“I’m a man, but I can change. If I have to. I guess.” – The Red Green Show
It’s amazing to me how little people change. It’s the same process, but the clothes are just so tiny.
Change.
It’s inevitable. The only choice I have is whether change is intentional or whether it’s not intentional.
The reason for wanting to change varies, especially with the change. In most cases, it’s because something in my life isn’t working. My plan on only paying for power once every three months? Turns out the electric company isn’t good with that.
Or, if it is working, it’s awful. Ever have a job that is awful, that sucks your life out minute by minute and leaves it on a moist puddle on the floor? Yeah, me too. And that’s a sign for a change.
For whatever reason, the biggest difficulty most people have with change is starting it. Scott Adams of Dilbert® fame had this advice – even though it’s written as a quote I’m paraphrasing: “If you want to do something, just do the very smallest thing. If you have to move your hand move your finger. Your smallest finger. The smallest muscle in the smallest finger.”
People who speak more than one language are considered more attractive. Unless the language is Klingon.
It’s amazingly good advice. Once physical movement starts, even the smallest of movements, it’s easier for the chain to start. I have unconsciously done a variation of this technique for years. Whenever I have to clean a room, I pick a place. I almost always start with a corner.
It’s very, very easy to clean out one foot in either direction from a corner. Then, when the corner is perfect, I move a foot outward from the corner in both directions. And then further. And further. You might ask, “Well, how dirty does John Wilder let a room get that he has to start in a one-foot by one-foot section?”
I live with rodeo clowns. Okay, now that The Boy is in college, rodeo clown. Even though the chaos distortion field in our house is down to a single teenager-sized bubble, I’m still amazed that the door isn’t always open with tumbleweeds and vermin-like opossums and Leftists constantly drifting through.
So, yes, I start with a corner and build-out. It’s the easiest way. Plus, when the corner looks great it creates a contrast with the rest of the room. Then all I have to do is make the rest of the room look like the corner.
I never drink when I clean. I’m a dry cleaner.
So, starting with changing just one thing makes a lot of sense. Changing just one thing out of your life is easy. I mean, after O.J. Simpson stopped killing people, well, the world opened right up for him.
I’ll give a personal example. I generally avoid video games. I played them (from time to time) when I was younger. But then I saw an episode of a television show, Dream On.
The secretary, Toby, was horrible. She generally ignored her job, but on one episode, she spent the entire game playing a video game at work. It was a virtual supermarket.
She started as a bagboy. Ten minutes into the episode, she was yelling, “Clean up on aisle three!” and had been promoted to cashier. A while later, she was manager of the produce department.
The episode was nearly over, and then Toby had beat the game, “I did it! I’m the manager! Of,” long pause, voice falling, “a supermarket,” voice moving down to a whisper, and filling with despair, “that doesn’t exist.”
The most common occupation to put a person in the hospital? Paramedic.
That had a big impact on me. Winning a video game was, well, hollow. I gave them up (mostly) for years and years and years. Then I found one that hooked me. Yeah. Sure, when I conquered the world, I was conquering a world that didn’t exist but . . . the complexity. Good times.
But . . . it was taking six hours of my life a week. Honestly, life is wrapped so tight that those six hours are straight off the top – I’m swapping sleep for world conquest. So, I decided in September to stop. So far I’ve gained about fifty hours of my life back. Did I sleep during that time? Sure, some. But the change was significant.
And it was positive.
It wasn’t a big change, but it was a change. Will I play the game again? Sure I will. It’s really fun. But I’ll pick and choose when I’m going to give that sleep up.
So, starting a change is one thing.
The next? Keeping up with it. There has to be a reason. Mark Twain said it very well – “Willpower lasts about two weeks, and is soluble in alcohol.”
I hear Shania Twain named her child Choo Choo.
The biggest thing people worry about is failure. And it should be a big deal. But dealing with the consequences of failure? Get up and start again. Like Mark Twain also said, “Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I’ve done it thousands of times.”
