Chapter 7: Agency and Daily
Life
As you know, the shortest path to a goal is in a straight
line. If you don’t have a goal, it doesn’t matter which way you go, a fact
you’ve known since reading Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland. "Cheshire-Puss," she began, rather
timidly, as she did not at all know whether it would like the name: however, it
only grinned a little wider. "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought
to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get
to," said the Cat.
"I don't much care where—" said Alice.
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said
the Cat.
Like Alice, many people without goals do a lot of ending
up somewhere they didn’t want to be because they didn’t know where they wanted
to go. These “lost souls” often end up in longcuts, which are costly because a
longcut is like a toll road. The longer you stay on a toll road, the more you
have to pay. Likewise, the longer you stay in a longcut, the greater toll it
takes on your future. Taking a longcut can postpone arrival at your goals
indefinitely. And even when you have a goal in mind, if your goal or plan of
action is only in your head, it’s not as likely that you’ll achieve your goal
as if you write it down. Thinking about goals is good, writing them down is
better. Writing makes your thinking more precise. Writing takes intangible and
unorganized thoughts and makes them more tangible and more organized. Written
goals focus energy. Written goals can change your aspirations into actions.
Some clever person said: “Don't just think it - ink it!” Written goals help you
keep moving forward through the inevitable adversity. Written goals help keep
you from being frustrated by setbacks and failures of which we’ll all have our
share.
When I was learning to drive, my father, who was in the
passenger seat, panicked as I suddenly turned across two lanes to get into the
left turn lane to make a turn that had come up sooner than I expected. He said, “It’s better to go a mile out of
your way than do something other drivers don’t expect.” Another time in a
similar situation he yelled, “Don’t do anything erratic!” As I grew older, I
realized he was teaching me simple, practical ways to be safe. He was saying,
“Driving in unexpected or erratic ways sets the stage for accidents.” He taught
me to organize my errands to do the one the greatest distance from home first
and work back towards home. His goal was to minimize the time I spent on the
road (which he made sure I knew was a greater risk than being at home),
minimize wear and tear on the car, and use less gas. I didn’t know it then, but
he was teaching me failure avoidance.
The basic concept of failure avoidance is simple:
Consider ways your goal or task might fail; then, one by one, implement plans
to insure the potential failures don’t happen. Failure avoidance may sound
negative, but it’s absolutely positive because it respects absolutes like the
laws of nature: gravity always pulls down; each day has exactly 86,400 seconds;
time ticks forward; objects in motion tend to stay in motion, and calendars
never turn back. If you make a perfect soufflé on Saturday but the party you
were supposed to take it to was on Friday, you failed. You are wasting
sun-block if you’re already sunburned. You can’t get life insurance when you’re
on life support. Failure avoidance is nothing new. You already use it every day.
You wear a seatbelt in the car and airplane. You put perishable food in the
refrigerator. You go to the dentist, wash your hands, lock your doors, keep a
jack in the trunk, and buy life insurance. Failure avoidance also acknowledges
the laws of probability. A certain percentage of the time you will be lucky,
and everything will work out even if you don’t implement a failure avoidance
plan. Eventually, though, the statistical realities of life will catch up with
you, and planning is critical to staying out of longcuts.
One night a young mother needed to go to a warehouse
store and realized she had less than two gallons of gas. She quickly calculated
her van’s miles per gallon and the distance to the store, and decided she could
make it. Besides, she hated getting gas—the fumes bothered her and the children
were already tired. Her calculations and excuses almost let her pass the last
gas station before the freeway entrance. Then she realized that if she stopped
and filled the tank, she wouldn’t have to stress about running out of gas. Her
failure avoidance plan was simple and made having a full tank of gas her top
priority. She filled the tank, drove to the store, shopped, put the children
back in their car seats, loaded the groceries in the van, and turned on the
ignition. The gas gauge pointed to full, but she didn’t even notice. She had
figuratively bought full-tank insurance and pulled out of the parking lot
worry-free. Within minutes, as she drove to the top of the on-ramp, she became
aware that traffic on her side of the freeway was at a standstill, and there
were no cars on the other side of the freeway. She spent the next sixty minutes
inching along as all vehicles were forced to exit the freeway at the next
off-ramp. Now she was thinking about the gas tank and was so thankful
she had used failure avoidance. A full tank can be systematized. Whenever the
needle points to half full, fill the tank, not when you’re running on fumes.
