Things You Should Stop Doing Today
The world will take everything you’re willing to give. It loves to watch you squirm. Your boss will always let you work eighty hours a week without a raise. Your family will always shine the laser pen of approval on the kitchen floor, as long as you keep pawing at it.
You will always have a racist aunt who posts factually-inaccurate memes on Facebook. And you will always find litter at the park.
Like, so much litter.
A frenemy or coworker will always win something you secretly think they didn’t deserve. You might even be right.
Some jerk will always say or do something to enrage everyone.
Someone will always feel entitled to your help. And someone else will always blame you for a problem they caused themselves. Then they’ll explain how you should fix it, while treating you like a spoiled teenager.
Finally, the other spiked heel will always drop. You’ll always encounter an unexpected obstacle. I’m not talking about the fun kind where you gather your start-up team and pull an all-nighter, one filled with Starbucks and takeout. I’m talking about your car breaking down just when you paid off your credit card again. Or wild animals nesting under your house that cost a thousand dollars to remove.
There’s a book for almost everything these days. How to do this. How to do that. Do more of this. Be more productive. But I’ve never found a list of things we only think we have to do, because someone told us once.
We do a lot of things we think are good for us, or we think will make our lives better. But they don’t. So I’ve been working on a list. So can you.
You’ve been here before. You ask someone if you should quit your job. Get a divorce. Go back to school. You tell them the backstory. Explain your situation. Then your friend starts slinging ideas.
One by one, you reject them all. Your friend’s ideas all suck. It turns out they don’t know exactly what it’s like to be you in this moment.
Who would’ve guessed? Certainly not the bartender, that’s for sure.
Nobody knows what you should do. Only you can figure that out. This lesson came to me in my 20s. Finally, I caught myself in a pattern. Always asking four or five people what I should do in a difficult situation. Maybe someone was cheating on me. Or I couldn’t decide whether to stay in the MFA program. Everyone told me what they would do.
The symphony of opinions devolved into noise. It blinded me to the realities. Instead of focusing on facts, I distracted myself by sorting through all the perspectives, from people who didn’t know my life.
You’ll never make great decisions if all you do is ask for advice. Odds are, you already know what to do. You’re just looking for validation. Stop. You don’t need it. And if you’re unsure, just make a decision. Nothing ever turns out completely good for bad.
During a job interview, a dean or a VP might ask you this question: “Where do you see yourself in five years?”
Hopefully you’ll say, “I see myself working here.”
He might express surprise. Most people rattle off a big list of things they hope to accomplish. So you’ll elaborate.
In my case, here’s what I said: “A professor teaches classes well, and they publish books and articles. That’s what I plan to do for the rest of my life. So the next five look pretty simple.”
I got the job. A year later, a student came to my office to talk about his career. He wanted to know where I wanted to be in five years. He asked if I was working toward another promotion, or a better job.
No, I said. I already had the job I wanted. Working toward tenure was always about keeping it. Maybe one day, I’ll decide I don’t like it here. Then I’ll go on the job market. These aren’t goals, just decisions.
Most goals mean dirt. You’re not going to make a million dollars this year. You’re not going to lose ten pounds. And you’re not going to write a book. Not by turning those aspirations into goals.
Goals are just unreasonable commitments we force ourselves into. If you’ve ever run a marathon, maybe you know it never feels like a goal. You just enjoy doing it, and the idea of a race excites you.
It’s just that simple.
We all need to keep an eye on our ambition. For me, I sometimes want to submit an article to my flagship journal — even though I already know it would fit better somewhere else.
Publishing in the top journal can’t be my goal. Instead, I’m training myself to write what interests me, and send it to the right journal. The right journal isn’t always the most prestigious —only a reputable one.
Hope is a great thing. Every day, you can hope your video goes viral. You can hope your job interview goes well. And you can take the necessary steps involved. You can decide to eat kale salads for lunch, and that you’re never going to touch a Cinnabon again. Accomplishing a goal doesn’t really make you feel anything. It’s hollow. Having a job you like and a healthy body and a place to live, those are real things.
Secretly, many of us enjoy piling junk work on our plates. We love goals, projects, and errands. Making a to-do list almost feels like fun. Just composing one tricks us into thinking we’re productive.
Other people suffer from Affirmativitus — we can’t say no. So we wind up with impossible commitments. Some of my work friends even brag about how much they’re doing.
It’s all just empty calories. We spend all our time planning, and get nothing done. Instead, we drive through our days at 90 miles an hour.
My productivity skyrocketed in my late 20s, when I finally stopped wasting my time and energy on junk work. I stopped helping friends write their mediocre screenplays. Quit editing that literary journal. Pulled back on my monthly book review in the local newspaper. Let deadlines for small regional conferences slide by. Instead, I focused on one big article, or one big conference presentation at a time.
If you want to get more done, do less. Spend more time on the work that matters to you, and you’ll never go wrong.
Some people, you wish you could just edit. Their personality has so many typos and punctuation errors. But you can’t.
