I Am Everything I Have Ever Really Worked Towards Being

If you want to be something, do something.

Want to be an athlete? Practice, exercise, push yourself physically and work hard.
Want to be the best dog trainer ever? Read books on training, volunteer at shelters, work with dogs, take classes.
Want to grow slothful and large in the midsection? Sit in a chair all day typing on your computer, eat way too much food, don't ever clean up your house.

You become good at what you practice, whether you practice it purposely or not.

Following that line of logic I now have four daily goals that I want to accomplish every day so that I can become who I want to be, who I am deep-down, but who I just haven't yet practiced at being quite enough yet:

• Write for 1 hour per day or 500 words whichever comes second.
• I will use a tracking program to keep time. I just need to remember to turn it on and off.
• Sweat every day.
• In the beginning, small steps are needed. No time frame, no amounts. Just sweat; show effort.
• Fill at least one canvas with art.
• Yesterday and today those canvases were windows, using Crayola Window Crayons. Tomorrow maybe the canvas will be a piece of paper.
• Clean one room, top to bottom.
• This one will be the most difficult, I believe, because I will be fighting against 33 years of life in which I have grown used to not worrying about cleaning as a daily exercise but rather only when it "needs to get done."

In the meantime I'll continue to become more proficient in other ways, of course. I'll practice dadding every minute of every day, for example. I'll probably continue trying to pick up any number of other skills, or accidentally learn how to be the best chair-rester ever. But these four things are my focus.

Write, Sweat, Create, Clean.

My Kitchen Theory

Sometimes life gets away from you a little bit. Things get messier than you meant them to and when you look at the tangled mess of things all jumbled together you just feel like throwing your hands in the air, giving up, and walking away. You just don't want to deal with it anymore.

There are things you can't control, of course, but for the things you can control sometimes you just focus on the whole picture when you should really just look at a little bit at a time. Sure, things are a mess but if you pick it apart little by little maybe it'll all seem a bit easier.

Sure, it doesn't seem like much when you just do the quick-and-easy, right-in-front-of-your face jobs; throwing out the trash or putting things in their place, but it doesn't have to look like much: It's progress!

It's all about the little steps, one-by-one, a bit at a time. You do the quick things first and then look at what you have leftover after that.

Then what do you do?

You take a long, hard look at the mess and you organize it. Put everything in order and look at what has to get done. Maybe you write everything out or maybe you just sort it in your mind; just put it all in one place and go through it step-by-step to see what needs to be done next.

Putting it all together like that and sorting it into piles based on what needs to get done will make it look more controllable, easier to do.

And then you start the work. I like to start on the easier bits to ease myself into it. I take it slow and if it's not urgent I'll even take plenty of breaks if I feel like I need them. There's nothing wrong with resting when you need to, or even just want to, as long as you know that you have to get back to sorting and cleaning!

I don't do all the easiest things first, just a few, and I'll explain why in a bit but it's very important to make sure you leave a few easy steps for later.

After most of the easy things are done I start working on the harder bits, the things that take some elbow grease, some time, and some special care. This is where I scrub the pots and pans, really put my nose to the grindstone and power through the trouble spots.

Sure, I'll still take a rest if I need to but I find that it's at this point where I do my best by just powering through, otherwise the thought of going back to the daunting bits can be too much and I'll lose myself in Facebook or something else just as inane. I do the hard work instead and just keep going.

Those last little bits and pieces of the easy work that I left for last? Those are the last big things I do so that at the end I feel like the job wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. Sure, I put in a lot of work but if the beginning and end of the project are relatively easy then next time I'm more likely to remember that than I am to remember the middle part where I had to scrub everything down, scour through the grime, and really power through.

It sounds silly, sure, but it's one of those mental tricks I use to make sure that the next time I do this I won't keep procrastinating.

After all that it's just doing the detail work that's leftover, making sure that you don't let it get to that point again, and working a little bit on the job every day (if that's the kind of job it is).

Life is like a really messy kitchen, sometimes: It looks overwhelming and feels crowded but if you go step-by-step and work a little bit at a time, you can make it sparkling clean and easier to manage.

And hey, if you can't do it on your own? Ask a friend to come help; they might not be great at cleaning your kitchen either but maybe they can help you organize the project a little bit better.