You spend your life doing things. Some of the things you do make themselves happen, and some don’t.

Sweeping the floor, even if you don’t love doing it, will eventually make itself happen, because you’ll get annoyed by walking through filth every day.

Same with things like getting groceries, sleeping, taking out the garbage, and getting dressed. Whether or not you’re excited to do these things, not doing them quickly becomes intolerable, so they get done.

Certain activities also make themselves happen out of habit more than necessity, such as flipping on the TV, slipping out your phone, or checking email. The mind and body are primed to do these things without conscious effort.

We can call all of these self-triggering actions default activities. You’ll do them unless you try not to, because they’re the actions the current conditions of your life drive you to do. You’re not going to let the years slip by without ever getting around to buying groceries or tying your shoes.

Not everything you do is self-triggering like this. If you’ve ever done something like write a screenplay, build an online following, learn woodworking, or plant a vegetable garden, you know that these things didn’t just happen out of momentum or habit. You had to make them happen. You had to deviate from the flow of default activities, and deliberately establish the new activity in your life. You had to declare, at least internally, “Ok, I’m doing this now!” I’m signing up for singing lessons today! I’m starting my YouTube channel this weekend, and that’s that!

We can call these sorts of things elective activities. These are things you want to do, but they’re not bound to happen like default activities.

Of course, there’s only so much time available – only so many hours in your days, and years in your life. So there’s a sort of competition between the two types of doing.

These two types of activities have different characteristics. If you compare your default activities to the elective activities you’ve done or want to do, you might notice that:

Default activities

• tend to maintain things on the current trajectory
• are usually driven by habit, instinct, or obligation
• assert themselves into your life (i.e. they basically make themselves happen)

Elective activities

• tend to expand your options, enabling new trajectories
• are usually driven by a desire to do the things themselves
• don’t assert themselves into your life (i.e. you have to make them happen)

Default activities can be vital and fulfilling too, but mostly they just keep the ship on its current course, for better or worse.

Elective activities are often the things that make life really glow, because they’re selected based on your personal sensibilities. That’s why everyone does similar default activities, but choose very different elective activities.

Default activities will take it all if they can

“The trouble is, you think you have time.“

-Jack Kornfield

In this competition for your time and attention, default activities have a huge advantage, which is that elective activities are far easier to ignore and defer till later. It’s not because elective activities are less important or meaningful – in fact they’re often the most fulfilling parts of people’s lives. It’s because not doing them never quite becomes intolerable, unlike with many default activities. Your unplanted vegetable garden doesn’t haunt you quite like the IRS does over your unpaid taxes. Of course, you’ll get to it later though – after all, it’s important to you!

But a thing being important to you doesn’t make it happen. Let’s say learning another language, or making short films, is a major dream of yours. You have a real affinity for this thing. You’ve been reading about it, dancing around the edges of it, and you admire others who really do it. You haven’t quite gone for it yet, but it feels like it’s in your future. More urgent concerns dominate your schedule though, and so far life has unfolded without this important thing happening.

It’s easy to believe you’ll get to it later, once you get a handle on the default activities. It doesn’t work like that though, because default activities are inexhaustible. To use an analogy from high school chemistry class, default activities behave like a gas: they expand to take the shape of the container they’re in.

Of course, the “container” they expand into is the days and years that make up your life. Life does require a lot of default activity, but much of it is simply the overflow of momentum. If you don’t stake out and defend space for the truly important elective stuff, default stuff will fill your container completely.

This is the life-satisfaction version of the old business adage, “pay yourself first.” If you try to get to everything else before doing the elective activities, there’s nothing left.

Put some stakes in the ground

So if something isn’t going to make itself happen, how do you make it happen?

The way I see it, you need to do three things to make an activity go from wishful idea to actually happening in real life:

1. Get clear on what exactly the thing is. Write it down in doable form. Not “learn guitar” but “Be able to play these five Beatles songs with no mistakes.” Without at least this level of clarity there’s no way to really start, because it’s too abstract to act on.
2. Get clear on when you’ll start, and when you’ll be done. No start date means it doesn’t start. No end date means you’ll put it on hold indefinitely as soon as you get to a tricky part. It has to be startable and finishable to be doable.
3. Always know the next thing to do. As soon as you don’t know the next thing to do, you’ll begin to bide your time, and then it’s no longer happening.

If you have all three, you can get from here to the start, and from the start to the end. You have a rope to follow the whole way.

After stalling in the same spots so many times, I’ve developed a system for ensuring you always have all three kinds of clarity, at least for medium-sized goals that take a few weeks or months.

So far I’ve held two cohorts of people using this system, where each participant decides to make a specific thing happen in their lives: finish their novel, get their website online, get the basement sorted out, apply for grad school, record a demo album, and other activities that aren’t going to make themselves happen.

We start by putting some stakes in the ground: get clear on what your goal is (or quest, as we like to call it) and choose your start date. Then you make a sort of “living plan” — focusing on the first, most obvious steps to get you actually doing it, and updating the plan regularly as you learn what’s necessary. If the next step is ever unclear, there’s a checklist for getting you right back to a state of clarity in a few minutes.

This is the One Big Win program, which you may already be aware of. I’m opening it for a third cohort soon.

The groups are always limited in size because I interact with participants personally and follow everyone’s projects. If you want to know more about OBW, get on the email list now. You’ll be notified as soon as it opens, and get access to the first lessons for free so you can decide if you want to do it.

There is one simple thing wrong with you – you think you have plenty of time. If you don’t think your life is going to last forever, what are you waiting for? Why the hesitation to change?

-Don Juan, Journey to Ixtlan

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Photos from Freepik and Unsplash. Illustrations by David Cain.