The lack of hope makes me moody.

I'm pretty moody.

I'm gonna talk about grit today. And boredom. And moodiness.

If I'm being honest, I'll admit to being fickle. I am.
Day to day. Hour to hour. Moment to moment.
My wife would corroborate that.

And those moods do affect my productivity. My ability to do the work.
And I hate that. It bugs me.
Which makes that bad mood worse.
That's not a virtuous circle.
Sounds pretty self-defeating.

Why do I bring that up?

There are days like today,
and the other days I've had for about two weeks.
They are not bad days.
If you asked me, in the middle of one of those days, "How's it going?"
and then you looked at my face,
you would think I was having a bad day.
They felt like bad days.

On those days I was working on the crap that's not fun.
Working, for example, on my website. (http://coachmatt.co)

Working on the website.

There was a time when working on the website was glorious.
It was brief, I realize, when I think about it in detail.

At the beginning, I was writing the website, writing the copy.
And that was awful.
I'm terrible at it.
And I asked for feedback and it was all bad.
And I asked a friend for help and it didn't go well, at first.
Let's just say there was a ballpark of decent copy for my front page, and I was not in it.
I was not even in the parking lot.
I was across town.
And playing in traffic,

That didn't feel good.

Then I made some copy about which I felt 90% encouraged and my whole life improved.
I started laying the thing out. Picking fonts and colors.
I put pictures in. And had two sections on the front page that I liked a lot. I was surprised and proud.
I was happy and working on it was FUN!
And I kept tweaking those two little sections.
Eventually I realized I would need other pages on the site.
Blech.
So I worked on those.
And that was okay for a while.

And, I was splitting my time, working on making an audio book half the time.
And that was really fun, even when it didn't go well.

Those were gooooood days. I was happy to wake up and get to work. I liked going to the office and buckling down.
I observed that I was productive.
The work had meaning and purpose.
I was getting somewhere.
Eventually having an income from it seemed possible.

And THEN?
I decided I better put the book aside for a moment.
I decided the website was the quickest route to income.
I chose to focus on that.
And immediately shit got bad.

You see how moody I am?

NOTE: As I sit here writing, my body has started to squirm of its own accord. My fingers have about a 60% accuracy rate of all of sudden. Resistance is in the building.

Hello Resistance, my old friend. Haven't seen you lately. You haven't been needed here, to slow me down. The work was slow enough.

This belongs, sweetheart. (I'm talking to me now, not him.)

I wonder what I was about to discover that he wants to keep me from.

Where was I?

I want to quit.

I decided to focus on the website.
And then I got moody.

Those days were like...
Showing up at 8am, picking one small thing that was bugging me about the website, (e.g. a font that was not changing sizes as expected) and working on it for three hours without coming up with a solution.
FECK.

Or - working on something (like a call-to-action footer) for hours, designing six different solutions and thinking "they're all shit."
FECK!

Or – having technology – like the WIFI, or the browser, or whatever – not working, and being forced to quit.
FML, as they say.

That all felt awful.

Today, I'm anticipating a similar thing.
I've shown up to work on the website.
I know I've got some little, picky thing happening in the menu on the mobile version, and it's bugging the hell out of me, and I don't know why it's happening.
I'm probably going to bang my head against it for a while.
Who knows if I'll figure it out.

I don't want to do this.
That's my truth right now. I want to quit.

Working without hope.

I've got these words on the board – "Take what the defense gives you, and stay PATIENT. And come back tomorrow." (From Seth Godin's book, The Practice.) That got me through a lot of the writing days for the book.

Is that helpful right now?
Not really.
There's an aspect of this that's different, more challenging, than when I'm writing.
At least, it feeeeeeels that way right now.
I'd swear that this is harder.

When I'm writing, I have more hope.
When I'm in the flow of creativity, I believe I can write my way out of anything. I believe that.
It might take a long time, it might be painful, but I don't doubt that I can do it.

Here, in this website stuff – this technical design space – there's just no telling.
I'm NOT good at it.
I look at the ugly shit I made, and I think, "Why does that look shitty?" and I don't know how to fix it.
I am far from competence.

I don't always see pathways to the goal, and I don't feel self-efficacy about it.
I'm working, working, working, with little to no hope.

And – WOW – I'll pat myself on the back.
Way to self-regulate yourself, Matt.
All that work, without HOPE - that takes tremendous willpower.

And – no wonder you've been exhausted.
All those self-regulation points you're spending, every time you work on this, every day.
FUCK!
That's a recipe for mandatory afternoon naps.

And – you haven't been taking those naps.
You've been going home and working on other tasks, some of them pretty difficult and draining in and of themselves.

And this is why I write.
To discover things like that.

Working on my hope.

Alright – discovery made, now what? I can keep working without hope, and recognize that it's gonna wear me out, and I'm gonna need recovery.
Or.
I could work on my hope.

Maybe I need a self-efficacy super-hero.
But instinct tells me that strategy won't help much this time.

(Or is that the voice of Resistance?)

Lazy? No.
Impatient.
YES. Feck. Yes.

Change the goal.
Am I showing up each day planning to finish the website?
Yeah, sorta.
(I am sheepish, answering these questions, even to myself.)

I could make smaller goals, and focus on the self-efficacy of that. Have mastery experiences.

See, even I forget this stuff. I fail to apply my favorites tools, to return to by best material.
I want it to be part of my DNA, but it doesn't work like that. I think about those skills, like, ALLLLLLLL the time.
But applying achievement skills does not come naturally, even to me.

Conclusion.

Here's my resolution for today's work.
Choose a smaller goal, one that I do feel hope about.

And those larger things, which I don't yet know how to do?
Exercise patience.
You can write your way out of anything.
Maybe you can draw, or design your way out.
If you give it enough time.