BY: Adrian Smith
After setting up our apartment in the fall, my roommates and I decided we’d get a canvas and paint something we could hang in the living room. It was pretty plain, with nothing but a plastic tree. The plan was to choose two colors of paint each, buy a large canvas, and then on the weekend, after our first bar-night as a collective, cover the canvas in splattered paint—creating our very own Jackson Pollock. We never actually ended up doing it, but it was a fun idea to have that week.
There are so many little things, like the painting, that people always talk about doing but just never get around to. Most ideas don’t even require too much energy or effort, we just don’t follow through on them. We choose not to. Why is that? If the excuse is there’s no time, or that it takes too much effort—how do we justify spending time and energy thinking or talking about what we could be doing instead? Making immediate strides towards these plans we have in mind would be more admirable. Whether or not they’re the small leisurely activities or bigger, more difficult, time consuming goals—immediate progression towards anything feels better than just talking about if you had done it, or when you eventually do.
There’s more reward in the experience than in saying how fun it would be, or how good it would have been for you. Dive into the plans you make right away, like playing more pick up, or watching movies that get recommended to you, applying for jobs you know you’d be a good fit for and would enjoy, or learning how to make music. Do it while the interest is still there, so that it always gets done. With everything that happens in a day, all the different ideas and quick thoughts that flow through your mind, it’s easy to dismiss what might seem like too much of a hassle among the chaos. But if you make immediate movements towards the things you say you could do, or want to do, you’d see a lot more of those little activities and goals accumulate and how the bigger ones eventually fall into stride.
The ideas of things aren’t worthwhile, actually doing what you’ve thought of is. It just takes a bit of effort and a real willingness to get the little, annoying and ‘time-consuming’ chores out of the way first. You can say that you’ll get to it, or that you really want to – but how do you know you’re going to do something, until you actually do it?