When keeping the tank at least half full is a priority, emergencies are avoided.
Prioritizing keeps your goals in sight, knowing what
takes precedent over what, knowing what to do right now, what can wait, and
what gets put on the back burner. Let’s say you have five errands you need to
do today; so you make a list: grocery shop, pick up dry cleaning, mail package
at the post office, fill car with gas, pick up your daughter from soccer.
Picking up your daughter is the only time-sensitive task. The other four can be
in any order. So you analyze what will be most efficient in terms of travel
distances and revise your list, starting with the errand farthest away from
soccer. The revised list is: grocery shop, mail package, pick up dry cleaning,
fill car with gas, pick up daughter. You are pleased with yourself because you
are organized and start early enough to meet the time sensitive deadline to be
at the soccer field by 7:00. The grocery shopping goes as planned; the post
office line was not too long; you pick up the dry cleaning, and head toward the
gas station. You are making good time but then the car starts to sputter, then
stops, and you realize you are out of gas. You did a lot of things right. You
made a list, organized the list according to time and distance, acknowledged
the time-sensitive errand, but failed to realize that without enough gas, your
plan wouldn’t work. Prioritizing is part of failure avoidance. Prioritizing is what
made coaches Gelwix and Miles successful. For them, winning was never as high a
priority as building character in their players. Other coaches might consider a
trick play that has the high potential of hurting an opponent or a trick play
that is slightly illegal but most referees don’t see or even taking a bribe. If
your top priority is winning, you consider all options, including immoral and
illegal alternatives. Even when integrity is your priority, situations arise
wherein you feel torn, not knowing what is best to do.
Let’s say you are a businessman, husband, and father and
have three different places to be, each with important responsibilities all
occurring at the same time: your wife is in the hospital trying to pass a very
large kidney stone that may require surgery in the morning; your son is
performing in the school musical; and your boss expects you to work late
because an important client is coming to town tomorrow. Your value system may
be that nothing trumps work. True, the boss is the key to maintaining your
livelihood, future career, and bonuses are coming soon. Your value system may
be that nothing trumps being a good father. There are not many opportunities in
a lifetime your son performs in the high school musical. Your value system may
be to attend to your wife’s needs first, and your wife certainly needs her you
by her side. In practical terms, if you go to work, that’s all you will do. If
you go to the hospital, it will be hard to pull away. If you go to the musical,
you son might expect you to take him for ice cream afterwards. You feel
conflicted, but there’s a possibility if you put your wife first, everything
else will fall into place. So you go to see your wife at the hospital, showing
her that she is your first priority. She responds: “There’s nothing you can do
here anyway except suffer through my moaning and groaning. I’ll be fine without
you, and Spencer needs our support.” On
your way out of the hospital you call your boss. You tell him your wife is in
the hospital and your son is performing tonight but that you will be back at
work after the performance to do whatever he needs you to do. Somewhere along
in this prioritization process you will discover once you have a plan, your
stress levels return to near normal. It’s when you don’t have a plan, when you
haven’t prioritized that stresses keeps accumulating.
