Just Do It

Today I am going to write a really lousy story. I don’t care if it will be totally illegible, not make any sense, terrible grammar, or be totally illogical to anybody who reads it. In short, I’m Just Going to Do IT.

My Martial Arts, Healing, and Meditation Teacher, Michael Andron had this little “game” he loved to play with us called “Spark Search”. The goal was to take something totally mundane and sometimes even inane and find  the Holy sparks within it. For example,he used “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”(remember the 80’s), and we needed to find something holy and elevated within the words.”Teenage” on the one hand is a time of rebellion, confusion, but on the other hand it’s also a time of growth, questioning and searching for ones truth. When we find the holiness and the divine within the everyday mundane day to day existence, our lives then become transformed.

The ultimate materialism of the 80’s was the Nike anthem of Just Do it. What a great slogan that brought billions of dollars to Nike and a whole sneaker culture to the entire world. However, if we look deeper and find the divine sparks within it , the concept of Just Do It is perhaps the greatest motivator of intellectual and spiritual progress. How often are we inspired by an idea, a tune, a story, and want to bring it out to fruition? And how many times do we hesitate, delay, procrastinate because we either fear failure, criticism, and especially because we want so hard to make the result perfect, full of profundity depth and quality. We simply Don’t Do it.

One of the most influential books that so eloquently explains the pitfalls of this thinking is Failing Forward by John Maxwell. In short, he explains that all truly successful people are chronic “failures”. That is to say they tried and “failed “repeatedly, but each “failure ” they looked at was an opportunity for growth and learning. For example, in an art class , the teacher divided the students into two groups: one group he told them to work according to quantity, that is , they were to sculpt statues one after the other without putting thought into the outcome or the quality. The other group was instructed to pay careful attention and thought to the details and quality of each statue they sculpted. Ironically, the results were that the group that focused on the quantity produced much better work.

So there you have it, I Just Did It in under 30 minutes. So to all of those of you out there I wish you many successful failures. In short, Just Do It!!