You create your problems

If you are having a bad time with something, you are probably doing it to yourself.

I spent a week or two angsting about whether or not to drop a commitment I had made. And it was just a commitment to myself.

So there I was, thinking “It has to mean something” if I quit this things. It means I’m a quitter, a failure, someone who gives up.

Meanwhile, the thing itself wasn’t really fun and I was starting to think I was wasting time on it which was taking away from my larger commitments and goals for the next year.

My coach asked me a question – “What do you want dropping that to mean? What criteria do you want to use to decide when to quit?”

After sitting with that, I realized I didn’t want to quit anything ever. I wanted to go all the way, to irrecoverable failure, or ultimate success.

And as soon as I said that, he asked “What’s that? How do you fail permanently?”

And of course, it was all just arbitrary. What is failure? What is success?

What’s the definition of done for anything? You make it up!

And if you make it up, you can change it when it’s not serving you.

Ultimately, my personal goal is to get into sync with the desires God puts in my heart, and to act out of those. To avoid putting things in the way that aren’t real, that are just the problems I am inflicting on myself.

How many problems do we inflict on ourselves? How many rules do we make up that aren’t really necessary?

The crazy thing is that even after knowing that we do this, you can still have massive blind spots where you think something is just the way it is, or how it should be.

You create your problems.