When Your Passion Becomes Your Obsession

Neera

There is a difference between passion and obsession.

Passion is a positive word that leads to growth, self-improvement, and perhaps one’s purpose in life; obsession, on the other hand, has a negative connotation about it, which could lead to being out of control and even mentally sick.

When you are passionate, everybody cheers you on, “Oh! you found your passion. Great! Be passionate! Follow your passion! Reach your goals! Live your dream!” People encourage you because they think you are on to something.

But when you are obsessed, they go, “Why you gotta be so crazy? Why do you spend so much time on [thing]?” Why can’t you be reasonable about it?” “You don’t have to be so preoccupied with it, it’s just a hobby (or a job, or a sport), isn’t it?”

When you are obsessed, people think you are nuts.

In life, you have a choice. You can either be passionate or obsessed.

Both choices are fine.

Being passionate about something is being in love with life.

But being obsessed with something is living life at another level.

I chose to be obsessed.

I don’t know when my passion for writing turned into an obsession.

When I started writing, I found the activity so calming and fulfilling that I became passionate about it. I dedicated time to it and strived to improve. As I became better and better at giving words to my thoughts, I started feeling good about my writing.

I could pour out all my frustrations, my negativity, my fears, my anger, my joy, and my daily happenings into my diary.

And that was when the problem began.

Something inside me changed. I craved writing all the time. I had to write every day. The day I didn’t write, was a day that didn’t exist for me.

I would rather write than attend a party or meet a friend for coffee, or go for a swim, or go for a walk.

My passion had become an obsession.

The Cambridge dictionary defines passion as an extreme interest in or wishes for doing something.

While an obsession is something that you think about all the time.

A passion is “extreme” but the aspect of time isn’t present.

An obsession stays “all the time”.

I think about writing all the time.

I work on getting better every day. I don’t rest. I can’t let it go. I am not content with my progress. I want to get better. I can’t accept the level I am at the moment. I know I could be better. I will continue to work on it until I reach the level where I want to be.

If you really want to achieve something worth achieving, you must get obsessed.

If you are not obsessed, you are not operating at your optimum potential.

If no one thinks you are crazy, you are not there yet.

You are not there yet until somebody in your life says, “Jee! you really care about this in a crazy way.” That’s when people see your obsession.

The weirder you are, the more committed you are to focus on your thing.

Obsession forces you to stay focused.

Obsession makes you keep going when others are partying, socializing, having fun, sleeping, or simply fitting in.

Obsession empowers you to find new ways to learn, to push your comfort zone, and to push yourself beyond what others or even you thought was not possible.

I love this quote from one of Bukowski’s numerous letters:

My dear,

Find what you love and let it kill you. Let it drain from you your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness. Let it kill you, and let it devour your remains.

For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it’s much better to be killed by a lover.

Falsely yours,

Henry Charles Bukowski

I will rather let writing kill me than give it up for a mediocre life.

Are you passionate about something?

Is it turning into an obsession?

If You Think Your Writing In Not Original, You Need To Know About Helsinki Bus Station Theory

Neera

“The secret to a creatively fulfilling career lies in understanding the operations of Helsinki’s main bus station,” said Finnish-American photographer Arno Minkkinen, back in 2004.

Helsinki Bus Station Theory had been circulating among photographers for years before Oliver Burkeman brought it to a wider audience through an article in The Guardian.

To understand the theory, imagine this:

You are at a bus station. A big bus station that is cleaner, environmentally friendly, and inviting.

There are two dozen platforms, and from each platform, several different bus lines depart.

But for a kilometer or more, all the lines leaving from any one platform take the same route out of the city, making identical stops.

“Each bus stop represents one year in the life of a photographer,” Minkkinen declares.

You pick a direction — maybe you focus on making platinum prints of nudes — and set off.

Three stops later, you’ve got a nascent body of work. You take those three years of work on the nude to [a gallery], and the curator asks if you are familiar with the nudes of Irving Penn.

Your work looks very much like Penn’s.

