When You Want To Do Something

Last night I bought my son a desk as a graduation present.  Having had his eye on this desk for a couple of months, he was geeked about bringing it home at last. He couldn’t wait to tear it open and put it together.

The long time ‘Lego Maniac’ had no trouble reading instructions and whipping the pieces together – something that would have had me pulling my hair out for sure. It was hard work.  It required particular attention to detail.  He’d never done anything quite like before but he tackled it like a pro.  It was hot and stuffy in his room and he didn’t even seem to mind.

Fast forward to today.  The cardboard box, packing materials, tools and a whole bunch of other stuff lay all over my living room floor.  I ask him to take care of things and finish putting his room back together and he tells me ‘It’s so hot and muggy – I’ll do it later.”

Yeah, that went over about as well with me as you think it did.

I pointed out that it was no hotter this morning than it was last night when he built an entire desk unit without complaint.    His response?  “Oh no, it’s much hotter today than yesterday.”

No.  Really.  It wasn’t.

The only real difference is that he wanted to build the desk and he didn’t want to do the clean up.

When you want to do something, you ignore little aggravations and potential obstacles.

When you don’t want to do something, those things get amplified in our minds and turn into excuses.

Of course, being the good mom I try to be – I used the situation as a teaching moment and shared that successful people do things that need to be done even when they don’t want to do them.  That’s what makes them successful.

He wasn’t terribly motivated by that little nugget of truth to be honest

But maybe you will be?

Do you notice that you’re willing to tackle something hard for fun but procrastinate about difficult situations that you think of as ‘work’?    Most of us do.  It’s only  natural.  We want to do what we want to do, right?

Still, we’ll have to do a few things we don’t really enjoy on the way to doing what we love.   We can either focus on all the things we don’t like about a project or situation or we can focus on the end results and press through with a positive attitude.

We don’t want to be one of those people who make more excuses than progress.