1. You’re trying to find time

You will never find time, just like you will never stumble across a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow: you have to hack chunks of it out, like a 19th-century ice-harvester working on the Kennebec river. Except even that is difficult – if your life is relatively uncomplicated, then maybe you can find huge, unbroken, marble-smooth slabs of time here and there in your work, but if it isn’t then you have to make do with pieces here and there: work done in snatches and parts, tapped out on your phone using coffee-shop wifi. Relatedly, if you’re waiting to find the time to go to the gym, you will never go: you have to make that time and protect it, like you would protect a meeting for a work project or a date night: by getting the other stuff done somewhere else if you have to. And if you can’t do three uninterrupted hours once a week, the solution is the same as it is for a writer: do what you can, when and where you can. If you wait for the time to arrive, you are doomed.

2. You’re waiting for the perfect space

Yes, it’ll happen, just as soon as you get your back office organised/find a coffee shop with the right Feng Shui/finally sign up with a gym that has a goddamn GHD machine.

Here’s Stephen King, from On Writing:

‘For years I dreamed of having the sort of massive oak slab that would dominate a room. In 1981 I got the one I wanted and placed it in the middle of a spacious, skylighted study…for six years I sat behind that desk either drunk or wrecked out of my mind. A year or two after I sobered up, I got rid of that monstrosity [and] got another desk – it’s handmade, beautiful, and half the size of the T. rex desk. I put it at the far west end of the office, in a corner…I’m sitting under it now, a fifty-three-year-old man with bad eyes, a gimp leg, and no hangover. It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.’

Your space will never be perfect. Your gym will never be good enough. If it is, it might ruin you: whenever I train at a place that has too much kit, I dither between the Ski-Ergs and the stall bars and the strongman yokes, uselessly unable to decide on what I want to do that day. Give me one bit of kit – a single kettlebell, a barbell, a pull-up bar – and a goal, and I will come up with a workout that gets it done. Take what you have, and use that.

3. You haven’t started

You know this, but it’s still crucial.

If you are thinking about writing a book, crafting perfect little phrases and the broad sweep of the story in your head as you go about your day, then you aren’t dealing with the realities of actually writing it: the fact that your Dickens-tier opening line has to be followed by 80,000 words of other lines, that characters have to get from here to here, that problems need to be solved as you go.

Similarly, while you craft the perfect fitness regime in your head, waiting for the day you can get a clear run at the gym and the oven, you aren’t dealing with the realities: maybe it’ll be too hard, maybe you’ll hate it, maybe you’ll be hungry or tired all the time and you’ll need to change things.

Maybe these will be problems, or maybe not. Until you start, you won’t know.

4. You can’t finish

The truth is: your book/body/rock opera/blogpost will never be finished: it will just be as good as you can make it in the time you (or if you’re lucky, your backers) allow. You have to decide where the finish line is and stop putting it off, and if the finish line is too far and indistinct it means creating smaller, faster ones (entering a strongman competition, posting a chapter online every week, telling everyone you know you’re going to post a shirtless selfie on your birthday whatever you look like by then). On Arrakis, they call this the Attitude Of The Knife:

‘Chopping off what’s incomplete and saying: ‘Now, it’s complete because it’s ended here.’

Decide on an endpoint. Then start with whatever you have.

HOMEWORK: Chop whatever you’re working on into the smallest units possible, and decide on a thing you’ll have done by the end of this week. Post it in the comments, and check in next week.

Imagine, please, that you are in a zombie apocalypse. Perhaps you have sourced a katana from somewhere, or maybe you’ve somehow acquired a crossbow. Either way, you’ve survived the initial bit where nobody knows what’s going on, and you’re into the new reality: there are zombies, they want to eat you, and you are going to have to deal with that. So now, the important question:

How do you spend your time?

Killing zombies, while appealing, is a maniac’s answer. There are millions of them, and they’ll never stop coming. Yes, occasionally you need to kill a whole bunch of them, but the better you get at managing time and resources, the more you realise that zombie-killing is an unavoidable and occasional necessity. Short-term, what you need to do is source food, water and medical supplies. If you’re a bit more long-sighted, you’ll realise that what you eventually need is a place to settle down (a walled-off town, maybe, or a disused prison) where you can safely camp out while you reassemble some sort of society and teach your kids to field-strip a Glock. Recreational activities, playing the guitar and making pasta all come a distant, distant last.

