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Dear Readers,

I had a small job to finish the other evening. Twenty minutes, maybe thirty. Instead, I opened it, worked for a few minutes, wandered away, came back, checked something unrelated, and repeated the whole performance.

Nearly two hours later, the job was still there. I finally wondered why I was treating something so small like it weighed fifty pounds.

My instinct was to push harder. Sit down. Concentrate. Finish it. But every attempt seemed to create more resistance, as though I were pressing the accelerator while something else had the brake on.

We tend to interpret friction as an instruction to apply more force. That's useful when you're moving furniture. I'm less convinced it's useful when the resistance is coming from inside your own head.

You can keep pushing when that happens. Most of us do. But if increasing the effort keeps increasing the resistance, that's usually my cue to stop treating force as the only available tool.

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If that idea catches you, look at how the approach works before deciding whether it belongs in your day. It asks for something different from simply trying harder again.

The job eventually got finished.

But the useful part wasn't crossing it off. It was noticing how much energy I'd spent fighting myself before doing twenty minutes of work.

— Alex R

P.S. If pushing harder keeps creating more resistance, see the alternative approach behind Genius Brain Signal here.

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