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When I talk about striving towards sanity, I’m trying to suggest that what we normally do, I think, the sort of default behavior that we engage in, is that we have some kind of vision for how we want our lives to be. That’s what I mean by sanity here. Calm and free from anxiety, focused, attentive to my family and my friends. You know? This whole sort of place I’d like to be. And then the default stance is to see that as something you have to work towards. You might have a little bit of it now, but mainly it’s something that’s coming later after you’ve put in place the right systems or done a lot more work.
I think that’s absolutely the standard position that both individuals and whole organizations fall into. It, pretty much by definition, defines the thing that you want to be, the way you want to show up in the world as something that you can’t do yet. You first of all have to fix something about yourself, about an organization. You have to you have to work out some problems that haven’t been addressed yet in order to get there. And so the result is really ironic. The result is that you actually end up getting further away from this position of sanity.
Starting from sanity is the alternative approach. It’s the approach that says, okay, once you have some sense of how you want to be showing up in the world, what you want to be doing with your time, how can you embody that at least a little bit, however imperfectly, right now, today? How can you act from that? The writer Richie Norton sums up this whole approach in two steps, which are, number one, decide who you want to be, and number two, act from that identity immediately. The recovering perfectionist in me would want to sort of qualify it and say, you don’t have to decide in some perfect sense who you want to be. You just have to have some basic feel for how you want to be showing up in the world. But the critical thing is then to act from that in some way today rather than just see it as something to be attained later on.
Reframe your to-do list
So the classic behavior of the person who is in this default position of striving towards sanity is looking at all the little things that are tugging at your attention and basically resolving to get them all out of the way before you move on to these big meaningful projects or important things in life that you feel you really need this kind of undistracted time and attention and focus to work on. And this is a good example of the way in which striving towards sanity pretty much guarantees that you never get there. Because if you dedicate your life to clearing the decks, all that happens is that the decks just refill at least as fast as you can clear them.
That’s where I think it can really help to understand that to-do lists of all kinds are really ultimately best thought of as menus. The way we think of a to-do list is as something we’ve got to get through. You don’t think about a menu that way. If you go to a diner and the list of dishes on the menu is obviously far bigger than you’re ever going to be able to eat in a single sitting, but that would be absurd. No one would ever think that the job, your job, as the customer was to get through the menu. That just doesn’t arise. The point is you’ve got this wonderful abundance of things from which you could pick a few things, and the abundance is great.
Because we are limited finite creatures and there’s always vastly, perhaps infinitely more that we could do than we’re going to be able to do, really every list is a menu. Every single day, it’s far longer and more abundant than anything you’re going to be able to get through. That connect is a really good antidote to this temptation to clear the decks. You can see that actually the thing to do on a daily basis is to pick a handful of items, a handful of dishes from the menu. Some aspect of this should be something that you do first in the day. It shouldn’t be a question of waiting for this mythical time when the decks are cleared.
If you can pick those items from the menu and make them a priority in your day, then pretty much by definition, you’re starting from sanity. And you’ll have other stuff and it’ll come up and you’ll have to find ways to deal with some of it and all the rest, but you won’t be postponing the meaning of life until some time that never arrives when you’ve got all the little stuff out of the way.