Annoyed to have been following someone else’s path, you hop off the bus, grab a cab… and head straight back to the bus station, looking for another platform.

A few years later, something similar happens. This goes on all your creative life: always showing new work, always being compared to others.

What’s the answer?

It’s simple.

Stay on the bus.

Stay on the f*#king bus.

The point Minkkinen is making is when you find your work resembles someone else’s, or you’re on someone else’s bus, traveling someone else’s path, don’t go back to the bus station at the very beginning completely reinvent yourself and start from scratch. Instead, stay on the bus.

At a certain point, your path will split off into something new.

It’s the separation that makes all the difference.

Once you see the difference in your work from the work you so admire, it’s time to look for your breakthrough.

Suddenly, your work will get noticed. Now you are working more on your own, making more of the difference between your work and what influenced it.

Your vision takes off.

There are two reasons this metaphor is so compelling:

  1. It vividly illustrates a critical insight into persistence.
  2. It points out the perils of a world that obsesses with originality.

“More often than not, originality lies on the far side of unoriginality.” — Austin Kleon.

Helsinki’s theory suggests that if you pursue originality too vigorously, you’ll never reach it.

Sometimes it takes more guts to keep trudging down a pre-trodden path, to the originality beyond.

“Stay on the f*#king bus.”

Things I Love About Writing

Neera

1. I love the sensation of my hand gliding on the paper.

It’s the best of all sensations.

“I write by hand because that is how I began, and I love it. Moving the wrist, the marks the pencil or pen leaves on the paper — like the trail of a snail — well, it is like drawing, no, it is drawing, and I am so enamoured of this activity that sometimes I write continuously without actually forming real words, I call it ‘fake handwriting,’ and it’s just as much fun as actually ‘writing’. By fun I mean it’s just as much a mystery. The whole wrist-moving action is why I write in the first place. I don’t like tennis or knitting; I like writing with my hands.”

— Mary Ruefle

2. I love the clarity writing brings me.

I write to make sense of this world. To clear my thinking. To understand the world, the people, and their motives. Whenever in doubt, depressed, or facing a dilemma, I pick up a pen and pour it all out on paper. I have been journaling for two decades now. Without writing, I wouldn’t be the person I am today.

Illustration via @jaozolins on Instagram.

3. I love how writing has become my therapy.

Because the words are a comfort. When things are rough and I have nowhere to go, writing becomes my solace. Writing makes my problems go away. I write and write and write until I have nothing left inside me to poison my soul.

Sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, panic, and fear which is inherent in a human situation. — Graham Greene

4. I love how writing has given me a voice.

I can express my joy, grief, hope, fun, love, beauty, opinions, and beliefs. I no longer feel being choked inside my throat.

Writing has such a power for exprssion. Even when you can’t talk with no one else in the whole world you can talk to your paper. Your feelings whether good, bad or indifferent. We call it despojo in Spanish, which means to be able to get rid of all this agony, weight inside of you. It brings clarity. — Piri Thomas

5. I love how writing has made me fearless.

I am no longer afraid of speaking my mind. I don’t hide my feelings anymore. Because of writing, I understand myself better and I understand this world better. Writing helps me dive into my feelings with courage.

“The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say but what we are unable to say.” — Anais Nin

6. I love how writing has helped me experience the joy of creation.

I can create people, places, and things. I can create a make-believe world, a place where I can forget my problems and relax. I can draw different meanings from different situations.

“You can make anything by writing.” — C. S. Lewis

7. I love how writing has become a tool to give back to the universe.

I have discovered that through my writing I can inspire others. When I am able to do that I somehow become bigger than myself. I no longer feel insignificant. I feel I have something important to say which can have an impact on someone’s life.

Writing has helped me make a place for myself in this world. People see me differently when they find out that I am the author of several books.

“One of the most fundamental of human fears is that our existence will go unnoticed.”― Ralph Keyes, The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear.

