Finding the bliss of being done
Oh, hi friends!
I put off doing my taxes for five months (even though the deadline got moved back, I went for the looonger extension!).
When you work for yourself, gathering your expenses, deductions, and payments from different companies can be mind-numbing (and, sometimes, an annoying reminder of mistakes not to make again). And this is all preliminary work because then I just send it to my accountant! But it is still the worst work day of the year.
All of that is to say — the soul-crushing minutia, the tasks you avoid hoping they’ll go away, the technological headaches (“OK, I want to cancel this magazine subscription, but they don’t have my account number or log-in, now they want me to call...and wait, I need to roll over that 401k but where is THAT login...) — all of that is to say, pushing through is worth it because THERE IS NO BETTER FEELING THAN BEING DONE.
So if you have a tedious task (you know the one) don’t focus on the hours it’ll take to complete. Those will pass anyway.
Imagine the bliss that arrives when you finally cross it off your list.
Hugh Jackman loves puzzles.
I was going to pick a motivational quote from this great interview he did on Tim Ferriss’s podcast, but when I considered what really stuck from the 90-minute chat, it was this: Hugh Jackman loves puzzles. He even orders his own based on photos that he takes! He said after performing in a concert or Broadway show, he never goes out — ever — and his idea of a perfect wind-down is doing a puzzle for an hour and then going to sleep.
Maybe that’s a motivational tactic after all. More deep concentration, more rest, more puzzlin’.
The rest of the interview is well worth listening to, by the way. Here’s the Apple podcast link and all the other places to find it.
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Thanks, as always, for reading.
Love, Kara