Here’s how all this looks in a grid.

It’s SO SIMPLE, Abraham, you dumbass.

Please take a moment to enjoy that graphic. And let’s just say it again: Q3, killing zombies, is the second-least important bit. Ideally, you’d eliminate it entirely. At best, it’s a distraction.

Here’s the insane part, though: when you’re watching The Walking Dead, you understand this. When Abraham goes off-mission to bust up some zombies that don’t really need smashing, you’re yelling at him to get back on the programme and start shoring up the walls. When Rick starts teaching the townsfolk to machete-fight, you nod approvingly. And when some lady starts talking about pasta makers, you pray for her to get eaten by zombies and then feel kind of guilty when she dies.

But are you doing it with your own life? Maybe, maybe not. Here’s how it breaks down:

Q1: Is the daily fire-fighting that goes with your job/life. It has to be done, but you should delegate it where you can, and put steps in place to streamline the process (like you’d start growing crops instead of going on potentially lethal food-runs if you lived in Alexandria).

Q2: Is the long-term stuff you should focus on for a better quality of life. It will never seem urgent, but without it you are limited to working with the skills and opportunities you have now (or living in a tent and fighting zombies whenever they come out of the woods). It’s also important to ensure your survival in the long-term: at some point, your current skills/setup might not be enough, and at that point you’ll regret not having made contingency plans, however urgent all that other shit seemed at the time. People don’t always mention ‘family’ being part of this quadrant, but it definitely is: you can always put off family commitments, they are never urgent, but one day the chance will be gone and it won’t come back.

Q3:  Is the stuff that seems urgent but is not important: nonsense meetings, pointless emails, engaging with people you don’t have to, getting in a zombie-fight when you could just run off. It will always be there and it will take over your life if you let it.

Q4: Is the stuff that it’s nice to kick back with when everything else is sorted: stress relief and a time to recharge. It’s not urgent or important, but it’s still easy to get obsessed over.

Again: you know this already. You know it when zombies are involved, and it is the same in your everyday life. One more time:

The Zombies Will Always Be There

But there is stuff that is way, way more important.

HOMEWORK: Work out what your Quadrant 2 activities should be, and spend this week focusing on ways to make more time for them. And call your mum.

Quick, here’s a thought experiment. Imagine that you have to do one of these things, whichever is furthest from your current comfort zone:

a) Become a world class competitive Street Fighter player

b) Run a sub-3 hour marathon

c) Redecorate your bathroom

There’s no particular reason that I’ve chosen these, except that they’re all a) Achievable for most people and b) Hard. You could do them, if you wanted to, however insane and daunting they seem when they’re written down and staring you in the face. The question is, how do you do them?

Here’s how: by worrying about the Next Action.

This is an idea I’ve (mostly) stolen from Dave Allen, whose book, Getting Things Done, is a classic of the productivity genre. A key to getting anything done, according to Allen, is deciding on the very next action you have to do, and (crucially) making that action as small as possible. Let’s say you’ve chosen to be amazing at Street Fighter: the next thing might be to simply look up what Street Fighter is. Then you need to buy a copy of Street Fighter, and then learn the moves to Street Fighter. Here’s the clear-cut version:

1. Make your plan

Write out the stuff you need to do. Make a list. Once it’s on paper it seems more manageable.

2. Split it up

A term Allen uses that I like is granularity: getting it down to the very next thing you can do. If we’re talking Street Fighter, ‘Learn the moves’ is not a good next action: ‘Learn Ryu’s special moves’ is a good next action, because that presents an extremely defined, manageable goal.

3. Eliminate the non-doable

Street Fighter again: you can’t learn the combos until you’ve learned the special move inputs, just like you can’t go running until you’ve got a decent pair of shoes. Hack your list down to the things you can do right now: there shouldn’t be too many of these.

