Athletes say “no pain, no gain.” My experience is that this truth applies in almost all human endeavors. Particularly those where you are trying to make something better. As you work to make it better, it gets worse.
Cleaning your garage, organizing your files, de-piling your desk or improving your cardio health. The biggest pain you will experience is getting started. Of course, this is after the extended discomfort you’ve enjoyed while putting it off, hoping it will go away or pretending you don’t need to do it.
My face is a mess right now. Red, flaking, sore and even scabbing. Why? Because after years of ignoring the sun damage, I realized (with the help of my dermatologist) that I’d better do something now or deal with skin cancer later.
So, after 10 days of flourouracil cream treatments, my forehead and nose look like the hull of an old fishing boat. I’m in hiding until my next appointment when we hopefully begin the regenerating moisturizers. Before the skin could get healthy, it had to look like this.
“It’s what you do when you don’t have to,” Floyd Wickman once told me, “that will determine what you become when you can no longer help it.” So true. Garages, relationships, client databases, health and so many other important things require regular maintenance. If you don’t do the right things along the way, you’ll have to deal with the pain eventually. Pay me now or pay me later.
The longer we wait, the greater the price we pay. Sometimes we can put things off way too long. Then, we get to deal with divorces, heart attacks, bankruptcies and skin cancer – really big pains. That’s when we ask the “why didn’t I just” questions.
So, no remorse here, just a reminder to all of us – get at it before it gets at you. Go for the prevention and you won’t need the cure. Worse is the first step to better. Feel the pain, get the gain.
I know when I put something off it gets bigger and bigger in my mind. It becomes overwhelming and I think about it A LOT. What I have taken to doing is timing how long horrible things take. Come to find out it actually takes less than 10 minutes to do the dinner dishes (NOT an hour and a half). It takes about 20 minutes to write a decent blog post and about 45 minutes to write a GREAT one – not 6 hours…:) Thanks for the reminder to do the boring, productive stuff without becoming frozen by the challenge!
They are the “tolerations” that we allow in our lives. Opening the “junk drawer” in an effort to look for something…..and after a few shuffles of the contents, we say “I should clean this drawer.” And then, two weeks later, we do the same again……these are our tolerations….our “shoulds.” And many of us are knee deep in should. I was recently coached to make a list of 50 shoulds in my life, pick the top 10, and get one a week done…..Do It Now! It will lessen the price later.
Thanks Dave, for reminding me to get working on my second “should.”
Excellent post Dave! And thanks for the Floyd mention and link. 🙂 Streaming your talk at REtechSouth now. You’re doing a great job.
Ive just been through a really tough time where everything was going wrong. things had been frustratingnfor a while and it all built up and then i tried to fix it. When doing this i made bigger mistakes at first and it got way worse, really bad. but now, i have come ouyt the other side with everything being really different but better. 🙂
good article, it takes a lot to write articles like this, I think it’s good though this is a little difficult to do