Mark Manson

So what Mr. Packwood told us, there was one day we were all taking a test and I think everybody was just stumped because all the kids were sitting around, not really writing a whole lot on their exams.

My teacher said the simplest thing, but it was like utterly profound, which is that he said,

If you find yourself stuck, just start writing the next step of the problem.

Don't try to solve the entire problem at once.

Just write the next step of the problem.

Just the momentum you build by writing the next step will generate insights and ideas into what could come next.

And sure enough, it was crazy.

You would just like do the next step of the problem.

And then that would something about writing that out would show you what the following step should be and so on.

And it became much easier to do the problems.

Once I got to college, I noticed that this applied to writing term papers, right?

You start writing an essay for English class.

You get stuck.

You're like, well, why don't I just write one sentence?

Just get one sentence, see where that goes.

And then you write one sentence and pretty soon you've got a paragraph.

And then once you got the paragraph, you're like, oh, I actually know where this should go now.

So the do something principle applied to academics, but it turns out it applies to pretty much everything.

See, we assume that to change, you need to feel like doing something different, and then that will lead to the actions of something different, but it's actually the other way around.

You start with the action and the action itself creates the emotion.