How Many Steps? Thoughts on Beginners Mind

How many steps to do the damn thing?  What a trivial question at first. What an important question in practice.  A few years back now, I was in a group of professionals of all walks and industries.  One member talked about her schedule: Wake up at 4 work out, grind like a machine and take no prisoners (or something like that).  Anyway, although I was disinterested in copying and pasting her exact rubric I did want to learn her secret of working out daily--but insert anything you don’t do that you want to do in place of working out. 

She said, do every single thing you can for the morning the night before.  I sat down and wrote out all the things I needed to do when I woke up in order to get to the gym. It looked like a fairly straightforward list:

• make coffee
  
• put on gym clothes
  
• ride bike to the gym
  

When it’s early morning though and your warm in your bed, and your motivation is potentially low, it looks more like:

• lift covers an inch off of body, gauge temperature in room
  
• cover back up
  
• think about coffee
  
• dream about coffee
  
• grind coffee beans
  
• fill water pot
  
• boil water
  
• get the filter thingy for the coffee thingy
  
• pour hot water on the coffee grounds AND SO ON
  

So, I set about doing as many things the night before that I could: Grind the coffee beans, fill the electric kettle, put out my gym clothes on the floor in front of me. Checking my bike tires etc. 

This way, in the morning, when Grog the slothful caveman version of myself was in charge of my brain, I could just put the clothes on that were on the floor POOF i’m wearing workout clothes?! What?
Walk out to the kitchen and hit a button to start the whole process of making coffee POOF, like magic, I’m drinking coffee.

I’ve done this process for years at this point, and I don’t think about the steps any longer, they just sort of happen.   This is the thing though.  They needed to be written out and processed for me to know that I needed to do them. 

This is also true of writing blog posts.  What are the actual steps?  Do you need to go in and find the damn folder on your computer each time you sit down to write a new post?  If so, can you cut that step out?  Can you make it stupid easy by having as few barriers as possible to your goal of writing a blog post?

A question for another day: are you adding and complicating your process?!  probably.  It’s one reason I’ve stopped adding photos to my blog posts. Sure I’d probably get more hits on these posts if I had photos BUT if a step that is in here is preventing me from doing the writing, then it HAS to go.

Beginner's mind:  Part of having a beginner’s mind is knowing that you don’t know things, and figuring out to a degree that you need to build that in. I’m going to need to allocate time and energy to certain pain (how the fuck do I create a new blog post on this damn platform?)  Yes, easy once you know it, but there is time and energy involved to do it the first few times!  

This is true of everything. 

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