A few years back, I found a podcast. It was a well-done show, and the guy doing most of the speaking goes by the name of James. I found what he was talking about very interesting.
I began taking notes.
I took so many notes I filled seven pages in my legal-sized notebook — front to back.
That was for the first 15 minutes.
I heard lots of things that probably should have changed my life. I made plans, plotted out dates to accomplish those plans, and made a decision, right then and there, to “choose myself.”
All told, I probably spent an hour and a half going through this stuff.
It was bliss, and I was ready to change the world, and, probably, more importantly, my life.
Then an alarm went off on my phone. The timer I’d set had just run out. It was time to hit the sack and get a good night’s sleep.
I couldn’t have timed the completion of my little excursion into the recesses of my mind any better.
There was just one problem.
That timer wasn’t supposed to tell me when to go to sleep. Nope, it was supposed to tell me when my practice test was supposed to end.
I was studying for the bar exam, and the biggest exam of my life was the very next week.
Somehow, I’d managed to get distracted again.
I’ve heard lots of stories about people who seem to have a natural ability to do something. I’ve seen natural piano players, athletes, readers, bakers, and eaters.
Apparently, I’m a natural at getting distracted.
I don’t even have to practice. Usually, it happens like this.
I start doing something important since I put it off until the last moment. I get into it, and really dig in. Something about having imminent deadlines really galvanizes my mind, body, and spirit.
But, inevitably, I start getting that itch, usually behind my left ear.
It always happens right about the time the thing I’d been dreading doing, and the reason I put off taking care of my “deadline-pending-the-next-day” task in the first place, is staring at me in the face.
Suddenly, the thing I know I should be doing becomes much less fun. That galvanized feeling usually dissipates, and I start looking around for other things that catch my fancy.
It’s quite the cycle, and without fail, it happens every. single. time.
It comes off super sinister, like the big bad wolf and red riding hood. Like something inside of me doesn’t want me to hit my deadlines, to succeed, to do anything good with my life.
Check that … It almost seems like this cycle doesn’t want me to do anything. period.
Eventually, when I finally took time to notice this was a pattern of mine, I started asking questions.
“What gives?” is usually the one I started with.
I dug in, trying to figure out what exactly gives, and the answer hit me in the face.
It hurt.
This consistent distraction circle actually has a source and a meaning. The source is my inner Jiminy Cricket. Only, it feels much less like a conscience, and much more like somebody much bigger and stronger than me, like Bill Gates, is pulling me away from the stuff I needed to do.
The meaning goes much deeper.
It turns out that this need to “distract” myself, has a much less sinister purpose than what I’d initially thought.
I’ll illustrate with a story (mostly fictional):
A while back, I was having dinner with my great-aunt Bettie. We were in the middle of Montana, in the middle of summer.
It was hot.
We were having a grand old time eating brisket in an old log cabin, in 110-degree weather, without air conditioning.
Did I mention it was hot?
Well, she gets up and walks to the kitchen to get the lemonade out of the fridge, when all of the sudden she falls over.
Granted the woman was old and rickety, and she was prone to falling over occasionally, I still feared the worst. At that point in my life, I’d never seen an actual dead person.
Being the gentleman I was, I cautiously approached the old woman. Cautiously, I called her by name.
That did it. She immediately got up and started rubbing both her knees. “Darn this arthritis!” she shouted, to go along with a couple of old-fashioned country cuss words.
The next day, we were hit with one of the biggest rainstorms in the history of Montana.
It took me a few years to figure out the significance of this event — even though it was mostly fictional. Apparently, the storm and my great-aunt’s arthritis were connected.
There happens to be a direct connection between flares up in arthritic joint pain and temperature drops of more than 10 degrees, drops in barometric pressure, and even rain.
My great-aunt’s knees were the harbinger of that massive storm that may or may not have happened.
I guess that’s why my great-aunt, as soon as she recovered (which was just took a few minutes) went outside and “battened all the hatches” on the farm and the house.
Looking back at this experience, it makes complete sense. Auntie had learned that her pain actually told her that the weather was going to change.
Distractions work in much the same way.
They are, in effect, the harbingers of greatness. You just need to recognize them for what they are.
Looking back at those times I’ve suffered from acute episodes of distractedness, I tried to find a pattern, some kind of similarity between the events.
It turns out, all I had to do was take a step back and squint my eyes a bit. Then, oddly enough, things started falling into place.
The first thing I noticed was that the distraction itself wasn’t all that important. Really, the substance of the distractions didn’t matter one bit. To the contrary, the more I looked at those distractions, the more difficult analyzing them became.
I had to look beyond those distractions, and really look at what I was doing when that distraction reared its ugly head.
This is where the magic started happening.
Every single time I was getting distracted, it was because I was on the brink of breaking through on something.
Going back to my bar exam struggles, I was right in the middle of trying to figure out secured transactions law. If you don’t know what secured transactions are, that fine, even attorneys that practice secured transactions law have difficult.
Imagine trying to shove your head into a hole the size of your fist. Now, imagine you actually did manage to get your head through the hole without traumatic brain injury. Here comes the hard part: you need to now get your head out of the hole.
That’s essentially how I felt when I was trying to learn secured transactions. It was brutal. I kept banging my head, trying to figure it out. Eventually, I got distracted. Little did I know, that the next time I sat down and actually tried to learn secured transactions, it clicked.
Time and time again I’ve noticed that those times when doing something else, instead of doing that thing you’re dreading, signals you’re about to break through.
But, in many cases, it’s not only signaling a breakthrough but something even better. I’m talking about serious personal growth here.
Distractions are necessary. We need to have them. Sometimes they help us decompress. Sometimes they get our mind of really painful stuff.
But deep down, we were given these distractions for the same reason my great-aunt was given arthritis.
We need them to succeed.