How can you make the difficult easy? How can you make your big tasks smaller and underwhelming?
Lao Tzu, the Chinese sage and author of the Tao The Ching answers the questions above by saying, “Difficult things of the world can only be tackled when they are easy. Big things of the world can only be achieved by attending to their small beginnings.”
So it is wise to make every task seem effortless, avoid unnecessary struggle, and then achieve your objective easily. Treat everything as potentially difficult, but accomplish it in the easier stages.
Let’s look at examples. Say you have a five page paper due in two weeks. If you start working on the paper early and do a little each day it will be completed ahead of time without stress and strain. On the other hand, if you wait until the night before the paper is due you will make the task difficult and most likely will be feeling a lot of stress.
When I first started thinking about writing my book, Achieve College Success…Learn How in 20 Hours or Less, I faced the resistance of my inner critic. The negative voice inside my head said, “This will take too much time. It will be difficult. I won’t have time to enjoy my summer off from teaching.” I countered this negative resistance by replying, “I will take one small step at a time and it will get done without strain. Then I asked myself, “What is one small step that I can use to get started?” I answered this question by deciding to brainstorm a two page Table of Contents which included the topics I wanted to cover in the book. Next I wrote a two page introduction and so on. You could write a 182 page book in one year by writing a half page a day. This is what Lao Tzu means when he says, “Sow the great in the small.”
So if you tackle your challenging tasks, goals, and activities before they become problematic, you will meet with few difficulties and can achieve more with less effort. Try this with one of your goals and let me know how it goes.
Copyright 2009. Raymond Gerson
Best regards,
Raymond Gerson