Let’s say you have a younger brother or sister. They’re a hot mess. Have you seen their bathroom? Downright disgusting. They still live at home. Still single. Unemployed. No plans for college. They really need your help, don’t they? You take it upon yourself to copyedit their life.
But there’s a problem. As things turn out, you can’t show someone else how to live. You try. Your efforts do nothing but ruin your relationship. Your sister gets pissed off at your constant nagging.
You get into fights about why she can’t just get a job at the mall. It wouldn’t kill her to be a Sephora girl for a few months, just to build her resume. Your sister rolls her eyes and calls you a sellout.
You call her a lazy freeloader.
Then your sister gaslights you big time. She knows how much pride you take in your degrees, all those years working shit jobs. So she tells you it all means absolutely nothing. She points out that, technically, she has more net worth than you do, because you currently have negative forty grand. She says you’re just jealous, because your parents let her stay at home and made you leave, because you’re so annoying, they couldn’t stand you.
This infuriates you, and so you storm out of the house. See, your sister’s not so dumb after all. She found a way to get rid of you.
This pisses you off even more.
You can’t change people. Not even your family members. Instead, they have to change themselves. Their vices and addictions. Their self-destructive habits. The best you can do is ask someone to change, or demand it. You can help, and show someone how. You can give them books, or sign them up for retreats. But you can’t make them do any of it. Until you realize that, you’re useless to them.
So you stop trying to show your sister how to live. You focus on becoming a friend. You just talk and listen. You stop judging. Almost by magic, her life improves. Now she has a job and goes on dates.
Maybe she’s doing better because you and everyone else finally got off her back. Or maybe she needed space and time to process some of your advice. Either way, people change at their own pace — not yours.
Staying informed matters more than ever. But most of us aren’t just informed. We’re over-informed, and not even about what matters. We don’t curate our news very wisely. We just let mass media trigger us with an endless stream of stories about tragedy.
We’re always waiting for the next breaking news about school shootings, natural disasters, and scandals.
Rarely do we take the time to explore one of these issues in depth. Maybe we should. Instead of getting outraged at every new catastrophe, we can try something else.
Maybe we can pick one social justice cause that matters to us above the rest. We can educate ourselves on that issue, and devote sustained attention and action to that thing.
Doing that might make us feel a little less powerless. Instead of bitching at politicians on Twitter, we can focus on change in our cities, counties, and states. Every two years, we can read up on the candidates in national elections and vote our conscience. The rest of the time, we can just tune out the mindless sound bites and political rallies.
None of us will ever outrun this monster. But we can stop leaving food out for it on the porch. I’m still surprised when I catch myself doing this — dropping bread crumbs for guilt, letting it break into my house and eat me. Recently, I’m trying to fight my guilt.
We all let people down sometimes, including ourselves. We think we’re responsible for other people’s success and happiness.
Young teachers deal with boatloads of guilt. Here’s a typical conversation I have with someone who’s teaching for the first time. They come to my office in a panic. You’d think someone just accidentally impaled themselves. But no, they’re worried because two of their students are failing.
They haven’t been to class in two weeks. These rookie teachers want to know what they did wrong.
So I ask a routine set of questions. Did they answer all their emails? Did they show up to class on time with a lesson plan? Did they grade work in a timely manner? Did they communicate their expectations? The answer is always yes after yes. So I tell them to stop feeling so guilty.
You can’t save everyone. Some people don’t want to be saved.
You know who doesn’t feel guilty? Ass holes. The world is full of people who commit real crimes. They lie, cheat, and steal on a daily basis. Because they think the world always owes them more.
These people will prey on your guilt. Don’t let them. When we screw up, the only thing we can do is acknowledge our mistake and fix it. Then we can make a plan to keep it from happening again.
I’ve shown up late to meetings. I’ve missed class due to illness. I’ve canceled office hours on short notice. I’ve missed deadlines. I’ve botched lesson plans. I’ve stayed up too late and struggled the next day. Sometimes, I don’t even respond to someone’s email within two business days. At no point has the apocalypse ever ensued.
These kinds of things bother competent people because they’re rare and unusual, not patterns. Imagine if a pattern did arise, though. Feeling guilty never helps. Instead, we’d have to figure out what’s going on in our lives that makes us unable to meet our expectations.
Guilt drives most of our bad decisions. It’s why we apologize too much, and why we don’t take more chances. When guilt becomes overwhelming, we even project it onto other people. We want others to feel guilty for a little while, to give us a break.
But it’s essential. Systems of oppression have truly won when everyone is holding themselves down, and each other.
Everyone has their own beliefs and habits they think might be helping them, but maybe they’re not.
Maybe it’s worth taking some time to make a list of the things you’re doing that aren’t helping you as much as you think. You’ve seen mine, and it’s long. These aren’t things I just overcame.
They’re habits I have to watch out for, because I fall back into them if I’m not careful. My biggest problem is working myself up over what I can’t control — like litter. I’ve got to accept the fact that I’ll be seeing litter in the park for the rest of my life. I can pick it up, and I can try to educate people. But I’ll never get to kick someone in the nuts for throwing a bag of fast food out of their car window. Visualizing it makes me happy, though.
Things You Should Stop Doing Today
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