8. I love how writing has helped me meet fantastic people.

Some of the best people I have met in life are through writing. These people were hanging out in writing groups, writing courses, or online platforms. I would never have found them had I not been writing. Writing has given me a chance to connect with complete strangers, and have deep conversations with them. I now have friends all over the world.

9. I love the fact that writing never bores me.

The best time of my day is when I am writing. With writing, I am not worried if I have nothing else to do or nowhere to go. I can take it with me anywhere and everywhere. I can spend the rest of my life writing.

10. I love how writing has changed my overall outlook on life.

Writing could be all-consuming and isolated activity yet it has enriched my life tremendously. It has put into perspective the things I can and can’t control. It has taught me how to overcome my fears and stay true to myself.

We should write because writing brings clarity and passion to the act of living. Writing is sensual, experiential, and grounding. We should write because writing is good for the soul. We should write because writing yields us a body of work, a felt path through the world we live in. — Julia Cameron.

11. I love how writing has intensified the pleasure of traveling.

By writing about the places I visit, I have come to learn more about them than I otherwise would have. When are read my travel stories a few years later, I get to relive the experience once again.

12. I love seeing how writing has helped me grow.

When I first started writing, I didn’t know how to get my ideas across. Now, I’m much more confident when I write, and I can see my craft improving. There is nothing better than the feeling when someone reads and admires my writing.

13. I love the fact that my stories will be the only legacy I will leave behind.

Through my daily diary, I’m keeping an archive of my days. And that is what I want to leave behind for future generations.

Notes On Creativity

Neera

Most people, when they think of creativity, they think of art. They think of writing, music, painting, theatre, movies, dancing, and making sculptures.

But creativity isn’t just limited to arts. One can be creative in any area of life — in science, or in business, or sport.

By creativity, I simply mean new ways of thinking about things. — John Cleese, Creativity

These notes are from John Cleese’s brilliant book aptly titled, Creativity — A Short And Cheerful Guide.

You are being creative wherever you can find a way of doing things that are better than what has been done before.

There is another myth about creativity. That you have to be born with creativity. It’s not something that can be taught.

According to John Cleese, that’s not true. Creativity can be taught. “Or more accurately,” he says, “you can teach people how to create circumstances in which they will become creative.”

Image from Amzon

John Cleese was not a creative child. When he was growing up in the forties and fifties, no one talked about creativity. It simply was not in vogue, to explore one’s creativity, like it is now. John studied maths and science in school, hardly the subjects with room for creativity. “You have to learn an awful lot of science before you can even to begin to think about taking a creative approach to it.”

When he went to Cambridge, he studied Law. Not much creativity there either, unlike now when lawyers are becoming much more creative with their practices twisting the law in favor of their clients (this pun is mine).

But when he was in Cambridge, he get to know a very nice group of people who were a part of a society called ‘Floodlights.’ They used to put on little shows on the club-room stage, performing sketches and monologues and musical items.

John desperately wanted to be part of that group of people. But to become a member of ‘Footlight’ you have to write something and perform it. John wrote a couple of sketches and performed them in the monthly meeting. They made people laugh.

“It was during the course of writing sketches — the first imaginative thing I was ever conscious of doing — that I realized that I could be ‘creative.’”

Role of the unconscious mind in creativity

Then John noticed something else. He would write a sketch in the evening and often get stuck. He would try to get unstuck by sitting late, but eventually would give up and go to bed.

“And in the morning, I’d wake up and make myself a cup of coffee, and then I’d drift over to the desk and sit at it, and almost immediately, the solution to the problem I’d been wrestling with the previous evening…became quite obvious to me!”

It was like a gift, a reward for all my wrestling with the puzzle.

So this is how he started tapping on his creativity. He would put the work in before going to bed and often would have a creative idea overnight.

Once he wrote a sketch and lost it. So he wrote it again, from memory. Then he found the sketch. Out of curiosity, he cross-matched them and found that the remembered version was better.

He began to realize that his unconscious was working on stuff all the time, without him being consciously aware of it.

