Possibility usually comes disguised as hard work. Don’t expect your next project to be easy.

Things fall apart

Anyone who tries to make something or do something finds that there is resistance. It’s an accepted fact of life that things tend toward disorder–cars break down, paint peels, joints begin to ache as we age. We expect that things left to themselves will fall into disorder. But it is also the nature of things to resist being brought into order in the first place. The world around us not only tends toward chaos, it also drags its feet when we try to make something out of that chaos.

Go looking for trouble

The problems only reveal themselves as you dig into the work.

The reality is that most projects have inherent obstacles, stubborn sticking points, intractable awkward aspects that only reveal themselves as you dig into the work. If you begin your project expecting to not run into obstacles, you’re setting yourself up for unnecessary discouragement. If on the other hand, you start the work with the expectation that some things will probably go awry, you’ll be pleasantly surprised when they immediately do. You’ll be able to tell your friends how clever you were to see it coming.

Include extra grit in your budget

It’s normal to build in extra time and money in your estimates on a given project to cover unexpected problems. The trick is to also mentally set aside a store of patience and perseverance so that when problems do arise, you’ll be resilient enough to follow the work through whatever obstacles come up. Because there will always be problems–something will break, or blow up, or you’ll have to scrap the whole thing and start over. That can sound pessimistic but it’s really not. We’re not looking for problems so that we can be defeated. Without knowing what they will be, we can anticipate that there will be problems and mentally prepare ourselves for the task of figuring out how to solve them.

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