4. Do the things

Allen’s rule: if you can do the next action in less than two minutes, do it right now – it’s more efficient to work that way than scheduling it for later. If you aren’t going to do the thing right now, at least decide what the smallest possible ‘next thing’ you can do when you decide to tackle your project is.

How this relates to training

Come on, you knew this was coming. This is a fine system for productivity, but I’ll go you one better: it’ll help you train harder, go faster, lift heavier and eat better. Here’s why:

Let’s talk about rowing again for a second. A 7-minute 2k, the standard I talk about all the time, is a very unpleasant thing to do. It can feel almost impossible, even when you’ve trained and peaked for it, even when you’re ready for it. Keeping a 1:45 pace for 7 minutes is…ugh. Just thinking about it, I don’t like it.

But here’s the thing: you don’t have to think about those next 7 minutes. Just think about the next action.

The first action in a row, realistically, is doing a couple of hard pulls while your ATP reserves are doing the grunt work, to start off. Then all you need to do is the first 1:45 500m. This is easy: of course you can do this.

The next 500, I’m not going to lie, is awful: if it isn’t, you’re going too slow. But it’s just 500m. Don’t kid yourself that you can slow down now and make up the time later: you can’t. Don’t let the pace drop to 1:47 – you won’t really feel any better, and you won’t hit the time. Don’t worry about the 3:30 that comes later. Just concentrate on the very next thing, which is keeping that monitor at 1:45 with every stroke.

This is the best advice for rowing a 2k you’re going to get.

BOOM. 1,000m in, and you’re nearly done. Now you’re on the home stretch. Yes, you’re hanging on, but you can hang on. Just do the next thing.

With 600m to go, you might be able to up the pace just a fraction. This is the next thing.

With 250m to go, all you have to do is 20 power strokes, with almost everything you’ve got left. Easy.

Once those power strokes are done, just go all-out with whatever you’ve got left. And you’re done.

Obviously this is an unfair example, because time expands around a Concept2 rower like it does around a black hole, but the principle works for anything that seems difficult, unpleasant or endless.

Don’t worry about sticking to your workout plan forever: just worry about doing the next workout, the next set, the next rep. 

Don’t worry about eating more healthily for the rest of your life: just make a healthy decision about your next meal, your next snack, your next drink. 

Don’t worry about changing your life. Just do the next action, and the next action, and the next action. 

You’ll find it easier. And you’ll get things done.

HOMEWORK: Whatever the biggest goal in your life is right now, break it down to the very next action you can do (in less than two minutes) to get closer to it. Write it down on a post-it, do it, then cross it out. Get it done.

• Skip/hit the gym 100 times?
• Study for 100 hours?
• Put off contacting a friend 100 times?
• Have 100 ‘quick pints’ after work?
• Spend 100 hours browsing the internet?
• Make an exception 100 times?

Put into context like this, the choice becomes more stark: your decision’s part of a larger whole that’s going to affect your life, one way or the other. That still doesn’t mean that the ‘bad’ decision (AKA the thing you want to do) is wrong, or that you shouldn’t do it – but it’s a better way of looking at the decision.

But I’ll go you one further. Next time you’re presented with an apparently-small choice, consider how many more times – in your life – you’re realistically going to have that choice at all. For me, going wrestling (Olympic freestyle not WWE) is the perfect example: the club where I do it has one good, serious, leave-you-on-the-floor class a week, and it’s on Wednesday night. One Wednesday in four is deadline day at my job, so it’s not realistic to imagine that I’ll ever get to leave on time to get to go to wrestling that night. So the most times I can expect to get a decent wrestling class done over an entire year is 39, and that’s without even factoring in holidays, illness, or times when life gets in the way. And 39 classes, if you want to be any good at wrestling, is nothing.

Since I started thinking this way, I’ve skipped a lot less wrestling classes.

But I’ll go you one further. 

One day, the circumstances of your life will change, and probably sooner than you think. You’ll change jobs or meet somebody you want to spend all your time with or have a baby, and suddenly, you won’t have any choices at all. It’s going to happen, and it’s tough to tell when.