The Language of the Unconscious

Then he started observing other things about the unconscious mind. This intelligent unconscious of ours is astoundingly powerful. It allows us to perform most of our tasks in life without requiring us to concentrate on them.

But that doesn’t mean that our intelligent unconscious behaves in an entirely predictable way.

Put simply, you can’t ask your unconscious a question and expect a direct answer — a neat, tidy little verbal message. This is because your unconscious communicates its knowledge to you solely through the language of the unconscious.

The language of the unconscious is not verbal. It’s like the language of dreams. It shows you images, it gives you feelings; it nudges you around without you immediately knowing what it’s getting at.

Role of Play in Creativity

A psychologist Donald MacKinnon did an experiment during the early sixties at Berkeley. He asked a number of architects who were considered the most creative ones in their profession, to describe to him what they did from the moment they got up in the morning to the moment they went to bed at night.

Then he went to a number of uncreative architects and asked them exactly the same question.

He concluded that there were only two differences between creative and uncreative architects.

  • The creative architects knew how to play.
  • The creative architects always deferred making decisions for as long as they were allowed.

When MacKinnon talks about ‘play’ he means the ability to get enjoyably absorbed in a puzzle: not just try to solve it so that you can get on to the next problem, but to become really curious about it for its own sake. He described this kind of activity as ‘childlike.’ Picture small children playing. They are so absorbed in what they are doing that they are not distracted, they’re just… exploring, now knowing where they’re going, and not caring either.

Children at play are totally spontaneous. They are not trying to avoid making mistakes. They don’t observe rules. It would be stupid to say to them, ‘No, you’re not doing that right.’ At the same time, because their play has no purpose, they feel utterly free from anxiety (perhaps because adults are keeping an eye on the real world for them).

Most adults, by contrast, find it hard to be playful — no doubt because they have to take care of all the responsibilities that come with an adult’s life. Creative adults, however, have not forgotten how to play.

Most people are very surprised to learn that this involves deferring decisions for as long as possible. Doesn’t this mean that the creative architects are, by definition, indecisive? Isn’t that a bit impractical and unrealistic?

No!

It simply means they are able to tolerate that vague sense of discomfort that we all feel when some important decision is left open because they know that an answer will eventually present itself.

Creative people are much better at tolerating the vague sense of worry that we all get when we leave something unresolved.

Interruptions

The greatest killer of creativity is an interruption. It pulls your mind away from what you want to be thinking about. Research has shown that, after an interruption, it can take eight minutes for you to return to your previous state of consciousness, and up to twenty minutes to get back inot a state of deep focus.

Create boundaries of space to stop others from interrupting you.

Create boundaries of time, by arranging, for a specified period, to preserve your boundaries of space.

Mistakes

When you’re being creative, there is no such thing as a mistake.

Meditation

Once you start chasing away any distracting thoughts (John does that by writing them down), you’ll discover, just like in meditation that the longer you sit there, the more your mind slows and calms down and settles. Once that starts to happen, you can begin to focus on the problem you’ve chosen to think about.

Clarity

When we’re trying to be creative, there is a real lack of clarity during most of the process. Our rational, analytical mind, of course, loves clarity — in fact, it worships it. But at the start of the creative process, things cannot be clear. They are bound to be confusing. It’s a new thought, how can you possibly understand it straight away? You’ve never been there before. It feels unfamiliar. So, much of our ‘Tortoise Mind’ work takes place in an atmosphere of uncertainty and gentle confusion.

It’s therefore really important that you don’t rush. Let these new notions of yours slowly become clearer, and clearer, and clearer.

New Ideas

When you first have a new idea, you don’t get critical too soon. New and ‘woolly’ ideas shouldn’t be attacked by your logical brain until they’ve had time to grow and become clearer and sturdier. New ideas are like small creatures. They are easily strangled.

Looking for inspiration

“When you start something creative for the first time, you have no idea what you are doing! But, whether you’re writing or painting, or composing a song, you need to start with an idea. As a beginner, it’s not likely that you’ll come up with a very good one. So ‘borrow’ an idea from someone you admire — an idea that really appeals to you personally. If you work on that, you’ll make it your own as you play with it. You’re learning, and learning from something or someone you admire is not stealing. It’s called ‘being influenced by.’”

