When you experience someone else’s genius work, a little part of you feels, “That’s what I could have, would have, and should have done!”

Someone else did it.You didn’t.

They fought the resistance.You gave in to distractions.

They made it top priority.You said you’d get to it some day.

They took the time.You meant to.

When this happens, you can take it two ways:

You could let that part of you give up.“Oh well. Now I don’t need to make that anymore.”

Or you could do something about that jealous pain.Shut off your phone, kill the distractions, make it top priority, and spend the time.

It takes many hours to make what you want to make.The hours don’t suddenly appear.You have to steal them from comfort.Whatever you were doing before was comfortable.This is not.This will be really uncomfortable.

The few times in my life I’ve made a real change like this, it felt awful on the surface.I wasn’t shallow-happy about it.I wasn’t smiling.I was annoyed and fighting it inside, but on the outside I did the work.And in the end, got the deeper satisfaction of finishing.