[Part IV] Resolve Your Mind To Action [Short]
There have been times in my life when I have been apathetic for weeks. My mind is racing with ideas, my body literally thrumming with the energy to act. However, there is a dissonance between my internal vision and the energy to act. They are disconnected. I am unable to act because no path has become apparent — I cannot even see the next step to place my foot, the next handhold upwards to continue my climb.
People give advice of just taking the next step (and there is value to that advice, for those who are stuck). However, for me personally, acting for the sake of acting has been unproductive. I can do a thing; I can do things all day, no problem. I find it more difficult to do things in a way that strings those actions into momentum.
I need the outline of a path available to me (a destination or goal that I can speak to myself clearly, and sink my teeth into) in order to tap into my full capacity. When you see the path, the end goal, have delineated milestones, and some inkling of how each objective leads you in a way that resonates with the vision: that is when you can truly exert yourself.
You don’t need to think, since you know what you are doing and what needs to be done. You just need to fight along the path of actually doing it.
This is where the Resolution of the Mind Into Action comes in. Truly resolving your mind is an incredible act of coherence. It is far from easy, and will only happen in stages. For your mind to be resolved, this means that you need to have:
- A Vision and Goal that exudes the emotion you want to tap into.
- A Detailed Plan that you are confident can help you get to the next milestone, detailed enough that it determines daily and weekly objectives.
- Systems, Processes, and Habits in place that produce an output, results.
- Elements of Character (will, determination, consistency, resilience) to string the vision, plan, systems, processes, and emotions together.
None of this has to be truly perfect to begin, however, without these fundamentals in place, your mind cannot be resolved. I know this from extensive experience. Eventually along every path, I have come to a deep dissonance between vision, thoughts, plan, systems, processes, and habits. Something is out of alignment, and the engine begins to fail. One or more of these principles is unstable.
I have felt this lack of resolution in a thousand ways. [I]
To resolve your mind into action is about focus, an internal clarity, but a deeper type of focus that requires synergy across various levels of ourselves. If you can discover the vision inside of you powerful enough to direct your life — the spark that exists in spite of everything trying to extinguish it — you can build the rest in time. Ultimately, resolving yourself in your life in a way that experience tells me can be inordinately powerful, as well as unexpected.
Notes
[Note I] In truth, the many ways that I have experienced this internal dissonance (and ultimately resolved it) are far too numerous to name. It has existed in every single aspect of my life. A few are:
- Misalignment between my athletic goals and execution of them. For example, my athletic goals have predominantly featured martial arts (mma, judo, jiujitsu, wrestling, striking, swordsmanship) for the last decade+. However, when my training didn’t reflect the vision, there was a dissonance and disengagement that persisted, even when my motivation was high.
- I would spend too much time lifting weights, knowing that it was effecting my performance.
- I drifted into ultra-distance cardio (running, cycling) which left not enough time, energy, and physical capacity for martial arts training.
- Furthermore, my focus on physical training often overshadowed intellectual work, getting in the way of research, learning, and creativity.
- STEM work and my passion for history and linguistics. My goals (and deepest nature and inclination) reside in technology, invention, and physics. However I was spending too much time studying history, languages, or training. Not enough of my efforts were making progress in the area closest to my heart, thus I deep breakdown between my vision and actions, led to disengagement. Furthermore,
- Probably the deepest, most persistent division that I have faced has been the dissonance between my very NATURE and my self-devised SCHEDULE and SYSTEMS. I excel in creativity, thinking, and innovation. But my executive function is not nearly as powerful. I developed incredibly sophisticated schedules and training regimens, which did not align with my strengths (hyperfocus) versus my weaknesses (task-switching). For example, I devised innumerable variations of schedules focused on balancing my interests every day. I did a little bit of everything every day, which resulted in burnout, stress, and very slow progress in actually doing the professional work I needed to. My schedule and system now is built around harnessing and weaponizing hyperfocus. I can not burn through a project in a day or week (while still doing the small amount of maintenance tasks each day — eating, sleeping, language study, physical training) but that transitioning through my disciplines more productively in macro-interleaving blocks (versus the micro-interleaving that was disastrous, yet which I persisted with for years).