So it’s another Thursday, and I am rushed as usual. There are reports for wor I need to generate. I need to unpack still, there is no food in the house and I have to find the time to write a blog post! When life gets hectic so do we. We try to cram as much into our day as we can and for many, this means we are distracted and working as quickly as possible to knock stuff off our to-do lists. I don’t know about you but I find this pace exhausting. Studies show that humans are generally pretty bad at multitasking. Our work becomes prone to error. We take short cuts. We move on to other tasks before others are complete. As my friend likes to say “If you don’t have time to do it right the first. You won’t have time to do it again.”
When we become crunched for time Our dreams tend to become a prime target to skimp on. After all our unfinished dreams are taking valuable time out of our days. We can just slap a story together or paint something trivial and be done; quick, easy, and painless. Our dreams, our craft, cannot operate in this fashion. They demand quality over quantity. Doing things quickly may seem ideal, trust me as an author I feel your pain, but shortcuts are not the answer. Putting half your heart and passion into your goal will not see it done any quicker. It may seem counter-intuitive but the fastest way to build our dreams is to take them slow and pay attention to the details. If we build our dreams with a bunch of shortcuts and half measures, we may find that they cost us more time to fix than if we had just done the task correctly the first time.
We use a lot of analogies around here and the idea that our dreams are like a building or a structure will not be something new to long time readers. Let imagine that you had the opportunity to design your dream home; all the amenities, all the space, all the gadgets, and gizmos you ever wanted. Would you want the contractors to build the home the way you designed it, or as fast as possible? Surely you wouldn’t mind if the contractors missed a few things right? Like hanging your new TV on a wall crooked. Or maybe they forgot to build a structural wall so the ceiling wouldn’t cave in. Maybe they didn’t do the plumbing right, and the basement floods every time you take a shower. I would not be very happy with my new dream home, or the people who built it.
Our dreams are built brick by brick from our hard work and skill. Each layer of the dream is built on top of the layer below it. As we build we must be careful that we do not botch things up for the next row of bricks. A building is only as good as it foundation. This is why we need to pay attention to the details of the dream or we may find ourselves having to tear out whole sections of the wall to fix a simple mistake that was done in haste. I see this practically every time I write. First drafts are fun and exciting because they are constantly new. However if I place my characters or setting in a place that can no longer drive the plot forward, well I have to go back and rework things. Whole chapters risk going into the fire when I do this, but it must be done. The story must go forward.
It is the same for any piece of creative work and for every dream. The foundation we lay today is the foundation we work from tomorrow. If we want our dreams to grow we have to take a breath from the rush of daily life and slip into a different state, even if it’s only for a moment. We need to focus on the task and hand and complete it to the best of our abilities. We need to slow down and take care of the small things before they become big things.