I remember one day as a young mother of many. The kitchen
floor looked completely covered in crumbs, tiny scraps of paper from a craft
project, and general debris from children going and coming. I remember thinking
as I began to sweep that the floor represented my life, completely out of
control and messy. As I swept the mess into a pile, I looked at how little
there actually was to sweep into the dust pan. When it was spread out over a
large area, it seemed like so much. When it was organized into a pile in the
dust pan, I saw it really wasn’t much at all. When life is spread out all over,
you can feel like you are out of control, but when you start gathering it
together in a workable way, your life will be more manageable. Now, if I had
for whatever reason not swept up the mess, by the next day it would have been
messier. If I’d let it go a week or a month, you can imagine the mess I would
have been in physically and emotionally. Whenever I’m have trouble starting or
completing a task, I show symptoms of procrastination. Procrastination is
putting off what needs to be done for an invalid reason. Failure avoidance
plans help those with a tendency or even habit of procrastinating. Learning to
prioritize also helps, and it all starts by setting goals and writing them
down. These life-skills can be learned even if old and unproductive habits are
firmly in place.
I credit my childhood dentist with teaching me how to
prioritize and not procrastinate. This was before the days of fluoride
toothpaste, so he usually found several cavities to fill. But as much as I
hated to go, Dr. Bishoff’s chair-side strategy taught me these two lessons.
“You have a little cavity here, and another one there,” he’d explain, “and
quite a big one in the back molar. So that’s where we’ll start; we’ll do the
hardest one first and get it out of the way.” Picture me, a very frightened
child sitting in a dentist’s chair. If Dr. Bishoff had said, “Let’s do the
little ones first,” my stress level and anxiety would increase incrementally
cavity by cavity. But by doing the largest one first, I knew I had survived the
worst of the ordeal and could more calmly handle the rest. In The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck,
he defines prioritizing: “a process of scheduling the pain and pleasure of life
in such a way as to enhance the pleasure by meeting and experiencing the pain
first and getting it over with” (p. 19). Greater pleasure seems like an obvious
goal, so why would anyone procrastinate if procrastinating diminishes future
pleasures.
The reason procrastination is so prevalent is that it’s
its own reward. There is an important task you need to do, but you don’t want
to do it. So you don’t. The immediacy of the reward it there, just like taking
the one marshmallow. You get an instant benefit. Procrastination reinforces
itself. When we avoid doing something we dread by doing something would rather
do, we escape the dreaded task. Given such a choice, it's no wonder why many,
if not all of us procrastinate to a greater or lesser degree. We all know
procrastination is a false sense of relief, but at the moment, a temporary fix
is good enough. Sometimes I find I procrastinate because the task isn’t clearly
defined in my brain and I don’t really know how to go about getting it done. In
reality, I can’t focus on doing a task that doesn’t have specific steps. That
was the situation Richard and I faced when we were hoping to find another place
on the Oregon or California coasts to watch whales. We were guessing, stabbing
in the dark, hoping to get lucky. And as you know, we started wandering, which
is exactly what happens without well-defined goals and incremental steps to
achieve the goal. Knowing exactly what you want to accomplish goes a long way
towards getting you there and towards diminishing the probability of entering a
longcut. Another motivator, for me, in
curbing procrastination is to add up the negative consequences that will
result. If I don’t return the library books today, how much will it cost in
overdue fines. If I don’t pay the bills before their due dates, how much will I
pay in late fees? Money is a motivator against procrastination. Another
motivator is when I calculate the time-loss I’ll experience if I don’t do the
dreaded task now. Having to eat a frog may be another motivator.
On Brian Tracy’s website you can download a frog that
will help you overcome the procrastination habit. Even if your procrastinating
is caused by fear or rebellion or is part of passive-aggressive behavior. It’s
called “Eat That Frog, 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done
in Less Time.” His Youtube video says: “Here’s a little food for thought.
There’s an old saying that says ‘If the first thing you do when you wake up
each morning is eat a live frog, nothing worse can happen for the rest of the
day!’ Now I don’t know about you but I think that’s a pretty safe assumption.
Well, Brian Tracy has said that your “frog” should be the most difficult task,
the one you’re most likely to procrastinate. If you eat that task first it’ll
give you energy and momentum for the rest of the day. But if you don’t, if you
let him sit on your plate while you do a hundred unimportant things, it can
drain your energy and you won’t even know it. William James, one of the
founders of modern psychology, said: ‘Procrastination is attitude’s natural
assassin. There’s nothing so fatiguing as an uncompleted task.’ So with that
said, here’s your assignment for the next thirty days. Take a look at your
list, circle the frog, eat the frog first and you’ll thank us for it.”