Of course, that doesn’t mean you can slavishly copy exactly what another person has done. That is stealing. And, in any case, what would be the point of doing that if you’re trying to produce something creative? Exact copying can teach technique, but this little book is about creativity, not forgery!

Keeping going

If you want to be creative in the world of science or architecture or medicine, you have to spend years educating yourself before you are ready to start thinking creatively about anything your colleagues might not already know.

However, in the Arts, it sometimes happens that successful novelists never quite achieve the originality of their first novel. This is because beginners sometimes have a freshness in their approach that later fades away. Picasso said that he drew better when he was ten than he ever did again. Edvard Munch’s later paintings never recaptured the intensity of his earliest ones.

The Buddhists have a phrase for this — “Beginner’s Mind” — expressing how experience can be more vivid when it’s not dulled by familiarity. Playing…keeps you “fresh.”

Coping with Setbacks

Whenever you try to come up with something original, you will find that some days the stuff flows, and some days it doesn’t. The anthropologist Gregory Bateson once said, “You can’t have a new idea ’til you’ve got rid of an old one.”

This insight helps you to view your fallow periods as preparatory to the fertile ones, and therefore as an inseparable part of the whole creative process. When the juices are not flowing, don’t beat yourself up and wonder if you should retrain as a priest. Just sit around and play, until your unconscious is ready to cough up some stuff. Getting discouraged is a total waste of your time

Get Your Panic in Early

Begin with simple stuff, such as…Who are you writing for? Then, you can ask yourself whether the audience will easily accept what you’re saying, or whether they might be resistant. If so, you’ll have to persuade them, and not just tell them.

Then you can start pondering, “What am I really trying to say?” “What is the point of this piece of journalism, or speech, or book, or play, or pamphlet, or email?” Think up different approaches, compare them, begin gathering key facts and research — it never does any harm to have a few quotes!

Finally remember the famous apology, “Sorry this is such a long letter, but I didn’t have time to write a shorter one.” So when you finish your first draft:

  • Cut anything that is not relevant (there will be more than you think).
  • Don’t repeat yourself unless you really want to.

Your thoughts follow your mood

We all know that if we’re depressed, we don’t have cheerful, optimistic, energetic thoughts. And if we are happy, we can’t take gloomy pessimistic thoughts seriously. If we’re angry, we don’t want to play with the kittens — we want to plot our revenge. If we’re anxious, we worry. If we’re full of ourselves, we feel decisive. If we’re feeling envious, we can’t enjoy other people’s success much.

Now, feeling creative isn’t exactly an emotion. It’s a frame of mind. But if you’re in the wrong frame of mind — if you’re distracted or worrying about something else — it follows that you’e not going to be creative.

The Dangers of Over-Confidence

As a general rule, when people become absolutely certain that they know what they’re doing, their creativity plummets. This is because they think they have nothing more to learn. Once they believe this, they naturally stop learning and fall back on established patterns. And that means they don’t grow.

Kill Your Darlings

Any good work of art will change — sometimes in major ways — during the course of its creation. At the beginning of the process, a writer may get a great idea — one that they particularly like. This is their “darling.” Inevitably, as the project develops, parts of the story will change and that “darling” may not fit well into the new version of the narrative. A good writer will jettison it. A less good writer will hang on to it, so hindering the transition of the story to its new form.

Seeking a Second Opinion

If you are an experienced writer, and you show people your work, there are four questions you need to ask:

  • Where were you bored?
  • Where could you not understand what was going on?
  • Where did you not find things credible?
  • Was there anything that you found emotionally confusing?

Once you have the answers to these, then you go away, decide how valid the problems are…and fix them yourself. The people you have asked will probably suggest their solutions too. Ignore these completely. Smile, look interested, thank them, and leave because they have no idea what they’re talking about. Unless they are writers themselves. Then…listen carefully. But at the end of the day, you and only you must decide which criticisms and suggestions you accept.

