Greg Proffit Writing

Tag: habits

  • Do You Negotiate Against Yourself?—How Often Do You Win?

    Do You Negotiate Against Yourself?—How Often Do You Win?

    Do you negotiate against yourself
    Photo by Štefan Štefančík on Unsplash

    Do you negotiate against yourself a lot? A part of you knows there are things you should or shouldn’t do, but another part bargains against those choices. This may be true for everyone.

    The negotiating you do with yourself determines your results.

    120 days ago my forward-thinking CEO self-negotiated a deal with my lazy, afraid, excuse-making employee self. My CEO got the employee to agree to a 30 in 30 challenge. For those who don’t know what that is, it’s a simple idea in which you write and publish 30 micro-blog posts in 30 days.

    CEO me got unreliable employee me to agree. To be fair, writing as a calling and vocation have been so important to both my CEO and employee selves that the fear of failure made it easier to shelve it, never do it at all, than try it—fail—and suffer irredeemable humiliation. 

    But there was a thick layer of dust on the plan to One Day Maybe become a writer… I’m talking years thick. Covid fallout impacted my usual source of income, freeing time for my CEO self to jolt the procrastinating employee into action. 

    “There’s time, now. That excuse is dead!”

    I found my login credentials for my long dormant blog, started spitting out some drivel that at least got my fingers limbered up and got the ball rolling.

    But it was sporadic. I didn’t get discovered after 3 days of blogging brilliance, and the employee self, doggedly pessimistic in the face of my CEO self’s aggressive optimism, was nearly ready to shut it down again.

    Along came the 30 in 30 challenge

    “Come on, dude. 30 250 word micro stories? Even you can do that. Tell ya what, when you’re finished each day, you can even have a bourbon and pretend you’re Hemingway.”

    “Sold!” agreed my novice-writer self. “You supply the bourbon and I’ll do 30 days.”

    Major negotiation completed, the challenge began that day. There was no more negotiating “IF” I was writing, only when, and about what.

    That was 120 days ago. I haven’t missed a day. Once I’d knocked down the original 30 days, it set the habit. I’m hooked, and I’m a writer now. My CEO self and employee self are nearly always on the same page… terrible pun intended. The employee writer still needs a haircut, but the CEO lets him write in Grateful Dead t-shirts so everything’s chill.

    So, friends with any kind of big negotiations you’ve struggled with for too long—cut a deal! Decide to do it. Take the “IF” part of the bargaining off the table. Get rolling and don’t look back! Oh yeah,… don’t forget the haircut. 

    Subscribe to follow me to see all my posts on Medium. You can also find my writing at gregproffit.com. Check out my 99 Life Tips—A List.

  • Covid And Normalcy

    Habitual Shouldn’t Mean Normal
    A year in and some of the old normal won’t be resurrected.

    Beth and I turned on the ACC basketball tournament last night and remembered that it was a year ago that the tournament was shut down due to the the first outbreak of positive Covid cases. Within a few days, the NCAA tournament was cancelled. And it wasn’t long before all sports took a hiatus.

    I remember seeing the first masks in the neighborhood grocery store. They brought to mind photos I’d seen of heavily populated Chinese cities where the citizens mask up due to smog and air pollution. But seeing people wearing blue masks here in my little town in America felt surreal.

    We made a decision early on that we would do our best to act as if we were already carriers. I talked to my two adult kids and the teenager living with me that we needed to curtail all contact with non-family, non-household people unless we were working and wearing masks.

    That was hard on my teen-aged son who was very used to having friends over and hanging out with them. But it was more real when he was sent home for his last year of high school to finish his senior year on a Chromebook from his bedroom.

    I think younger people in general have had a harder time with a more restrictive lifestyle. As I’ve previously written, younger people are more exploratory than exploitative in life. They haven’t had enough time to craft a life that they are sure they’ll like and that will bring them the riches of contentment.

    The sports thing actually became a welcome change of pace. I soon found I didn’t miss it at all. We filled that time with other things that were much more shared and therefore more enjoyable. Virtual, nightly attendance to some game or other had felt normal. But just because something is habitual and autonomic doesn’t mean it should be normal.

    Maybe too much of life is lived that way, without putting a lot thought into it. But the new reality of Covid created the context to actually think about the mundane and ordinary. So many things that once were normal no longer feel normal. Even watching movies is odd. The characters have no masks on and we shrug and say, ”Pre-Covid”.

    So, for me at least there are some positive take-aways from being forced to re-think how life is done. It’s not a bad idea to have that conversation with yourself and those you do life with every so often. If nothing else, Covid has helped reinforce the belief that my favorite things in the world, and the things and people that make life worth living, are pretty close by after all.

  • Habits

    You are what you…
    Early mornings & freshly ground coffee…it’s all downhill from there.

    It has been said that you are what you do…habitually.

    If that’s true, what are you?

    I’m an early-rising, coffee-drinking, Beth-loving, blog-writing, compulsive-reading, tele-marketing, tv-watching, over-eating, guitar-playing, Gabriel Allon and Carolina Hurricanes fan.

    Some of those habits I’m pretty proud of. Others, not so much. A year ago even, my list was different. I was a different person then. Hopefully you were too. I have developed some habits I didn’t have then. I’ve replaced some. I had a couple other serious habits on that list. One needed to go, one needs to come back.

    A year ago, I was 3rd on the American server for the online game Forge of Empires. Yeah, that was me…ugh! 

    I was also a habitual walker. Like…habitual, as in almost 5 miles a day.

    The walking is coming back. The gaming is staying in the coffin.

    I wrote a post a few weeks back about exploration vs. exploitation. It occurs to me that good habits, while certainly in the exploitation column, also offer some of the aspects of exploration. And let me qualify my use of the adjective ”good” above. By good habits, I don’t mean ”healthy”, I mean ”fun” or ”pleasurable”.

    Most of my habits have those qualities. Only one is done out of sheer necessity…unless you also count coffee-drinking, which I probably should. 

    Make your own list. Check it twice. Which habits are naughty. Which are nice? Which add to your life and make it worth living? Which are detriments, and make you not the person you want to be.

    The wonderful thing about habits is they’re like that old Steve Martin joke about keeping a litter bag in your car. They don’t take up a lot of room, and if it gets too full, you can always chuck it out the window.