Follow-Through frustrates Frustration

Frustration is the queen of inhibitive emotions. It’s my personal launch pad into a maelstrom of negativity and destructive self-talk. But the worst form of frustration doesn’t creep up where you might think. For me, it appears during a profound and beautiful experience: ideation.

Every time I start writing a particular blog post, I get ideas for other topics that I could write about. Because I don’t want to forget them, I use Taylor Swift’s rule for creative epiphanies: write them down immediately. This technique is one of the best I’ve ever tried for recording ideas (don’t lie to yourself that you will remember them later—you won’t). But here’s the problem: after I’ve written down the idea, I don’t go back to my original blog post that I was writing. Instead, I start writing a new blog post on the idea that I had. This transforms my blog database into an art exhibition of unfinished projects.

Because I tend to start new things on a whim, I don’t finish many of them. In other words, I have a lot of creative ideas but lack follow-through. If you don’t act on the well of ideas that flow out of you, they will become a swamp. And swamps stink. You’ll soon trudge through murky water filled with unfinished thoughts and projects. This builds frustration. Not with an idea, a tool, or another person—but with yourself.

Frustration leads to anger. Anger leads to sadness. Sadness leads to self-pity. Congratulations: you’ve dug yourself a hole—and you’re at the bottom of it.

Since we humans only share about 60% of our DNA with potatoes, we’re not happy staying in the dirt. So it’s time to crawl back out of the hole—and keep ourselves from digging it again.

By studying the pattern above, I realized that my true problem isn’t having too many ideas. It’s my indecision that keeps me from progressing further with any of them.

Here are the things that helped me overcome this challenge:

1. Control your attention: The most important resource of our time isn’t oil, gold, or data—it’s attention. Where your attention is, your focus goes. Train your attention so that you can control your focus. I’ve written about it before, but meditation is the king and queen here. I should write a blog post about meditation and go into how—no wait!
2. Merge: A lot of times, there are overlaps in your ideas. Try to figure out what they are. If you can, merge as much as possible. This will clean up your idea database.
3. Set a metric that defines “done”: You can work yourself to death on a project if you don’t define when it’s finished. It helped me to define a threshold for when I can consider the idea or project to be “done.” For example, I aim to write at least 500 words per blog post.
4. Deadlines: Deadlines are one of the archangels that saved my productivity. I know that I have to upload a new blog post every Tuesday night. This creates urgency in my mind to get it done. Even if nobody relies on you meeting the deadline, don’t think that it won’t have consequences for anybody. It will bother you, trust me.
5. Seeing the purpose: If you don’t see the purpose in what you’re doing, you will have a hard time sticking to it. If you want to do something for years to come, then you have to see an innate purpose in it.
6. Celebrate: Don’t forget to celebrate if you finish something. It will reinforce the positive behavior you’re building. There are many people who mock this tip. Look at it this way: the people who mock celebration aren’t found in happy people’s lives. Be thankful that they showed you who they are. Spend less time with them. Have a better life. Celebrate.

The goal is to create the habit of finishing projects. To think thoughts through. To act on the ideas you have. This will give you follow-through. And follow-through frustrates frustration.