As to when you should seek a second opinion, you should do so when you have reached a point of sufficient clarity for someone else’s judgment to be of practical help. Don’t wait until you feel your idea or project is as good as possible, because you may waste a lot of time if you ask for feedback too late in the procedure.

Here are two very interesting and informative videos by John Cleese. I urge you to take some time and listen to them.

The first one is an interview where he talks about his book. A fascinating account.

The second one, Creativity In Management, is a talk given by John Cleese to an international audience at Grosvenor House Hotel, London on 23rd January 1991.

https://youtu.be/klvQrn7cK7c

I Am Not Busy Anymore, I Am Fully Optimized

Neera

The word we chose determines how we feel.

Recently I learned how much power ‘words’ have on us.

The words not only have meaning but also emotions attached to them.

Lately, I have been using the word ‘busy,’ a lot.

‘Busy’ is a word with negative connotations. It’s a word I associate with drowning in work. I literally feel suffocated.

So, when I say ‘I am busy,’ I feel anxious, overwhelmed, and heading towards burnout.

So I replaced it with ‘fully optimized.’ The next time someone asked me how my day was going, I said, ‘Couldn’t be better. I am fully optimized.’

It instantly felt better. It generated a different emotional reaction. I felt in control and on top of things.

Think about the words in your life that might restrict you. Find a replacement word for them and watch the magic happen.

I Got Rid Of Overwhelm Virus For Good, With A Simple Remedy

Neera

When I quit working back in 2019, I thought I will have all the time in the world, now that I don’t have to commute to work, and spend most of my waking hours doing meaningless things that others want me to do.

I thought I would wake up leisurely each morning, go over the newspaper over a cup of tea, spend a couple of hours writing, then go out to visit a gallery or meet a friend, before heading home for a long, interesting evening.

Instead, I was chasing my tail all day, doing things I never thought I would have to do. Things such as writing articles, social media posts, newsletters, doing marketing, web calls, seminars, and webinars.

I had contracted the overwhelmed virus.

The virus incapacitated me for years. I kept soldiered on. I reduced the number of articles I published each week to just one. I made them smaller. I stopped writing on my website and concentrated just on Medium. I ignored Facebook and LinkedIn completely. I still couldn’t manage.

I was about to quit, but before that, I gave writing one last shot.

What I did might sound contradictory, but I set myself a challenge to write 100 articles in 100 days.

From 13 April, 2021 to 21 July, 2021, I wrote 100 articles without missing a day. How did I do that when I was finding it hard to write even one article a week?

You might think the answer lies in increased ability, yet that’s not it. I didn’t suddenly become more talented in those days.

You might suggest I somehow had more time to write, but it wasn’t even that. During those months, I wrote and published my first book.

So, how did I do it?

I stopped fretting and kept ploughing ahead.

Writing and publishing an article day becomes a task just like cooking or doing dishes.

As soon as I stop writing (and publishing) every day, writing becomes difficult again.

Prior to 100 articles, I had taken part in NaNoWriMo several times and I knew if I could meet the challenge of writing 50,000 words in 30 days, I can write an article a day.

Surprisingly, I don’t get overwhelmed when I am participating in a writing challenge or publishing an article a day.

That overwhelm comes from less, not more.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been part of a 30-day challenge, but a simple challenge like that can solve your problem of overwhelm forever.

Then I have another ace up my sleeve, and it’s called “planning”.

When faced with writing 7 articles in a week, you can’t just sit down and write each day. Your brain is fried with the thought of having to create such a high volume of work on a constant basis. The only way forward is to sit down and work out a plan. And that’s precisely what I do.

Without the plan, I would be soon flounder. To get those articles out day after day without fail, the only lifesaver is a plan.

Time and time again, the people who are overwhelmed will almost always not have a plan. When you know you have to write something every day, you will read online magazines, or go to the library and come back with an armload of books, you will keep your eyes and ears open for stories.

