Last Sunday I decided to solve my motivation problem by making a better checklist and planning to buy sticky notes to write tasks down on. I still haven’t bought the sticky notes and barely finished any tasks from the list. So when sitting down to write today’s letter, I felt unqualified.

So today I want to talk about doubt.

Keep asking why

Last year I found an exercise called Seven Levels Deep. It consists of seven questions that you need to ask yourself. You start with a question about an area you’re struggling with and keep asking follow up questions about why it’s important to you. So I did it today to find out why I am not writing the book even though so much depends on it.

  1. Why do I want to write the book? – Because it’s the only project that I can viably make and possibly get real money from.
  2. Why is it important to make real money from this specific project? – Because this will prove that I can be a good teacher and allow me to work on even bigger projects or open consultations.
  3. Why is it important to be a good teacher? (And so on until 7…)

I kept answering those questions until I realized that the reason I’m doing it at all is to not end up a loser. It is a selfish reason and it sounds dreadful. So I am doing it out of fear.

Fear isn’t the problem

I also floss my teeth every day out of fear, I don’t want to have to do expensive and painful procedures at the dentist. Although I’m doing it out of fear, it actually doesn’t feel dreadful at all. So fear is not really the issue.

The difference is scale. Flossing takes a couple minutes and nothing depends on any single day of it. The book though, it carries my entire self worth on one huge, ambitious project. No amount of motivation would carry me through a year of hard work like that, and knowing it was fear didn’t get me any closer to actually working on it again.

Then I remembered what actually happens on the days when I open the project. I almost immediately start getting ideas, seeing issues to fix, and quickly get absorbed into the work. The last couple weeks I just haven’t opened the file enough to let me get interested in it again. So the solution is pretty simple, I have to open the project in order to work on it!

So I added the shortcut to the project file into the startup folder on my pc and now every time I turn it on, I immediately see the project opened on my screen, ready to go.

Doubt didn’t hand me the answer by itself, but it helped me chip away at the wrong ones until I found the real problem. If you’re stuck, ask why enough times and eventually you will figure it out, most of the time the fix is pretty simple. We’ll see if I can make this one work