Juggling Four Balls

Long Time No See

Hey there friend, I hope you're well, let's have a chat. Something has been on my mind.

You know that feeling you have when you set out to do something and it just doesn’t seem like it’s going to work? That ugly reality of sinking time into something you thought would be worthwhile but now difficult to finish and pointless. If I asked the whole world I think I'd see around 7.5 billion hands up (even the babies, nothing they try to do ever works). We just don't readily want to give up on something that we’ve invested so heavily into. Maybe we don’t want to admit our own failure to ourselves, like when someone doesn’t want to let go of a stock that’s performing poorly, it’s a hit to our ego. If we really finished it, would we even like what we created?

Recently I was talking to Adriana, whose blog you should really check out, per her suggestion we agreed upon a challenge to post to our blogs by the 21^st of January and every two weeks thereafter. I instantly had an idea, and I was very adamant about it. I wanted to learn how to juggle four balls and chronicle my learning experience on my blog. Dude, it was insane. I’d write every day in the past, present and future tenses, talking about what I had done, what I was currently doing and what I was going to do in order to wrap my head around juggling four balls. I had the task, I had a deadline, everything was ready to go and I was excited, so I began writing.

You can't see stock images in verbal conversation.

The excitement quickly faded. Well… kind of slowly. Actually, just right at the very end. I made a mess of it but you've read my last blog post, right? The one with the letter to myself; that was an even bigger mess to begin with. Yesterday I was trying to fix this blog about juggling for hours as if there was something to be valued in that mountain of trash! And then it hit me, I knew that the way it was, I was writing something that nobody else would want to read. As I was trying to fix it I realised that I was actually writing about something that even I would not want to read. Bit of a sour eureka moment, don'tcha think?

The things that I want to write may not always be the same to the things that I want to read. Sounds obvious right? I started thinking about it this way: writing something that I'd enjoy reading is my goal, and writing things that I want to write is more akin to impulse. Even though I was going through the same process of “fixing” this post like my previous post, the topic that I had planned to write about was impulsive and not actually working towards my goal. Besides, why did I think just a day by day description of what I was doing would be interesting in any way?! Since I had invested so much into my impulse I didn’t want to stop writing on it, I held on because I’d put time and effort into it, I couldn’t tell myself that I wasn’t able to make it work.

You didn't think I would get this far in without referencing Spongebob did you?

It sort of works though. Forget about the fancy title, just get it done.

After defeating my fixation on the juggling post, it occurred to me that this is true in many endeavours in life. I had made a goal that I agreed with but I didn't try to understand it. There were so many ways that I could have worked towards my goal but I was impulsive. The important thing was that my goal here was to write a post I'd like to read within the time frame of our challenge. There are so many interesting ways to achieve that! It was only until I took a step back to really understand what it was that I’m trying to do that I realised there are multiple routes to achieving the same outcome and the first one you see may not be the best option to take.

So I guess that there's a lesson to be learned in all of this, huh. Know your goal and know that there are multiple paths to achieving it. I know for sure that I'm going to think more in the future about whether or not my actions are linked to my goal. It's inevitable to make mistakes but don't be afraid of ditching a losing investment. That's about it though, thanks for listening but we're supposed to be having a chat and I've done all the talking so far. What've you been thinking about?

But before that, I did actually learn how to juggle four balls! Come closer, let me show you an extremely sped up video of myself practising.

And a GIF that makes me look better than I am.

Cool, right? It looks like I have four arms! Okay, I promise that it's your turn to speak now. See you on the 4th of February!