You will make notes, collect headline, have draft articles ready for the next day. You are ready. Just like you stock your fridge and pantry for the week to cook every night, you stock your draft folder with draft articles for the week.

If you go back to the root of overwhelm, you will almost always find a lack of planning.

Once you get down to planning, you realize it’s a bit like being on the road.

You may have the plan to get to your destination, but things have changed since you got into your car. There might be too much traffic, or an accident up ahead. Every lousy driver seems to have shown up on the road at the exact point you started on your journey.

When we start a project, we realise things change and our plans have to change too. That’s fine. Yet planning helps.

They say plans are worthless, but planning is priceless.

It is during planning that we are prepping our mind for the task ahead. And most of the time the only thing standing between us and our goal is our ‘mind.’

Usually, it takes much less time to do a task when we ‘feel’ like it. But when we don’t, a simple task feels like a mammoth.

There are ways to trick our ‘mind.’ If you can make the task a routine, the mind allocates the task to the ‘autopilot.’

Autopilot is the subconscious part of the brain that takes care of all routine mundane activities, such as brushing our teeth, washing the dishes, turning the TV at news time.

When article writing become a routine, subconscious mind takes over and it keeps working on it all day in the background.

Most people who get things done have similar routines

They first set a plan in place, and then turn it into a routine.

The people who are overwhelmed never have a plan, and hence no routine either.

Check out the busiest, most productive people you know and they’ll have plans and routines. Find someone who is overwhelmed all the time, and they’ll tell you they have plans and routines, but they often have none. They complain they have no time to plan. Well, there you go — it’s all downhill from thereon.

A plan needs to exist, or nothing happens.

Planning also stops us from taking on too much.

When your day is already filled with drawing lessons, writing articles, and learning software you really should master — you know that you’ve got enough on your plate. Without the plan in place, it seems you can slot in more stuff.

I plan my year, my months, and then my weeks. But I don’t plan my days. My days have routines. Even then I keep most of my days flexible so that I can handle emergencies and make room for spontaneity.

To get off the overwhelm bandwagon, you first have to work out a plan.

Then the plan has to become a routine. But that’s just the starting point. It doesn’t help if you take ages to get something done.

Productive people also have another superpower. That power is called fluency. Fluency is the ability to do a task quickly and effortlessly.

Look at all the work you’re doing, and you can be sure you’re wasting massive amounts of time.

Let’s take the simple act of finding interesting images for your articles. Do you do that each time you write an article, or you set aside half an hour in a week and download a bunch of free images to use in your articles?

The difference between people who get a lot done vs those that struggle is merely the lack of fluency.

We fail to create such shortcuts because of course, we’re busy. We fail to implement new features because we have a life. But it’s all a lack of fluency, and it leads to a drain of energy.

Once your energy is drained, you’ve heading towards a state of overwhelm.

You can get a high-quality article done in 90 minutes flat or sweat over it for days on end.

People who are overwhelmed take the longer route

The way to get away from that overwhelming feeling is to ask yourself: How can I do the task in ‘x’ minutes?

Or x. hours?

It is not as hard as you believe. In reality, most of us can reduce the number of hours we spend on writing quite dramatically.

What the word ‘overwhelm’ suggests is that we have lost control.

The word ‘overwhelm used to give me negative feelings. I have eliminated it from my dictionary and replaced it with ‘fully optimized.’

Now, when I feel I am losing control, I don’t think ‘overwhelm’ I think of re-prioritizing. It changes my perspective. I don’t get negative feeling about the situation I am in. Rather, I feel energized to review and realign my priorities.

If you use the word overwhelm, that alone will kill you. The way out of overwhelm is not exactly easy, but it starts with a word change.

‘Optimized’, or ‘Re-prioritize’ are good start. Once you have replaced the word, you can start working on achieving fluency.

Takeaway

Anyone can get to where he or she wants to be and do it without feeling overwhelmed.

It’s a combination of several elements, but in the end, those who are able to meet the source of their overwhelm head-on and become fluent at it, can be free of the virus forever.