You have to remember what you want

Yesterday, about 4:30 in the afternoon, I was sitting at my work table and thought about two options:

1. Go take a nap.
2. Keep working.

I thought I chose #2, but in fact I was mistaken about what my choices were. Because I was mistaken, I had only two real options (if I had recognized my real options, I would have had other alternatives as well to choose, but my ignorance left me with only two).

1. Go take a nap.
2. Take a nap while sitting at your work table.

These were my real options, so by rejecting choice #1, I in fact “chose” #2.

If I had realized that those were my options, I might have been able to add some other alternatives. Such as:

1. Go take a nap
2. Take a nap while sitting at your work table.
3. Get up and quickly deal with dishes in dishwasher and sink and, with your blood flowing again, resume working.
4. Get up and move lap top to counter and work while standing.

(Side note. I wish it was socially acceptable to stand in the back during church sermons. At some point–at about the age of 38–it seems my circulatory system redesigned itself so that all the blood to my brain flows first through my buttocks.)

This all came back to me when I started listening to today’s podcast from Michael Hyatt on how to be more disciplined. Some of Mike’s comments reminded m of this book on “will power” by Henry Hazlitt. (It is a free book, if you have a e-reader or don’t mind reading books on .pdf on your computer.)

Michael asks if we can want something enough to endure doing things we don’t want in order to get it.

My take on this from my experience and reflection yesterday, as well as Michael’s own advice, is that the problem is just “not wanting it bad enough” but forgetting that we want it. We fall “asleep.”

Actually, forget about the quotation marks. Think of a person who is asleep. If you know that person to be goal-driven and disciplined is your description false every time the person is sleeping? No, that is not the way we think. As Martin Luther pointed out, a believer doesn’t cease to be a believer when he is unconscious.

But what if some medical condition made the person much more prone to fall asleep? Then the effects of being disciplined would be much less visible. Perhaps even undetectable.

So I think we have to think about the problem of achieving goals as not just wanting them, but remembering them at the important times when we are making decisions. If you think the decision is just between wanting or not wanting a goal, you will find your real decision was between not wanting the goal and only wanting it for a moment before you fell asleep at your work table. One of the means of achieving your goal is the adoptions of exercises or programs to remind you of what you want (which, I think, is one way of describing the point of much of Michael’s advice in his  podcast).

PS. I used one of my older categories for this post because I think this relates to much of what I have written about wisdom in the Bible. You might want to take a look.