I will start with a story Jane Friedman wrote on her blog, which she, in turn, read in Terrell Johnson’s newsletter, The Half Marathoner.
The story is about Roger Bannister running a mile in under four minutes in 1954. Up until then, it was believed that humans couldn’t run a mile in four minutes. All kinds of scientific reasons were given to prove that the human body is not equipped to run that fast. As soon as Bannister broke the four-minute mile barrier, many other runners broke it too. Bannister’s story is used widely to illustrate that it is the mental barrier that keeps us from achieving what we want to achieve.
But there is another lesser-known but equally important lesson from Bannister’s story.
Did you know that Bannister was not a professional athlete but an amateur runner?
He was a medical student who competed in races around his busy schedule. He didn’t have much time to train. He once put it, “I trained for less than three-quarters of an hour, maybe five days a week. I didn’t have time to do more.”
Read this again, he practiced only for 45 minutes, maybe five days a week, in between his medical studies, and within two years, he ran faster than all the professional athletes in the world.
He didn’t dedicate his entire life to that purpose, but he found time to become a person capable of running at that speed around everything else he had going on in his life at the time.
You don’t have to drop everything else in your life to do whatever you want to do or be. You need to carve some time out of each day to honor that priority.
In some ways, running and writing are very similar. Both test your resolve to the extreme. The trick is to throw yourself against the barriers you have erected yourself and then ask what would you do about them.
It is quite likely that writing like running is just an end in itself. You don’t have to compete or train to beat a record. Ron Hogan’s book Our Endless and Proper Work touches on the same theme - developing an ongoing writing practice is an end in itself, not a means to publication.
But if you intend to become the person who can run a mile in under four minutes, you need to train with that intention in mind. Bannister’s strategy was to break the mile into four parts and run each quarter in one minute. As soon as he would do one quarter in a minute, he knew he could do the next one and then the next one.
I suppose the point is to become a person capable of achieving the goal. You don’t need to cut off from everything else to become that person. Nor you have to make yourself miserable while going through the preparation. A little bit of focused effort can bring amazing results.
What's true of both the preparatory phase and everyday life is that you should only be striving for one thing at any given moment.
The problem is that in everyday life, we stress ourselves out – spurred on by several forces (economic, influencer, greed) – try to do more than one thing; wondering if whatever we're doing is the right thing, and driving ourselves ever harder because we've got one eye on all the other things we feel we need to fit in by Friday afternoon.
The real test of our commitment to a purpose is to focus on it single-mindedly until it is done.
Only then are we able to see what we are capable of producing.
This week I finished the three-part series on writing stories from everyday life and a two-part article on crowdfunding. Here are the free links to this week’s articles.
Crowdfunding for Writers Part 2
I Am Learning About Crowdfunding Part 1
I Am Half Way Through My 100 Articles In 100 Days Challenge
How To Write Stories From Everyday Life Part 3
How To Write Stories From Everyday Life Part 2
How To Write Stories From Everyday Life Part 1
Enjoy!
That’s it from me this week.
Take care.
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Thanks for sharing Neera. Everything starts in the mind. We’re limited by our minds and excels by our mindset.Great achievements and things we think we couldn’t do can be accomplished with the right frame of mind.