It’s okay, he eventually got down to smoking just a single cigar a day, but he noted, “it was the size of a crutch.” Plus? Every single day of his life, he got to be him. So, big cigars and being Mark Twain?
Sounds like a win to me.
Thank you, John Wilder, for another great post. And for Red Green… I don’t think there is any better.
– Original Grandpa
Thank you! When I was in Fairbanks, they used to have the Red Green River Regatta – duct tape was required for every floating . . . thing (don’t want to call them boats).
My wife likes to say, ” when the pain gets bad enough, you’ll do something about it”.. change is inevitable, whether by choice or by pain, we must change.
On your other point.. when I went to college again at 30, I kept it simple, the next paper or test were the focus. Before you know it I had finished each class, prerequisite and applied to med school.
The amount of time and work ahead of me was daunting. So I took each step, clinical and course as my immediate focus. Several years later I was being recruited by a dozen fellowships and hanging my diploma.
I never could have finished if my mind was set on the entirety of the task. Just take care of the next thing that needs to be done.
Like the old adage says:
How do you eat an elephant?
One bite at a time.
One foot in front of the other – the only way to climb a mountain.
I was wrong all this time.
I thought Shania named her spawn “Tutu” for some reason…
Or Model Twain?
Back before I retired the company I worked for went on a big Change Readiness Assessment (CRA) kick, which was and still is a Thing in the corporate world. They showed charts like this: https://imgur.com/a/oF2PdIT . I kinda wonder if Brandon’s puppetmasters and the Squad are currently running this playbook on America.
There’s CRAs for application on a personal level, too. Like this one. https://www.ecfvp.org/files/uploads/2_-change_readiness_assessment_0426111.pdf
Come on, name the game!
You know we want to know!
If it’s the same as the game in the pic, it’s ‘Hearts of Iron IV.”
https://hoi4.paradoxwikis.com/Hearts_of_Iron_4_Wiki
As mentioned by Zorost, it is Hearts of Iron IV.
Probably. Or they’re making lattes for the collective farm.
If Jean-Luc Picard and Shania Twain had a child, would they name the child N. Gauge?
Hopefully that instead of HO.
My wife told me a joke about a Chiropractor about a weak back. I’m still waiting for the punchline.
Ha! I hear people who get hooked on chiropractor visits are crack addicts.
This article about how to think like a detective is a helpful take on change/progress: https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-solve-problems-by-thinking-like-a-detective
I like that article! A lot there.
Your post hit home with me. It’s been almost a year since I retired, and the process was like standing by a large pool of water, with the knowledge I couldn’t just stick my toe in to see if the water was cold. It’s been a change, and this early in the game, I wonder why I didn’t make some big changes in the past to help with the moment of retirement.
Sometimes we just like being on autopilot, I think.
I was like that with Eve Online, I could lose hours and hours in that game.
Yup. I spent hours on the game while waiting at a hospital. Barely noticed the time passing.
I think it was Brian Tracy that said people greatly overestimate what they can accomplish in one year but greatly underestimate what they can accomplish in five years. At least for myself, I often think I have to accomplish some huge thing to make a change, instead of the little things that actually make up change.
Thanks for the post!
Yup, and I’ve started a second small change. It (fingers crossed) is working just as well.
Funny. I was just this morning reading Izaac Walton’s “Life of Dr. Donne” where he quotes Donne’s motto at age eighteen:
“How much shall I be changed,
Before I am changed!”
Great quote – first time I’ve heard that one.
Isn’t that Zhou Bai Den’s current motto, after his Vatican visit?
Hitler’s strategy was backwards. You don’t invade Poland, then France. You invade France and England, then you can invade any damn place you want.
Agreed! And the Germans came very, very close. The had the Royal Air Force (RAF) absolutely against the ropes and was on the verge of wiping out all aerial resistance to their Operation Sea Lion invasion that was all ready to go. The Brits were convinced the invasion would begin on September 8, 1940 because of tides and weather.
