How to make progress

# Chapter 326

Making progress. Over a year of steady work and we are seeing a truck emerge from the briar patch rust-bucket we pulled out of the thorns and briars in coronavirus lockdown. We call it our briar patch coronavirus project. Making progress happens with steady consistent effort and attention. The energy to produce that steady consistent effort and attention is the real subject here though. Managing your energy is the more key issue as you get older. Maintaining your energy is another key issue. We all remember the days of our youth when we could work 12-14 hour days and keep the pace. Now we are doing great to have 4-6 hour days of high quality focus and production. Most days we are fortunate if my dad can work three hours at a stretch and then he is done.

He seems to think this is terrible, but I think that for an 80 year it is wonderful and that he has any energy at all is great. We did not make all this progress on the briar patch truck sitting in the house under the air conditioning! No we made progress by endless hours of sanding, cutting, patching, painting, and rebuilding. All of these requires managing and maintaining your energy levels up high. It means sweating and bleeding and scraping and using a lot of bandaids.

Working on the briar patch truck does not require or demand the same kind of progress that thinking work does, but they both demand all your energy and effort to produce something amazing. Time to get to work!