I was telling my partner that though I love the sense of accomplishment when I finish a travel sketchbook, it inhibits me from doing more travel sketching because the thought of completing an entire sketchbook feels daunting. We both concluded that perhaps it is better to have a generic sketchbook with no specific theme so we don’t have to feel compelled to finish it in general or when we end a trip. We should feel okay to sketch a couple of drawings to record our impressions, or maybe an entire trip can simply take up one spread. Sometimes it is hard to remember that it is not the quantity that matters.
Our floor gets exceptionally dusty whenever we come back from a trip, so the last time we got back I had to mop the floor. I am strangely a perfectionist when I mop the floor, so it prevents me from mopping it often because it feels too draining and tedious. This time around I decided to deliberately do a shoddy job, half-heartedly going over the floor quickly and ignoring the difficult-to-reach areas. I learnt that it takes exponentially less effort to mop the floor this way compared to my regular effort. The floor still felt clean enough.
In response my partner told me that she too started putting our comforter in its sheets haphazardly instead of making sure it is perfectly straight into their corners. At the end of the day, it still does its job.
These examples reminded me that it is better to do what we can instead of always aiming for some ideal state. I think a lot of my procrastination happens because everything feels too daunting and tiring. Knowing how to chunk, pace and dose is key to doing the things we want to do.
Our society has conditioned us to be perfectionists, as though anything done without excellence is not worth doing. So many people don’t even try doing the things they wish to do because they think they will be bad at it. But nobody says we have to be good at doing the things we are interested in doing. Interest and excellence are different. I can be interested in photography but I don’t have to be excellent with it. Depending on our goals, sometimes having fun is more important. Pushing for excellence may not be fun to everybody, especially for someone like me who prefers novelty to specialisation. It is important to understand our own preferences.
I run at at an average 10:00 per km. That’s awfully slow from most people’s point of view. But I enjoy it, it keeps me at a sustainable steady state, and that is my zone 2ish pace. I don’t incur too much oxidative stress or stress hormones. So why do I have to compare myself to other people’s pace or try to break PRs?
Just like I once wrote that there is minimum effective dose for strength training and other beneficial activities, there are also thresholds where doing something is effective enough without it feeling strenuous. Once we breach that threshold the effort:reward ratio becomes dramatically smaller. Continual experimentation is needed to figure out where is that threshold. If 80% is enough we don’t have to go for the 100%. Heck, sometimes even 1% is good enough, because everything compounds.
It is important to figure out where we are and do what we can at our own pace, or we are gatekeeping opportunities and experiences from our selves. It is a skill to do things for just a few minutes with minimum effort, knowing that it all adds up and that it is better than doing nothing at all. There are some instances when doing nothing is better than anything, but as with everything we can learn to make conscious informed decisions versus simply being dismissive and passive.