Making It All About Just One Thing

In a post this past weekend (“Something Completely Different: a New Direction for the Willpower Engine and ReidWrite“), I talked about the new focus I’ve pulled together for my writing and this site. What I’m finding as I pursue it is that it’s creating a natural unification of efforts in my life, and this unification is making my life easier, my mind clearer, and my efforts more useful.

Just one goal
I’ve always been bad at following my own advice to have only one major goal at a time. This isn’t because I have any doubt whether it’s a good idea: it is. It’s just because when I tried to narrow things down to one goal, what I would find was that I got down to multiple goals that were each so important to me that I couldn’t bring myself to discard any of them; the best I could do was to put some on the back burner.

I want to be clear here that when I say “goals,” I’m talking specifically about goals for doing new things that I’m not already achieving, goals that need extra time, attention, and focus. Splitting those scarce resources among multiple goals isn’t effective, because it’s hard enough to help ourselves change in just one way at a time; more than one way is usually overwhelming.

The joy of just one thing
But recently, I resolved to take all of the research I’ve done into the psychology of habits and self-motivation and build a novel out of it that will help people experience how to actually change their lives. It’s a tricky job despite the very great success of some books that have tried similar kinds of challenges, like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Ishmael, Eat, Pray, Love (though of course that’s a memoir rather than a novel), and even Ecotopia. It seems easy to me to stumble by either preaching–which loses the reader; or by not bringing in the really useful information–which loses the point. Still, I was never the guy who liked taking the easy jobs.

What’s particularly joyful for me about this whole process is that I’m able to single-mindedly pursue one project without the distractions of a lot of other projects, even though there are innumerable little jobs that are part of that project. At the moment, while of course my efforts go into other important things on a daily basis, when I have time to think about or work toward something big and expansive, I know exactly what that thing is: it’s this novel. That kind of one-project focus is a rare and miraculous thing for me.

It’s a little bit like a handy solution to a fiction writing problem, when you find that two characters can be mashed together into one and that this adds a burst of new possibilities and payoffs. Hey, the thief could also be the guide! you say. Suddenly everything is easier.

Unifying goals turns into unifying sites
Interestingly, unifying my focus also is resulting in a unification of my Web sites. I had already realized that I wanted to bring together my psychology of habits blog and my writing blog: my original writing blog at reidwrite.livejournal.com is getting folded into my original willpower blog at www.lucreid.com . But I realized today what the name of the new compounded site should be, and what else it should include: this site will become the new LucReid.com, and the out-of-date writing site I have by that name is getting updated and folded into this site as well. It’s interesting to me how it all seems to be coming together.

Photo by interestsarefree