The point is, amplifying the results of that one action – however small – make it tougher to make excuses. And it’s not an unrealistic thing to imagine: almost everything you do is habit, and the more times you avoid bad actions and chase good ones, the more ingrained good habits will be.

Self-discipline is killed by exceptions. Avoid the exceptions, and the results will come.

[Hat tip: PeaceH from Reddit, whose was nice enough to let me use elements from this post when I asked. Read his other stuff.]

King Leonidas: This is where we hold them. This is where we fight! And this is where THEY DIE! Remember this day, men, for it will be yours for all time! Give them NOTHING! But take from them EVERYTHING!

Super. Now, here’s Steven Pressfield’s account of a post-battle chat from King Leonidas, from his excellent take on the same story, Gates Of Fire.

Leonidas sought to instil courage not by his words alone but by the calm and professional manner with which he spoke them. War is work, not mystery. The king confined his instructions to the practical, prescribing actions which could be taken physically, rather than seeking to produce a state of mind, which he knew would evaporate as soon as the commanders dispersed beyond the fortifying light of the king’s fire. ‘Look to your grooming, gentlemen. Keep your hair, hands and feet clean. Eat, if you have to choke it down. Sleep, or pretend to. Don’t let your men see you toss. If bad news comes, relay it first to those in grade above you, never directly to your men. Instruct your squires to buff each man’s aspis to its most brilliant sheen. I want to see shields flashing like mirrors, for this sight strikes terror into the enemy. Leave time for your men to sharpen their spears, for he who whets his steel whets his courage.’

Which of these is closer to how Leonidas really acted? Maybe both: it’s possible he got all frothed-up before a fight and was calm and collected afterwards. Maybe neither. Which would be more successful? Almost certainly the second one. More on why in a second.

If you’ve got six and a half minutes, listen to this speech from Eric The Hip-Hop Preacher. If you haven’t got six minutes to watch the video – or you’re at work, or something – it’s about a guy who meets a guru who promises to teach him the secrets of success, then meets him at the beach and (spoilers!) holds his head underwater until he almost drowns. The moral:

When you want to succeed as much as you want to breathe, that’s when you’ll be successful. 

That’s great, right? Lots of people think so.  Eric the hip-hop preacher tells this story very well, by the way, and adds in some stuff about how you should want success more than you want to party, sleep, and so on. It really is worth listening to. It’s a great story, memorable, you’d probably be able to repeat it almost word-for-word tomorrow or in a week. Eric’s built a career on this sort of thing, preaching to his ministry, and to baseball players and MMA fighters. Bear all that in mind, and then answer one question:

What the fuck does that actually mean?

I thought that little parable was amazing the first time I heard it, and the second. Then I thought about it, and realised that there’s no advice there. None at all. Needing to breathe is an inbuilt human response: it’s not something you think about. How do you get so hyped about ‘being successful’ (whatever that means) as ‘needing to breathe’? You can’t. It’s literally impossible. The moral, if there is one, is that you should probably party a bit less, and, I don’t know, read some books or something.

Here’s the Leonidas Paradox: motivational yelling sounds good on film, it’s fun for actors to do, it makes for memorable moments…and it’s considered close to useless by everyone who’s actually successful in what they do. Consider John Wooden, whose 88-game unbeaten streak in NCAA basketball puts him in consideration for being one of the greatest athletics coaches of all time in any sport. Wooden, to be fair, did some motivational speaking. But did he lead his teams to victory with a load of eye-rolling, Pacino-style speeches?

Nope. He did it with advice. Thousands and thousands of tiny chunks of advice, delivered in a constant stream. At the start of the season, he’d tell his athletes how to put their socks on – partly so they wouldn’t get blisters and have to miss practises, partly to help them understand the necessity of detail. In practise, he’d keep it short: ‘Hard, driving, quick steps.’ ‘Crisp passes, snap them.’ ‘Take the ball softly – it’s a pass, not an interception.’

