Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done pdfdrive com

Data Moves Us Beyond Discouragement
Jason Bartlett wants to lose forty pounds. A sedentary job as a pharmacist made
it easy to pack on some sneaky pounds. He knew he was carrying around more
weight than he wanted to, but Thanksgiving is what really pushed him over the
edge. Well, not Thanksgiving exactly, but his wife’s grandmother. As he entered
her room at the nursing home, Grandma Betsy looked up from her book and
announced simply, “Well, Jason got fat.” Old people and little kids tell the truth.
We only act polite in between.
Although forty pounds seems like a lot—Jason was after all trying to lose a
kindergartner—it wasn’t impossible because he had done it before. Like most
dieters, this was not his first attempt.
Unfortunately, at forty-four, he was finding those extra pounds persistent.
They were refusing to leave despite eight weeks of hard work. He hired a
personal trainer. He was running more. He was being careful about what he ate,
and every morning the scale refused to budge an inch.
This is the moment when most people bother to first review the progress.
When the goal is taking too long, when the desired outcome is playing hide-and-

---

When the goal is taking too long, when the desired outcome is playing hide-and-
seek, we peek up from our work in dismay.
The diet is not working. The promotion is not coming. The book is not
spilling out on the pages at the clip you’d prefer.
Perfectionism will point that out and suggest that now might be a good time
to give up. This was a stupid goal anyway. Why did I want to finish that in the
first place? I’m not making perfect progress, so I must not be doing anything.
We give up because we do not review the progress the right way.
When things aren’t going well, it’s not time to give up. It’s time to get your
bearings and make adjustments. “Adjustments?!” perfectionism screams. “If you
need to adjust, you might as well give up!” Don’t listen. It’s time to look at your
GPS watch and see how your pace is. It’s time to read the course markers and
make sure you’re still headed to the finish line. It’s time to adjust the next few
miles based on what you learned about your pace from the first few miles.
If I were on the side of the course, watching all the runners, I might yell out
to you, “How’s the race going?”
If you answered, “No idea! I don’t know how fast I’m going, how many
miles I have left, or even which way to go. I’m just going to run faster to fix that
problem, though,” I would think you are dumb.
If you don’t review the progress, you can’t make adjustments. You can’t
learn from mistakes. You can’t get better, and ultimately, you can’t finish.
Perfectionism doesn’t want you to look at the progress. It might tell you that
you don’t need to. Smarter people don’t need maps or measurements or data. Or
it might tell you that you’ll be afraid of what you’ll find. For a solid year, I
didn’t look at my book sales data because I was scared of what I would learn. At
the most extreme edge of this problem are people who refuse to go to the doctor
because they’re afraid to find out they might be seriously sick.
For a thousand reasons, this doesn’t make any sense.
We laugh at hamsters stuck on their metal play wheels. They give everything
their little hamster bodies have but don’t go anywhere. That doesn’t matter,
though, because they have little hamster brains. The hamster isn’t trying to finish
anything. If anything he’s just trying to execute that elusive move where you get
the wheel going so fast that you can do a full 360 around the circle. I bet the girl
hamsters love that.
You are smarter than a hamster. There’s a positive affirmation for you. Slap
that on a mug.
You might not be on a wheel, but if you ignore where you’re headed, you
probably will get discouraged and not finish.

---

probably will get discouraged and not finish.