I could end here, but there is something beyond making
goals, writing them down, practicing failure avoidance, prioritizing, and
reducing procrastination. Those principles are tried and true. They’ve worked
in my life, and they’ll work in yours. Guaranteed. What I’m going to tell you is
something I’ve never see in print; something I haven’t discussed with anyone.
Maybe it’s a secret. I don’t know, but what I have found is that when I live
life by the principles already discussed, sometimes forces beyond my control
help me succeed to a greater degree than anticipated. It has happened often
enough that I think it happens to others too but may go unnoticed. After you
read the following examples, you may think I was just lucky. It can’t be luck;
luck is blind and random. This is the opposite of luck. The turn of events and
fortune that have happened seem rather to be in the realm of being rewarded for
good effort and sacrifice. I see this phenomena as evidence that agency,
opportunity beyond what you wanted or expected, is possible. Not only can you
lose agency; can gain agency.
After I graduated from high school, I talked to a friend
who was graduating from university in three years instead of four by attending
summer semester. That idea seemed overwhelmingly practical to me. Wow! I could
save a whole year of my life! However, I’d already missed the summer between
high school and beginning college, so I’d have to take more than a full load
for several semesters to get all the credits I needed for graduation. At the
end of three years, I had tried my hardest but still had one more class to
take. Then a friend called me and congratulated me on my graduation. I told her
I wasn’t graduating because I still had a Chinese history class to take. She
said, “I don’t know about that, but you are on the graduation list.” I called
the head of the department. When I explained my situation, the secretary got
mad at me and said I should have checked before, and after some more grumbling,
said she would talk to the department chair and get back to me. Within a few
minutes she called back and said, “Dr. Miller said, ‘She’s a good student; let
her through.’” You see the point. After I had done my best, outside forces
helped me reach my goal.
We bought our first home in 1974 for $38,500 at an
interest rate of 8.5%; the payments were $236.84, which seemed almost
impossible at the time. A few days after we had signed away thirty years of our
lives to a big mortgage, which is supposed to make you smile when you think of
today’s home prices and payments, I was talking to a friend about my
home-purchase anxieties. She told me she and her husband only had seven years
left to pay off their mortgage. I asked if they had a very rich uncle die. “Oh
no,” she said, “we make extra payments each month.” I quickly calculated how
impossible that was for us and said, “How can you pay extra payments?” “No,”
she said, “Not extra payments, extra principle payments,” and explained the
process. I was excited to tell my husband about the possibility and that night
we set a goal to pay our home off in ten years. I remember the first payment on
the mortgage. I added in five or six extra principle payments because each
extra principle payment was around $20.00. We did well in our goal, but with
about five more years to go to meet our goal, we still had about eight years of
payments at the accelerated schedule we’d set for ourselves. Then we got a
letter from the company that held our mortgage. (It was during the time the
savings and loans were failing.) The letter said they had noticed we were
trying to pay off our mortgage ahead of schedule, and if we could pay double
principle payments for the duration of the contract, they would help us by
cutting the interest rate in half! Of course we said thanks and were able with
the much reduced interest rate to meet our goal. Again, unexpected help came
after we had set a very worthwhile goal, put it in writing, made it a priority,
and didn’t procrastinate. Does the reward always happen, of course not, but it’s
a phenomenon worth keeping track of in your own life.
To
avoid longcuts:
1. Take wisdom and counsel from those who have walked
the road of life before you
2. Never expect to be the exception to the laws of
nature
3. Know you will harvest what you sow
4. Learn the lessons of history so you won’t repeat
the same mistakes
5. Find
the power in resisting impulse, persisting, and delaying gratification
6. Develop
personal integrity and make moral decisions
7. Know
that others see things you don’t and welcome their perspectives
8. Work,
work, work
9. Make
goals, write them down, use failure avoidance, prioritize, avoid
procrastination.
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