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| Stop preparing to live and go do it |
Doing The Thing to Do
The Thing
When it comes to wasting time, the
people I work with all have a saying; “We don’t need to do the thing to do the
thing.”
“Doing the
thing to do the thing” refers to things like having a meeting about the meeting
before you actually have the main meeting or sending an email before you send
the email of the email you’re about to send. But it can also refer to things like driving a car to the gym so you can walk
on a treadmill.
Too much of our time and energy is
spent on doing the thing to do the thing; so much so that when it’s time to do
the actual thing, we have no energy left.
Don’t get me
wrong, I am a firm believer in preparation and planning. I’ve often said that
preparation beats will-power any day of the week. But when you are having a
pre-meeting for the sake of pre-meeting, with all of the same folks who will be
in on the meeting, then you are not really doing preparation work; you are
doing the thing to do the thing.
I love a dry
run. I often take a drive to a place I need to be so I know exactly where I’m
going when it’s time to get there. That way, I avoid the stress of being lost
and worse yet; late. Preparation is critical; but eating dinner before you eat
dinner is doing the thing to do the thing.
This
morning, I have to catch an early flight, so last night I packed my bags, laid
out my clothes and got to bed early. That’s preparation, but if I took those
clothes and put them on, drove to the airport and then came home to do it again
in the morning, I’d be doing the thing to do the thing.
I hope you
are getting this because a great deal of your energy for life is not spent on living,
it’s spent in preparation for living
and too often, preparation is as close as you get.
Let’s stop doing the thing
to do the thing and as the young folks say, just go on and do the dang thing.
Be you, be well, be
living.
Bertice Berry, PhD.
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