GNT #175: The hardest part of just doing things

Welcome to Grow North Thursday - One idea each week to help you grow on purpose, build healthy profit, and live like you mean it.

Forwarded this? ​Subscribe here.

read time: 3 minutes

Last Saturday I got a lot done.

I was up before everyone. I answered the emails that had been sitting since Thursday. I drove EJ to jiu-jitsu and ran to the grocery store while he rolled, came back, got him, dropped Dash at a friend's, swapped a load of laundry, fired off three things I'd been meaning to send all week. I picked up the kitchen twice. I made real progress on a project I'd been avoiding.

By two o'clock I sat down on the back step with Luna pup and a coffee that had gone cold, and I felt that good kind of tired. The productive kind.

And then a small, annoying question showed up.

What was any of that for?

Not the laundry. The laundry is for clean clothes, fine. I mean the whole shape of the day. I had been in motion since six in the morning, efficient, capable, crossing things off. And I could not point to one thing on that list that I had actually decided I wanted. Every item was a response. Something arrived, and I handled it. Something was expected, and I did it. The day did me.

Does this ever happen to you? You're good at the doing. The doing was never the problem. 

The doing might be the thing hiding the problem.

Let's dig in.

The easy muscle and the built one

Doing is the easy muscle group. Most capable people I know, myself included, have trained it for years. We are extremely good at responding, executing, handling, shipping. Hand us a thing to do and it gets done.

The hard part isn't the doing. The hard part is having something you actually want to do.

That muscle doesn't come trained. You have to build it. And almost nobody does, because we treat what we want as something you discover, like it's already in there waiting to be found. So we keep waiting to feel it. Meanwhile the doing keeps us busy enough that we never notice we're waiting.

I sat on that back step and ran through the last few months honestly. Here is what I found.

The newsletter I almost wrote last month because a topic was trending, not because I had anything to say about it. Pure motion. I caught it in time, but the pull was real.

The yes I gave to a thing in April that I didn't want, that I said yes to because saying yes is what I tend to do, and because the asking felt like it deserved a yes. I was responding to the shape of the request, not to anything I wanted.

And then the opposite. The afternoon a few weeks ago when I blocked two hours to actually think about what Catapult North should be in three years. No deliverable. Nothing to cross off. That one was hard in a completely different way, the way the unfamiliar muscle is hard.

The pattern was not that I'm lazy. I am the opposite of lazy. The pattern was that motion is the path of least resistance, and choosing is not.
 

The trap

Here's the trap. Doing produces evidence. At the end of a day full of responding, you have a clean kitchen, sent emails, a kid delivered to practice, a list with lines through it. It looks like a life. It feels like progress.

Wanting produces almost nothing you can see. An afternoon spent figuring out what you actually want to build ends with no clean kitchen and nothing crossed off. By every visible measure, you did less.

So we choose the doing. Every time. Not because we're avoiding the question on purpose, but because the doing pays out immediately and the wanting pays out slowly, if at all, and only if you keep at it.

Takeaway

It's not whether you can act. You can. You've proven that a thousand times.

It's whether anything you're acting toward is something you wanted for yourself, instead of something that simply arrived and got handled.

So here's the one I'm sitting with this week, and I'll hand it to you too.

If your whole next week went perfectly, every box checked, every email sent, every plan executed flawlessly, would any of it be something you actually decided you wanted?

I'm always rooting for you. See you next week.

-Colleen

📩 If you’ve found value in this newsletter, please forward it to a friend. It’s the biggest way you can support my work, and I appreciate it so much.

For more short, grounded ideas throughout the week, you can follow me on LinkedIn.

If someone forwarded this to you, you can subscribe here to get it each week.