The common thread? Every one of those would leave no doubt in a player’s mind about what they were supposed to do. Did they need to want to be good at basketball more than they wanted to breathe? No, they just needed to get better at basketball, through targeted advice. Listen to Greg Jackson – widely considered to be one of the best MMA coaches in history – when he’s cornering a fighter sometime. Is he yelling ‘How bad do you want this?’ No. He’s giving digestible, actionable advice: ‘Watch his right hand.’ ‘Angle off after you throw a punch.’ ‘He’s open to the double-leg.’ Can you remember a fight where Greg Jackson started yelling motivational slogans? The only one that springs to mind for me is Cowboy Cerrone vs Nate Diaz, where Cerrone finishes round two looking battered, and Jackson comes to life. ‘Give me two minutes of hell, son!’ he yells, as Cerrone stands in front of Diaz, all the fight clearly gone out of him. ‘You give me two minutes of hell!’

More spoilers: Cerrone loses.

Look at Pressfield-Leonidas again. He’s a great leader, sure. He’s not above a joke, a bit of bonhomie, or a growled bon-mot. But when it comes down to it, he knows that what wins fights isn’t rhetoric: it’s advice about keeping your kit clean.

If you’re starting a new business, or a novel, or learning a new skill, or holding the Persians at a narrow pass while you wait for the Greek army to gear up, do you need someone to yell at you? No, you need someone who can give you advice. What motivates you isn’t always what works. War is work, not mystery.

HOMEWORK: Read Dan Coyle’s The Talent Code for a more in-depth look at how John Wooden actually worked. And this week, instead of pinning up motivational phrases, pin up an actionable thing that you’ll know whether you’ve done or not at the end of every day. It could be eating five pieces of veg, practising at codeacademy.com, or doing 100 press-ups. You don’t need to want success more than you want to breathe – you just need to do the thousands of tiny things that’ll make you successful – whether you’re motivated or not.

You know why EL James is a better writer than you, though? Because she got that awful book done.

Writing books is hard. 50 Shades is about 105,000 words – even if all you did was bang the typewriter like one of an infinite number of chimps, hitting a respectable-for-a-professional-typist 50 WPM, that would take you 35 hours. If you went at pace that allowed to think about what you were writing – say, as fast as Anthony Trollope, who wrote for three hours a day and knocked out 2,500 words a morning before his job at the post office – it’d take you 42 days.

So here’s a test, people who claim that you could write a better book than 50 Shades: have you spent that long trying? Because EL James did. Whatever you think about her dreadful, dreadful writing – all that time you spent reading articles about its lazy characterisation and weak narrative, chuckling over those easy-to-write clickbait pieces cherry-picking the worst bits of dialogue, hugging yourself with schadenfreude because the cast apparently can’t stand each other, telling people you could do better – or maybe while you were just in the pub, or having a lie in, or binge-watching Netflix…you weren’t doing better. Did you click on that last hyperlink? That’s another two minutes of your life you spent not pursuing a project of your own. You know what EL James was doing while you were chortling over her comparing orgasms to the spin cycle on a washing machine? If it was anything other swimming around in a big pool of money like Scrooge McDuck, I’d be incredibly surprised.

It has never been easier to get a book published: you can do it in a day, and make it available to anyone who has access to the internet in exactly the same timeframe. Traditional publishing models are broken, and there’s a dude out there making money from Gay Billionaire Triceratops erotica. If you’ve written a book, then whether or not to self-publish is a thing that it might be worth devoting some worrying-time to. If you haven’t written a book, then it isn’t.

So start. Write something, or do whatever your project is. Fail fast, and learn from your mistakes. As Steve Pressfield has it: ‘The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.’ If you’re not doing that? It doesn’t matter how good you think you could be – you’re a much, much worse writer than EL James.

HOMEWORK: Every time you want to read some clickbait or write a snarky tweet this week, write some words on a project you care about instead.

Recently, I’ve been trying to help other people with their writing, which is a whole lot trickier. I won’t go into specifics here, other than to say that if you follow Orwell’s Rules Of Writing religiously (trust me, if you think this is easy, you aren’t doing it) and read Made To Stick, you’ll put yourself ahead of about 80% of people who claim to be writers.

There’s other advice I give, though, and sometimes it works, or sometimes it doesn’t. Some people whose writing I’ve criticized get better, and others don’t. I’ve thought for a while about the difference between those two people, and it my only advice to the latter group boils down to one thing:

Just try a tiny bit harder.

