If It's Important to You, You'll DO It! (And other Fallacies....)
There are certain things in life that have always annoyed me.
One of my pet peeves I first became aware of when I was quite young: I would find my mom or dad because I wanted to tell them something that seemed important... and they would be too busy to listen to me.
"Ask me later!" my mom would say. So I'd go away, and wait.
Later, I'd be asked what it was I had wanted to say... and most of the time all I'd be able to come up with was a sheepish "I forgot."
To which my mother (especially!) would reply "Well, it must not have been important, then!"
I would go away fuming, not because I had forgotten, but at the implication that one's ability to remember something was connected to its importance.
What I instead learned — at the tender age of maybe eight or nine — was to simply start writing everything down, if I couldn't get to say it, ir act on it, immediately.
Fast Forward, Several Decades
A later variation of this particular pet peeve came with the statement that makes up the first part of the title of this post:
If it's important to you, you'll DO it!
I believe I first heard that particular assertion during some kind of motivational workshop when I was in mid-20's. I would probably have argued with the workshop presenter if I had felt more motivated... but I didn't.
There's something overly simplistic about that assertion that just rubs me the wrong way. Perhaps it's the part that totally overlooks the functional aspects of just doing something because it's important to you, in the process totally overlooking any consequences or fallout from doing so... like maybe being fired from your job or pissing off your entire family, or maybe the fact that you lack the basic resources to get started.
Maybe that's a bit extreme, but I expect you get my drift.
My point is: Choices have consequences.
Maybe I'm an old stick-in-the-mud but I was always taught to think things through before doing them, and to carefully weigh the consequences of my whims.
I suppose I'm more of a believer in the idea that if something is important to you, you'll try to find a way to make it a reality. But some things are just not going to happen...
Risk-Taking and Playing the Percentages
Not only do choices have consequences, but we have to be willing and able to accept those consequences. And the consequences can come up front in the form of "no matter HOW much you might want this, you lack the resources," or they might come on the back end, in the form of the scale of the potential downside.
There's a difference between knowing that you'll still land on your feet if you fail at something, and knowing that if you fail you'll be homeless and living in a refrigerator box under a freeway overpass.
Which brings me to another pet peeve saying: "Do what you love, the money will follow!"
That one should really has an asterisk by it, with the caveat "only as long as what you love is something popular!"
Of course, that caveat has not stopped me from doing things I love. But I have long since given up on the idea that any money will follow.
And that's really OK...
Thanks for reading, and have a great Friday!
How about you? Do you think "motivational statements" should come with some cautions? Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!
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Created at 20220819 01:43 PDT
0635/1881
What about if it’s important to you, you won’t be able to ignore it forever.
Or, if it’s really important to you, it will be persist/be recurrent.
For me, the main thing is to continue to operate within what I'd consider "the realm of reality."
Some things may need to be "modified" to reflect that I can do them full time.
When I read this, I wasn’t totally sure if you meant do it full-time, or if you meant satisfy yourself by doing it in some way.
I often think that there are ways to do the things we (think we) want to do, but not quite as we envisioned doing them and still be satisfied. Maybe that’s what you mean by “modified”.
For example, if someone were fixated with France and really wanted to go there, but just didn’t have the ways or means, maybe he/she could find an outlet in studying the language for five minutes a day, creating a ‘We love France’ meetup once a month, and studying French cooking to share at the meetup, etc.
That’s just one of many possible examples, but I guess what I’m trying to say is that, in regards to the if it’s important to you, you’ll do it saying, I think that we can find ways to satisfy our desires by finding other ways of doing (while not actually doing) what we want to do. If that makes sense. And sometimes, the more important the thing is, the easier it is to lower the bar and say well at least I can do this at this level. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing.
That said, I understand the implications behind the ways the expressions you referenced are often used.
Another motivational one is something like, if you want to ensure success, you have to burn the bridge behind you (referring to the old war tactic that forced soldiers to either succeed or die). Definitely, if you don’t try, you won’t succeed, but it doesn’t have to be so extreme, and succeeding doesn’t always equal financial freedom.
I suppose one of the things I have to confess to in all this is that I tend to be someone who'd like an outcome that "makes as many people as possible happy."
I do think we're talking about pretty similar things here. For example, I do love my mandala painted rocks; they are my creative outlet, my meditation and my "mental health program." Would I love to just be able to paint, sell the rocks and not worry about anything else? Absolutely! However, in reality there probably aren't enough people walking around on the planet willing to buy a painted rock that I can do so. So just because I WANT it do be so, doesn't MAKE it so. So I have to "modify" and still go to work at something I can actually get paid for.
OR I can make the conscious choice that if I just want to be an artist, the "price" is that I get to live in a tent on the outskirts of my neighbor's land.
And so, I am actually doing a variation of what you suggested, in "lowering the bar" from where I'd hoped to place it, some 15 years back.
That's the funny thing about dreams: so often they are really not practical!
That place where thoughts crash into reality.
When teaching, I often have these ideas for lesson plans that seem great until I implement them. Were I to just throw them away and never use them again, they would be failed lesson plans, but after making a few adjustments, and often after having a couple more not-so-great lessons, they work wonderfully.
I think there’s a lot of truth to the idea that if you it’s important to you, you’ll find a way to do it, but how much a person is willing to sacrifice in order to get what he/she wants shouldn’t be a measure of his/her success.
Using your rock example, it might not be practical, but there’s most certainly a way for you to make a living selling painted rocks. In the end, though, you would either have to make sacrifices to your lifestyle that you don’t want to make, or you would have to take an entirely different approach to the idea, probably one in which you didn’t even paint rocks anymore. Maybe instead of rocks, you would end up painting something totally different, something that for some reason millions of people want to buy. Maybe instead of painting anything at all, you would create a mandala-painting-rock application that makes unique screensavers. I don’t know.
Nevertheless, either making money is important enough for you that you pursue the mandala idea to this point, or the act of just sitting and painting is important enough that you do it to relax and then find satisfaction in selling $100 a year of painted rocks at a craft show or something like that.
I want it to be so definitely doesn’t make it so. I think that adapting and modifying are very important. I think maybe you can apply the idea that because it’s important to you, you’re willing to modify and adapt this idea/plan/activity so that you can continue doing it.
I don’t think that will make you or help you begin to like the saying If it’s important to you, you’ll do it, but it might be a slightly different way of approaching it. Or not. Things like this that really get under our skin and irritate us are funny, aren’t they.