I’ve not been working out for a few weeks now. It started as a problem with my foot. It was difficult to wear most of the shoes I have. For a while I was wearing only my walking shoes everywhere. And when I walked I still had pain. So I stopped walking and playing racquetball. And for some reason I stopped lifting weights as well, even though I could probably have lifted in my walking shoes without too much trouble. This is fine. I’ve had these injury setbacks before and always come back. But this time something was different.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading and writing lately. This is good. It’s what I want to do, what I like to do. I feel like I’m at home and doing what I should be doing. But it’s like anything else. Too much, even of a good thing, is bad. In this case, it’s bad because I have been distracted from everything else. And because of my passion for it, I have ignored, or at least put off, the many other things I have learned that make life better.

When I get up in the morning, or get home from work, or whenever I have time, I want to push ahead with my passion. I want to write, or read, or promote my writing, or read about writing. I choose to do these things rather than the things that make my life in general better. For example, I got up this morning and started writing this. It is Saturday morning and I don’t have to work, though I do have to travel for work tomorrow. Morning is usually when I work out, first thing. Though my gym doesn’t open for a couple of hours, I have basically decided not to go today. I’m writing! And I’ve been charging through a popular author’s catalog reading everything and I want to keep charging, finishing one book today and starting the next.

What goes through my head at these times is logical, though like most decisions we make, it’s emotion reinforced by logic that I base my decision on. There’s a very popular book called Good to Great, and one of its co-authors wrote a book called Great at Work. In this book he describes how very successful, that is, high-performing people are very good at focusing on a task. This involves something we are not used to at work, which is ignoring distractions. Distractions such as emails about routine things, people asking questions, other little projects that need doing. They focus on one thing at a time, and they do that one thing really well.

Multi-tasking is a myth. I can’t remember who told me this first. I think it was a co-worker named Matt Debusk. But it hit home because I had discovered it through experience. The human brain is not capable of multi-tasking. Unlike computers, we take so much time re-establishing our frame of reference that it becomes more efficient, not less, to focus on one task. This is the concept touted in Great at Work, and it is part of the logic my brain is using to keep me from loving my life.
I always feel like I have to get something done. The sooner I finish this blog post, or my latest short story or promotional video, or podcast episode, the better. This feeling is amplified with regard to my passion, because unlike my day job, I’m not guaranteed a bunch of time, paid time, to work on it. I have to scrape time up whenever I can find it. So that time is more precious.
What I fail to realize at these times is the concept I discovered in 2016 when I made my first (and only, actually) life plan based on the process outlined in the book Living Forward. When I prioritized my life, I put physical fitness as my number-one priority, because everything else depends on it. So by ignoring the things that make me healthier, I am hurting everything, not just my health. In the past, I have also had workaholic tendencies. But people are always saying “Don’t work too hard,” referring to the day job. A passion is a different story somewhat.

I always try to turn things around, when I talk about how things aren’t going the way they should. At heart, I am an optimist, though it may not always seem so. I think we are all optimists, or we couldn’t keep getting out of bed and facing the world every day. So I find myself examining how this happened and what I need to change to make things better. After all, by now I know what I need to do. I just am not doing it. I’ve studied a number of methods. Here are some.

Get help

I have found that my mind is a terrible thing. It’s beautiful, it’s powerful, and it’s terrible. I am so likely to get myself in trouble when I only do what I want to do and do not involve anyone else. And trouble is a relative term. I’ll give you an embarrassing example, because those are the best kind. A couple of months ago I decided I was going to get a master’s degree in the field that my day job is in. I had the best of intentions. It would certainly make me better at my job. I had been trying to learn a certain skill for many years and it had baffled me, and this degree would force me to learn that skill. But, as they say, the juice would not be worth the squeeze. It was going to cost me sixty thousand dollars. My company would pay about 15% of that, but I was certainly not going to get paid any more just because I had the degree. And it was going to take a couple of thousand hours of my time.
I didn’t tell anybody about this, except the people I needed to write recommendations. I got accepted, paid my initial fees, and bought some nice university clothing. And a couple of weeks ago, I realized it did not make sense. I’m out a few hundred dollars. And more importantly, I wasted the time of the three people I asked to write recommendations. If I had discussed this with friends and family, I would have known quickly that I was headed for a mistake. In this case, the consequences are not dire, but I hope it illustrates my point that acting on my own, without the support and guidance of my friends and family, is not the best idea, especially with life-impacting decisions like this one.

Left to my own devices (my device is my terrible brain), I can do things I would not think of doing if others knew about it. The human brain is an amazing organ. Through the magic of the brain, I can actually fool myself! And the smarter I am, the worse life gets. I lose perspective. When I depend on people I trust for more objective advice, I make better decisions.

Get in a routine of doing the right thing.

Well, this doesn’t help me in the moment. If I haven’t developed those habits over time. But I can tell you that habits have helped me in the situation I’m currently facing. I eat similar things every day, so my diet hasn’t suffered like my exercise program has. I didn’t have to stop my diet because of an injury, so I can keep rolling. Habit kept me exercising, but it doesn’t take long to get in a new habit of just doing what I want with regard to that distracting passion. So I have to re-establish my habit, and this involves the hardest of my suggestions, which comes up next.

Just do it!

Sure, it sounds easy. But remembering this not-just-a slogan can help me realize that I’m hemming and hawing and bitching and complaining and why? I can do the right thing. I know what the right thing is. A habit starts with doing a thing once. I can’t just suddenly be in the habit of regular weightlifting if I never get in my car and go to the gym. One morning I have to just do it. The first time is always the hardest.

I also need to remember that I don’t have to suddenly be doing all the right things. I only have to do the next right thing. It’s only one thing. It’s not my whole life I need to change. It’s just this one thing, in this one moment.

Passion is what we live for. And to do that passion well, we need to live well. To live well, we need to take care of my health, because all else depends on it. That is why, for me, it is priority one. Follow your passion. And keep it going by loving your life, loving your health, so you can live a long, healthy, happy, active life right up to the very end.