September 6, 1940:
“By now, the British commanders were at their lowest ebb, exhausted pilots and squadrons, Spitfires and Hurricanes were still being lost at a far greater rate than they were being replaced. In just two weeks Fighter Command had lost 295 planes with 171 badly damaged. 103 pilots had been killed while 128 had been wounded. Squadrons were now weakened by only having 16 pilots attached instead of the normal 26. As far as the airfields were concerned, Lympne and Manston were out of action while Biggin Hill which had suffered immensely could only operate one squadron at a time. Radar stations were being patched up the best that they can, and communications was only at 75% efficiency.
They knew that once they stopped intercepting the German formations, Göering would immediately know that he had achieved his first objective, that he had destroyed the RAF and that there was no stopping now, the cities could be bombed and the invasion could commence.
As the Group leaders left, Dowding said quietly, “…we must pull together…..we must win”. That night, from the office of the War Ministry, the Home Forces HQ issued its preliminary Alert No.3, “Invasion probable within three days”.”
September 7, 1940:
On September 7, instead of finishing off the RAF airfields and aircraft, the Germans turned their attention to London and began the huge tactical error of The Blitz. They killed 400+ Londoners on the first day of The Blitz. They also killed their only hope of ultimately winning the war by giving the RAF a critical and desperately needed chance to regroup. Despite invading France, the Germans never grasped the importance of the French term “coup de grace” in the Battle of Britain. A very small change in German tactics on a single day would have made all the difference in who won World War 2.
“It was burning all down the river . It was a horrid sight. But I looked down and said ‘Thank God for that’, because I knew that the Nazis had switched their attack from the fighter stations thinking that they were knocked out. They weren’t, but they were pretty groggy” – Air Vice Marshal Keith Park AOC 11 Group on the switch to attack London.
https://www.battleofbritain1940.net/0036.html
On the other hand, Sea Lion might have failed all on its own….
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea_Lion_(wargame)
One of the oddities of WW2 was how both sides thought “strategic bombing” (i.e., slaughtering civilians en masse) would be war-decisive. I think I found the answer to why in the book “On Killing” by Col. Dave Grossman.
The statisticians had broken down the data from WW1 showing the rate at which soldiers would be driven mad by combat and artillery barrages. After 1 week X% would be temporarily shaken, Y% would be permanently impaired; after 1 month 6X% would be temporarily shaken, 10Y% would be permanently impaired, etc. The data throughout the war was very reproducible, with little variation, so they thought they could guestimate the results of bombing civilians from bombing soldiers. With a lot of wiggle room due to soldiers being the best and bravest who have been trained and are generally young males, so civilians would actually be far more susceptible to the psychological effects of having their lives in danger.
It turned out that civilians are far less susceptible to the psychological effects of bombardment than soldiers. The implication of the book (I don’t think he ever stated it explicitly) is that the fear of death isn’t what drives people to madness on battlefields, but rather the fear of killing or of failing in your duty and thereby causing the death of a teammate. So random bombs falling as you go about your day is something people just get used to, but killing or being responsible for the death of a teammate is not something most people ever get used to.
Oh, this one again. That book has been proven wrong so very many times.
Soldiers in a trench can’t go anywhere, and are a fixed, relatively easy target. The soldiers really don’t have much else to do but worry if the next shell will be on their heads. The shells arrive more or less randomly and continuously, with little or no warning. They have no home except perhaps a pallet in a hole in the ground, which might just collapse and bury you if a shell lands too close. And the trench walls could collapse and bury you alive, too. And you could drown in the mud. And if they run, they get shot. There was no escape from the stress.
Cities are huge, and the civilians can leave or at least move about. They have other things to do most of the time. And they have houses, in which they can hide and feel protected. They have jobs that need doing. They have children to tend to and care for. They can read a book or listen to the radio. They can get drunk. They can have sex. They can have parties with their friends. And the air raids aren’t constant, more like once or twice a day, for a relatively few minutes, for which you generally had ample warning.
But, boy, crossing the channel is rough . . .