I can’t put this next bit any better than Dave MacLeod, author of 9 out of 10 climbers make the same mistakes already has, so I’m going to quote him:

4% less effort does not get you 4% less results.

 

Often, 4% effort gets you 90% less results.

 

The return on making that little extra effort is vastly out of proportion with the extra work required. Multiply it across all the aspects of climbing performance, and 4% extra in each one delivers a windfall of results that lifts you over huge performance barriers.

 

In practice?

 

A top climber will try the boulder problem 26 times to your 25, and do it on the last go.

 

A top climber will rest 20 seconds less per attempt on the climbing wall than you (hint: multiply the extra attempts by the number of sessions per year to see the effects of this on training load).

 

A top climber will hang on five seconds longer than you before [dropping off the wall] and see the move that will get them to the top.

 

Every single one of these things seems trivial, but taken together they explain why the best do what they do, and you don’t.

 

Obviously he’s talking about climbing, but this applies to writing just as well – because once you know the rules, and can engage the reader, effort is more or less all that’s left. So maybe you spend an extra five minutes on the introductory paragraph, and think of an opener that’s better than the one you wanted to use. You take a minute to read over your work, and find a cliche that’s easily replaced with a more interesting turn of phrase. You realise you don’t need something, and slice it out. Things get sharper, better, easier. Sometimes, you’ll write something twice as good as you might have, just by putting that 4% of extra effort in.

This works with most things.

Of course, it’s not quite that simple. Yes, the secret really is just: try a bit harder, get a bit more aggressive, don’t give up quite so easily…but it’s not something to dabble in for a day, or a week. It’s something commit to for months, then years, every time you do The Thing. The rewards come slowly, but they can be huge.

Try 4% harder. And watch things change.

HOMEWORK: Sit down with a copy of George Orwell’s rules of writing and any other bit of writing you like – or don’t – and see just how well it handles them. If you’d like an extra challenge, try rewriting it so it’s sharper, less cliched, better. See how well it works. And then do it forever.

Basically, a Zero Day is any day where you do nothing towards your chosen goals. A day where you don’t do a single press-up, or write a single line of your novel. Your new rule? No more of these.  If it’s 11:58pm and you’ve done nothing towards your chosen goal: do that press-up. Write that line, or an idea, even if it’s on a scrap of paper. A better idea would be to start in the morning: get up 5, or 10, or 30 minutes early, and scrub out that zero just as fast as you possibly can. Whatever else you do, however busy or bad work is, whatever crisis comes up, that day is non-zero. Firstly, as ryans01 points out, this will often snowball – with the hard part (starting) done, you’ll often do another 10 pressups, or write something else. Secondly – and maybe more importantly – this gets you in the habit of doing something productive every single day. Habits are the most important part of success in anything – automate good behaviours, and you’ll never need willpower again.

Here’s how I’ve been using this recently:

Coding

I’ve decided that I ought to be able to code: at least at a basic level. I’m using Codeacademy to learn – legit programmers are mixed in their opinions on it, but easily the best thing about it is that it records your ‘streak,’ and sends emails that encourage you to keep the streak going. Most days it’s the first thing I do in the morning: I get out of bed, get some coffee on, then do an exercise or two before I hit the shower. Even when I was recently on a trip to a foreign country, working days where almost every hour was occupied, I’d get in at night and hammer out a single line of code – just enough to ‘pass’ something – before going to bed. This has worked magnificently well.

Pullups

At a recent event with Gym Jones (the guys who trained the 300), I realized that, while my pullups are fine (personal best with an overhand grip: 15) my strict, chest-to-bar pullups are shockingly bad. This is not the kind of thing that needs to be fixed with a dedicated training plan – it can be sorted out just by doing chest-to-bar pullups. Quite often, I’ll get these done pre-coding – I might do a couple of sets of 3, or 5, while the kettle boils. Sometimes this snowballs into doing 25 – other times, it doesn’t. Either way, I’m getting better at pullups. Don’t have a doorframe pullup bar? Skip the pub this week and buy one.

