Starting your days with aspirations of grandeur

I’ve always appreciated the idiom, your eyes were bigger than your stomach. 

It’s the common mistake of taking more food on your plate than you can eat. Especially when going out for sushi. You just can’t help yourself. The food is just so delicious and colorful and healthy and fresh, that the thrill of eating it almost always causes you to overestimate how much your stomach can handle. 

But by the time the waitress drops the check at the end of the meal, that rice baby in your stomach has grown to the size of a small country. 

Count that as another failure to practice consuming within your means. 

What’s fascinating is, we repeat this behavior outside of the culinary world all the time. We start out our days with aspirations of grandeur, convinced that we can accomplish massive amounts of super human tasks by lunch. 

Our to do list is so long that it doesn’t have an end, it has an event horizon. 

But as proud and strong and productive as we feel in trying to eat the whole world, the reality is, we’re the ones bing eaten. We’re the ones being consumed by the frustration of trying to fulfill our ever escalating ambition. And it’s crippling our overall performance. Either because we’re running from the sheer terror of standing still, or because we’re comparing our capacity to other people and wishing ours was different. 

Pressfield’s manifesto about the war of art reminds us that resistance uses our own enthusiasm against us. That it gets us to plunge into a project with an overambitious and unrealistic timetable for its completion. And it knows we can’t sustain that level of intensity.  We will hit the wall, he says, and we will crash. 

No wonder productivity scientists don’t recommend using computerized to do lists. That makes it possible to add an infinite number of items. 

But using something like an index card, on the other hand, fits perfectly in your pocket and limits you to noting only a few priority items. 

Which is far healthier and more efficient than going to the all you can eat buffet every single day. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…  

Are you starting your days with aspirations of grandeur?

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.  

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

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