Do the thing

Posted on by kirankelkar

Every few weeks, I’ll have a burst of inspiration of things that I’d like to write about. Sometimes, I’ll take that inspiration and run with it, but many times, I’ll just let that spark fizzle away to nothing again and forget that I ever had an interesting thought about a thing.

It’s sad, really, when I think about it. I’m constantly searching for something to write about and more importantly looking for the right time and the perfect circumstances to get my thoughts down on paper, but the older I get, the more I realize there is no “perfect” to getting anything done. Then I realize that this is simply me making excuses for my own short comings. I’ve always made it a point to carry a pad around with me and I always have a pen – hell, I always have my phone with me with any number of apps on it that I can take notes and write blog posts (like this one).

I was speaking with a strength and conditioning coach the other day. I admire his work in the field, but mostly I really admire the level and quality of his output. I mentioned this to him and he provided me with a fair bit of advice that I took to heart. While he gave me a lot of great information, there was one soundbyte that really stood out for me. That was the idea of “Just do the thing.”

There are always going to be things we don’t want to do, but have to. We out these things off as long as we can until we’re stuck in the last minute and are forced to do the thing under pressure and heightened levels of stress. Why do we do this? I don’t really know, but it’s probably simply due to laziness and lack of a realization. Many people justify this type of action by saying things like “I work better under pressure.” or other phrases of the ilk. This is just smoke and mirrors.

Scientifically, it’s almost impossible to do better work under high levels of stress, simply due to the adrenaline dump that can occur.

At the end of the day, sometimes (read: always) you just have to go and do the thing.

When you have a task you aren’t looking forward to doing, it’s invariably better to just go ahead and do it first. It’ll probably take the most time, but once it’s done, it’s done. No more BS, and you can move on to the thing that you really want to do.

For me “the thing” is writing. I’ve always wanted to write a novel. I started one years and years ago, but never continued with it, simply because I lost the inspiration. I read something about Neil Gaiman’s writing process today where he explains that if you’re waiting for inspiration to strike, the words will never reach the paper. Just set a word count for every day and write, without fail and without question. When it comes time to reread and edit, you’ll be hard pressed to identify the inspired writing as opposed to the workman’s writing.

Go and do the thing.

Presidential Election 2020

Posted on by kirankelkar

What an odd couple of presidential elections we’ll be looking back on when we look at 2016 and this upcoming 2020 election. In 2016, we had a contest between (from the outside) 2 of the most disliked candidates in all of history; that’s the common refrain anyway, and when you think about it, the dislike was always coming from the opposing party. Yes, I realize there are “Never Trumpers” in the Republic party, but I can basically guarantee that none of them (or few enough to be negligible) actually voted for Candidate Clinton. As such, all you’re seeing is the majority of the Democratic party voting against Trump, and then majority of the Republican party voting against Clinton.

Well, we all know how that played out now: Hillary won the popular vote and Donald won the Electoral College.

At the end of the day, while I largely disagree with the efficacy of the Electoral College in today’s day and age, that’s irrelevant to what I’m writing about.

What we have no is another oddball potential election cycle. At this point, all candidates for the Democratic nomination have dropped out of the primary race, leaving us with Joe Biden. While it was, for a little while, still possible that some of the other candidates could still receive votes as many have simply suspended their campaigns and not dissolved them entirely, it’s becoming even less likely. Just recently, it happened that New York State, my home state, has cancelled the New York Presidential Primary…so there’s Bernie’s chances in NYS. That said, the Democratic National Convention still awaits, and who the hell knows what will end up happening there.

The reason I say this is simply because of the fallibility of Joe Biden. For all appearances, I like Joe, he seems like a nice guy, and if the presidency was based entirely on that, then he’d win in spades…simply because Trump by all appearances is the polar opposite. But that isn’t the case, especially now with the emergence of sexual assault allegations against Biden. From the last I had read, there are 7 women that have come forward with accusations of sexual assault of varying degrees against Biden. Even if we assume that some of these accusations are falsehoods or exaggerations, there’s still the current estimates of only 2-6% of accusations being false (Here’s the truth about false accusations of sexual violence). This puts us in an interesting place, simply because that means less than 1 of these accusations could potentially be false.

That’s the Democratic side of the equation. When you look at Trump, you have an even greater number of credible accusations.

So now, we’re looking at an election where both candidates have serious, and credible, accusation of sexual misconduct and potentially sexual assault. How the hell can we, the American people, be in a position where those are our options?

This will always be the most frustrating aspect of the American Presidential electoral system to me – the 2-party system. By most descriptions, the US doesn’t operate with only 2 parties, but at the end of the day, you’re largely looking at only 2 groups: Republicans and Democrats.

Anyway, I don’t really have a direction I’m taking this, mainly because I know I probably won’t vote for either of the major party candidates. That means I’m going to have to be paying attention to the election cycle and see which 3rd party candidates start showing up for the party.