What my hands learn every time I log in

There is a certain magic to repetition. #

Long ago, in response to a story where someone was forced to change their password every three months, I read advice to make that password something that they wanted to focus on. Yes, we have touch ID, but I still type in my password 7 to 12 times a day. So this advice made sense to me. It comes from the same genre as, on the low-effort, low-effect part of the scale, “write out what you want and put it above your bed so it’s the first thing you see when you wake up”, and high-effort, high-effectiveness being “Re-design your whole office so that walking through the corridors prepares your mind for the thing you need to spend the next 8 hours focusing on”¹ #

What you pay attention to, grows. #

Your subconscious mind is paying attention to the things your hands are doing, even if you don’t really notice. Four years ago, I changed the login password on all my laptops to publish. Just the one word. I had been frustrated with wanting to write, but that frustration wasn’t helping me write. Or I was writing, but then I was letting it die in my drafts. I wanted to write and see it through! #

For the next year and a half, every few hours as I would type the word publish (whether I actively paid attention or not) my subconscious brain oriented towards finishing what I had started writing. It paid attention to the barriers stopping me from putting my work out there, and then worked on dismantling them. I didn’t have a blog on the website, so I wrote on mataroa. I felt like I had nothing to say (about anything important), so I wrote weeknotes (and discovered I was wrong). I attended a writing workshop for nerds. I started Writer’s Club. I started Indie Web Club. Here we are. #

My next password was to do the boring thing². It’s no surprise that people don’t do hard things - but we must try, every so often, because only through discomfort can we grow. For me, it was hard to be bored. It was hard to pay attention to any one thing for more than half an hour. I would constantly get distracted, with the flavor of “let me check my messages”, but also, “here is a thought. Why don’t I look it up immediately and fall down this rabbit hole where I’m clicking a new link every 90 seconds instead of sitting with this hard problem that I haven’t yet taught my brain how to understand?” And so I decided to remind myself, every login, every sudo password, every time I have to unlock my keychain access, to Do The Boring Thing instead. #

In the time since this change, I am one year through working the hardest job I have ever worked, the longest hours I have ever worked, learning the most I have ever learnt in my career. I now have conclusive proof that I’m not lazy (take that, depression brain!). I can do boring things. Along the way, I also learned to do the hard things. I don’t have to turn the boring things interesting. I can just accept that they need to be done, and sit down and make it happen. #

It’s time for a new laptop password. While I figure it out, I’m trying to remind myself - there is a certain magic to repetition. #