Boxing

For ages, I’ve been putting striking practise off ‘until I have more time’. Recently, I decided that I’m never going to have more time, and just started doing it instead. When I can, I hit the gym first thing in the morning with a friend of mine, and spar. When I can’t do that, I’ll just throw jabs or practice head movement in my flat. On days I can’t even do that, I go through Jack Slack’s enormous archive of striking technique clinics, and note down things to work on. Keeping myself emotionally invested in getting better pays dividends, and makes me more likely to hit the gym.

Writing

I’m working on the sequel to Zombie Titanic, and I try to add to it – even if it’s just a couple of words, or a phrase I like, every day. Failing that, I’ll read what I’ve already done. In tandem with not playing fucking Candy Crush on the train, this means I often spend my commute thinking of solutions to plot problems, or clever bits of dialogue. It’s helpful.

These are my solutions. Think about yours.

HOMEWORK: Pick your two biggest goals, and resolve to avoid non-zero days on them every day this week. How long can you keep the streak alive? Watch the original Tyrone Power Mark Of Zorro – if it’s good enough for Batman, it’s good enough for you. Oh, and stay tuned for next week’s upgrade on this idea: One Interesting Thing A Week.

‘Provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodized and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost finished and complete in my mind, so that I can survey it, like a fine picture or a beautiful statue, at a glance.’

Intuitively it might make sense that a man who started intensively studying music – under his famously dictatorial music-teacher father – at the age of three might actually be able to sit down and think out something like Symphony No. 41 without even needing a quill. But here’s the thing: it isn’t true. That quote comes from a letter that was supposedly written by Mozart but was actually a forgery. Mozart rewrote his music just as much as anyone else does, with the possible exception of T-Pain. What I’m saying is, you might be able to write Take Your Shirt Off in one sitting, but putting together a genuine work of genius is another thing entirely.

Consider also: Arnold Schwarzenegger’s early training. He didn’t walk into a gym and start doing the ridiculous multi-set arms/chest/back split that everyone associates with him and wants to try. According to his book, The Education Of A Bodybuilder, he started out by training in the woods:

‘We did chin-ups on the branches of trees. We held each other’s legs and did handstand push-ups. Leg raises, sit-ups, twists, and squats were all included in a simple routine to get our bodies tuned and ready for the gym.’

Afterwards, he got stuck in the army, and so he’d get up at 5am and work out next to his tank, hammering his muscles with as many different exercises as he could. Was he doing everything exactly right, or following the advice you’d get from most personal trainers today? Probably not, but it started him along the path that would eventually lead to him successfully air-arm-wrestling Carl Weathers. If he’d sat around debating time under tension and forced reps before he did any press-ups, he’d never have done any press-ups.

Here’s the point: nothing you do is going to be perfect the first time. If you’re waiting for the perfect lightning bolt of inspiration to strike, it isn’t going to happen. If you’re hoping that someone will eventually create a workout perfectly tailored to your body type, stop hoping. If you’re expecting science to one day agree on the single diet that’s more effective than anything else ever devised in the history of the planet, you probably don’t understand how science works.

Depressing? No. Because here’s the good news: you can start anything you want to, right now, with the tools you have available. You might not know all the characters’ motivations for your novel, but once you start writing the plot outline you’ll see where things need tightening up. You might not know the perfect set/rep scheme for your fitness ambitions, but doing 20 pressups is better than doing no pressups, and will give you a better base for whatever else you start doing further down the line. You might not know the perfect macronutrient ratios for your body type and activity level, but you know that crisps are bad. You can experiment with the other things afterwards – once you’ve started your book, workout regime, diet, or other masterpiece, you’ll start to see what’s wrong, what works, what needs to be tweaked.  Whatever you want to do, you know how to start: everything else is just details.

Do what Arnold and Amadeus did. Start now: fix it later.

HOMEWORK: Pick a project you’ve been avoiding, and pick the simplest possible step you can do today that starts it. Throw out your fizzy drinks, do some squats in the living room, start typing the book. Don’t join a gym; don’t order another book about plot structure. Do something that starts right now. Otherwise, you won’t be able to fix it later – there’ll be nothing there to fix.