And the riffraff, which knew its place, readily granted him his, unlike in the United States. That is why he loves India. That is why the Third World middleclass and the rich who live in the West are deeply in love with their homelands. Nations that are filled with the poor are feudal in nature, and so excellent homes for the middleclass. India is probably the best.
Resident Indians, despite all their reasonable grudges, experience the privileges every day. That is at the heart of the collapse of Team Anna’s apparent revolution, which called for a battle to the brink to overturn Indian politics, and asked informed Indians to dismantle what ignorant voters had erected. But then there is no genuine trauma in the Indian elite for them to soil their lives with strife. The Indian middleclass (the not-poor and everything above) does daydream about lining up downmarket politicians and shooting them, but they simply cannot be angry enough and angry too long. What reasons do they have really to be angry in this paradise of the middleclass? They are, after all, the easy beneficiaries of India’s inequities. It is not just about the maids, the baby maids, the cooks, the gardeners and the drivers, who come at laughable rates. The comfort is much deeper. As long as one is from a certain background, one does not have to be exceptional to go a long way in the private sector, academics, arts, media, anything really. In fact, one can even be a low-grade tennis player and still be considered a sports star in India.

But when it all began in April last year, when Anna Hazare arrived in Delhi to fast until he died or achieved the Lokpal, the middleclass assumed they were the predominant victims of the Indian way of life. And they thought the moment had finally come, when they could finally disrupt the political establishment by cheering one old man as he performed his only trick, which is to starve until the orange juice materialises.
At the time, he was not known to most Indians. He had by then won the Padma Bhushan for social work, but such award winners are usually known only to those who gave them the awards and their small constituencies of miserable people. In Hazare’s case, that constituency was a portion of rural Maharashtra. Before April 2011, his name usually evoked amused smiles from Mumbai’s political reporters. There was no doubt that he was financially incorruptible and that his fasts against corruption were not entirely farcical movements. But there was something material that Hazare adored. He liked the idea of the powerful taking note of him, his protests, and like all simple old men of his type he could be a terrible pain when slighted. This, Maharashtra’s politicians knew very well. At the first hint of a Hazare fast, they would run to his feet, make vacant promises and from somewhere the juice would materialise, and everything would be alright. Sonia Gandhi, if she were advised by men who were not so hopelessly arrogant, could have probably avoided Hazare’s movement. Hazare himself carelessly hinted at it the very first day of his dramatic April fast in Delhi.
He said he had written letters to Sonia Gandhi about the Lokpal, but she never responded. It was as if he were not important enough. That inspired him to come to Delhi. (Eventually, he stopped mentioning this.) He delayed the start of his fast to let the cricket World Cup fever subside. By the time he sat by the wayside, swearing to die until the bill was passed, several forces had aligned in his favour—the growing public disgust over the Commonwealth
Games scam and 2G scam. Also, though the number of those who walked miles holding the accusatory white candles was growing in several Indian cities, the idea of a massive, festive public demonstration against crooked politicians was still new to the educated urban middleclass, and it was an intoxicating experience for them.
Some families arrived in their luxury sedans to be part of something they imagined was important. Good fathers carried their daughters on their shoulders and showed them the distant introspective image of Hazare. Lovers held hands and sang songs. It was all very joyous. In states like West Bengal and Kerala, where the middleclass has always been a part of the political process and were not amateur citizens, people were not so stirred, but they took Hazare’s name with affection. On Arnab Goswami’s Times Now television channel, when I defended my report in Open of the first two days of the fast, which had described it as ‘a comic revolution of an obsolete man’, one of the guests on the show, an angry young man who was setting out on an ‘indefinite fast’, said, “Get out, get out, all you cynics, get out.” Which was baffling because I was sitting in my house.
Television news loved the revolution for reasons other than just business. After the revelation of the Niira Radia tapes, some anchors were facing a crisis of credibility—were they merely agents of politicians? And Anna Hazare presented them with a sexy story through which they could appear to trash the political system.
It is true that mass movements need the assistance of farce. Common sense and rational analysis do not have the profound influence that farce has on a large body of people. And for some time, it did appear that the farcical beginnings of the movement were indeed coming together to become a more meaningful and cunning parallel political force. An inner circle of Hazare rose and came to be called Team Anna. It was a circle of unlike minds—Hazare is a villager, infatuated with the right wing, who hates corrupt politicians who do not respect him and likes tainted politicians who flatter him (Vilasrao Deshmukh, who is facing graft charges, is an agreeable politician in Hazare’s eyes). Arvind Kejriwal has a discreet contempt for reservations in colleges and jobs (he was once driven away from the campus of Jawaharlal Nehru University by Dalit students). And Prashant Bhushan is the human embodiment of Arundhati Roy’s prose. He has deep socialist tendencies, is suspicious of capitalism, and appears to believe that the efforts of modern economists to put a huge mass of humanity firmly in the saddle is a conspiracy of saddle manufacturers.
Team Anna was not composed of natural allies but it was held together by the common cause of the fight against political corruption. It was inevitable that such a battle in India had flaws in its very reasoning. It assumed that corrupt Indian politicians are an unnatural phenomenon while the fact is that they are merely the success stories in a republic where savage practicality has always been valued more than ethics. Is there anything in the Indian system, in the Indian way of life that will help a clever impoverished child from a remote village reach the top layers of society through honest hard work?
Also, as Sharad Pawar showed in the municipal elections in Maharashtra, even as the Hazare movement reached its peak, the shame of corruption is not a disadvantage at the polls. All Indians, including voters, lament that corruption is destroying the nation, but again and again they return the corrupt to power. The middleclass, through the media and films, has made corruption appear to be the most loathed aspect of Indian society. Yet, circumstantial evidence suggests that when they have to make a decision, Indians not only consider other issues more important than corruption but also rate corrupt politicians as more efficient, impressive and useful than the soft good folks, of whom there are not many in politics anyway.
Despite all this, Hazare’s war against political corruption received massive support in 2011. Who can deny that it was a greatly enjoyable war—the underdogs on one side and the arrogant, filthy politicians on the other.
What killed the revolt was not its inherent hypocrisy but the fact that the movement could not escalate from a farce to something substantial. For an enjoyable revolution, and it is important for a revolution to be enjoyable, the scenes have to keep changing. But Indians were stranded with the same old man and his inner circle, doing the same things and saying the same things for several months. The middleclass, whose primary instinct is to be an island untouched by India, lost interest in the revolt and went back to its life — among other things, bribing government officials and accepting huge amounts of black money while selling homes. It was inevitable that television anchors, including the delightful evening patriot Goswami, should abandon the movement. And the comic revolution of an obsolete man finally died.

Mourners say that it was all still worth it. At least, the political establishment knew that there are dangerous adversaries lurking around. That is not true. What the brief life and death of the farcical revolt has done is ensure that a more substantial and potent rebellion against Indian politics will not come anytime soon.