If you’ve ever seen a few MacGyver episodes (and who hasn’t?), you almost certainly witnessed some bomb almost explode. Disarming a bomb with only 1 second left is one of MacGyver’s specialty (along with creating all sorts of devices with chewing gum and duct tape). Though defusing a difficult situation only moments before it’s too late is a great ploy to create tension and emotion in the viewer, it also happens quite often in daily life.
Deadlines
You have deadlines, taxes to pay, DVDs to return, meeting presentations to prepare, etc. What all these situations have in common is that they cause significant pain (financial, emotional, etc) if you don’t take care of them in time. You may push them back for a while, but the closer you are to the deadline, the more your brain is obsessed with it. At some point, you will drop everything else and take care of the hot potato. In order to deal with it, you might do it yourself, ask your friends for help or even hire a freelancer.
Whatever it takes.
What happens is that the mind doesn’t want to be bothered with it, so it tries to avoid it as much as possible, until it gets real, and realizes there’s no way to escape it.
What happens when you have to do it? You bring up the big guns. And you make it.
Being a hero
Being a hero is about having the courage to do what’s right, what has to be done, when most people wouldn’t.
But when you do what is necessary to make that deadline, you are a hero, you save the day.
I might means you called in all your favors, you dropped or put on hold what wasn’t really important, but you fought, and you won.
But who decided you had to wait until the last moment to do what heroes do?
Everyday hero
You know that when the pressure is right, when you’re close to the end, you find a way to do it.
So how come you always wait until the last moment to invoke these resources?
You don’t need the gloom of the eleventh hour to call your friends and ask for help, or to set aside time and energy to deal with your obligations. Use the resources you have.
Imagine it is the eleventh hour, give yourself an earlier deadline, and be a hero. Not only it will remove some stress from your life, it will also train you to use the best resources for the job, while keeping your mind on your passions.
Let’s say that you spend a week every month dreading some project you have to get done. If you can gather the resources and get it done before the stress comes up, you instantly gain 12 weeks a year that your mind can spend on a subject that you love instead of one that you dread.
I’m not saying it’ll clear your all schedule, but it might clear up a lot of the background processing of your brain, allowing it to be free to enjoy and be passionate instead of being tense and unhappy.
It’s simple to be better than MacGyver, gather all your knowledge and resources and deal with the bomb as soon as you have the tools to defuse it at your disposal, instead of waiting until your mind can’t simply hide it anymore.
Tell us in the comments how you are better than MacGyver.
A friend at work tends to call me Bon-gyver because I create stuff out of duct tape and bailing wire (or rubber bands and paperclips while at work).
Another friend of mine always says, “If you wait until the last minute, it will only take a minute.”
I’m all about scheduling, getting stuff done early. Although I don’t always do it.
Thanks for the reminder!
“If you wait until the last minute, it will only take a minute.”
I love that!
Most times though, you can do it in a minute way before the last one 😉
Not for those of us who over analyze everything. Give me a month, I’ll take a month. Give me a minute, I’ll get it done in a minute.
That was kind of the point of the article : if it can be done in a minute, do it in a minute, even if you have a month left :).