Life is difficult, and it is filled with complicated things that often make us surrender before them. Quite often have I found myself ready to achieve a goal, but ultimately give up before even trying, or at the very least, procrastinate until it becomes a necessity. The reason for it becomes apparent on me when I actually begin to jot down all of the things that will need to be done to actually achieve my goal. What dawns on me is not the sheer hard work that it would require, but the fact that the things are so complicatedly inter-related that I cannot even fathom when, if even, I would reach the finish line. If it was only the hard work it required, then things would be so much easier as we could throw perseverance at the problem and ultimately reach at the destination for which we had set out for. However, what we see is not an obstacle that, although steep, can eventually be overcome, but a simple dead-end. If you see a lot of self-help articles or motivational quotes, then you might be tempted to think of it as just another steep climb that will be overcome if you kept at it for long enough. The only problem being that you are working hard knowing that it just as might not lead to the place where you had set out for. Not only that, you are also not sure whether you are actually climbing in the right direction or not.
This seems like a very tricky situation, and indeed it has crushed many people before they even begin on their journey. However, it is not as hopeless of a situation as you might be thinking right now. The painting drawn so far suggests that overthinking about the intricacies of the steps involved would make us overwhelmed, and that would eventually overload our brain i.e. we ill exhaust our mental capacity. However, if that were the case, and there would have been no solution that worked for me, then I would not have had wrote this article in the first place. It is a bipartite solution composed of very easy steps that I take, and which work for me.
1. Take a Breather
The very first thing that you need to do is to step away from all your thoughts about how complicated the task at hand is. It doesn’t matter how you find your optimal way of moving way from such a situation, but you do need to invest yourself into something else. The last thing that I would recommend is for you to keep working hard to untangle this web, and end up quitting due to over exhaustion. Delaying it to refresh yourself is a lot better than making a last ditch effort to either make it or break it. Even if you keep going, chances are that you will only keep bashing your head against the wall and hope that the result would be somehow different than you getting hurt.
My personal favourite thing to do once I find myself involved in such a hopeless battle is to go to sleep. I do not think about it while going to sleep, but rather I make it a point to only think(or not think at all) about sleeping. This serves not only to prevent me from giving up pre-maturely, but also to refresh my mind so that I can tackle the problem with a fresh mind once again, as well as approach it with a different angle this time around. But that is just for me, and you can think of anything that takes your mind off of the present difficulty to something that you do not view as work at all. Moving away to a different kind of work would compound the mental fatigue rather than erasing it.
2. Occam's Razor - Aim for Simplicity
There can arise a situation where you will keep running up against the same difficulty that you once faced earlier, and keep repeating this cycle of exhausting yourself and then refreshing yourself to no avail. What I recommend here is that you see the problem at hand not with a microscopic lens’s view, but rather with a bird’s-eye view. That is, think only about the most simplest requirements of the task at hand, and not of the excessive ornaments surrounding it. Even though it might make your plan appear like a bare-bone structure, having only minimal similarity to what you had once set out to do, this is the right way forward.
Everything that appears to be very complicated to you is actually just a collection of a lot of simple things that are superimposed over one another. If you can just identify the simplest group of things that combine together to give you what you had set out for, even if it is just a very crude representation of it, then you have a plan to move forward with. This eliminates all reason for you to overthink or get overwhelmed, and provides you with a map towards your goal. Starting with simple things does not have to mean that you will also have to end at simple things as well. As long as you have started, you can always look to incorporate(or do not incorporate) more simple things in your action plan.
Without following this second step, all that you will achieve is procrastinate to no end, and hope that some external factor would come into play to facilitate you. So, believe in that simplest solution and keep working to achieve your goal. Good luck!
