Stop Looking

Mahler’s Monday Morning Motivator # 233 – Stop Looking

Stop Looking (10-20-08)

Just the other day I was browsing my computer files looking for a form I had created for use in the office. I must have spent an hour opening up folders, scanning file lists, and doing searches on likely file names. All this produced nothing but wasted time and some real frustration. Finally, I gave up and took a paper copy of the document from my file cabinet and went to work recreating the form. Of course, no sooner had I spent another hour or more in this endeavor, did I then happen upon the file that I was looking for all along. Pissed would be a mild expression for what I was feeling at that moment.

How often have you had that experience in one form or another? You lose something or you start looking for something that you need to complete a task. You are quite sure where you put it or know when and where you used it last. You go confidently to the desk drawer, the tool chest or the closet where you are sure you left it, but low and behold, it just isn’t there. Sure, it must be. You rifle through the other items occupying the space, absolutely positive that one of them is concealing what you seek from sight. Sometimes you even close a drawer, walk away and come back and open it again, thinking that somehow that thing, that object you seek will magically be there, because you must have been mistaken or your mind was playing tricks on you. You came up empty, didn’t you?

Next, you spend hours looking in all the likely places, formulating blame and terrible retribution on others who you are sure must have taken it, the thing, the object of your quest, and moved it without telling you. You hurl painful epithets at those who try to tell you where to look, and you contemplate a horrible demise for those who ask that inevitable question, “well, where did you put it last?” Next, you begin to look in all the unlikely places, places where it could not possibly be, but where some other fool, certainly not you, may have left it. Hell, I have even looked in the refrigerator for items that no one in a sane state would put there.

Finally, you give up. You have been brought to your knees. You devise some way to do without or you use an alternate method of completing your task. More often than not, you find yourself running out to the store to buy a replacement for that now lost and never to be recovered object. You have now wasted the greater part of the day, but at least now you can finish what you set out to do in the first place. Returning home you renew your efforts to complete your task. You reach for something and your hand falls upon . . . Damn it.

There is a lot in life and in our training that is so much like one of those days. Often we can spend more time seeking something than we actually spend in accomplishing something. And, of course, as soon as we have given up and moved on, there it is. We even complicate things further by looking for perfection; the perfect scheme, the perfect workout, the perfect nutrition plan, the perfect “whatever.” The important thing is not to spend all your effort looking, but to put more of that effort into doing. Chances are, even if it is not the perfect plan, you are going to make progress, because the easiest way to find something is to stop looking for it and start working for it.
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Copyright 2004-2008 John R. Gesselberty. Mahler's Monday Morning Motivators (MMMM) may not be copied or used without permission of the author. All rights reserved.