According to my childhood journals I was an incredibly ambitious youth (in a way). I wrote extensively on my goals, detailing strategies and plans to achieve big things. Despite precocious goal setting, I reached very few of my aims. While being unduly judgemental of my younger self is problematic, I can safely state that even for a child I could be dilatory and unproductive. After laying great plans, my ambitions fizzled out and another unfinished project was heaped on the bone pile of failure.

Age and reflection tell me two source issues weigh heavily in explaining why I struggled to continue moving goals forward beyond the planning stage. First, my plans were simply "all the things" as the famous internet meme succinctly put it. Second, I was drawn to dreaming about goals more than finishing them, basking in the warmth of imagination instead of the hard-won fruit of realized dreams. Both of these issues have a keen relationship with the idea of "resistance" which Steven Pressfield describes so well in The War Of Art. When faced with resistance, one either capitulates or overcomes. 

Overcoming is difficult, but there is one tactic I've used for several years that helps master resistance to challenges. It is a very simple idea I call My Five Minute Rule:

When faced with internal resistance to working on a project, agree with yourself you'll work on it for just five minutes. And then work on it for five minutes. 

To my astonishment, five minutes becomes the minimum duration of the work session. Five becomes ten, then thirty. Quite often, after practicing this for the last several years, five minutes becomes many hours. There is an additional layer of wonder that those hours, sometimes into the night, are not white-knuckled efforts. Instead, they're joyful periods of focus. 

I'm not clear on why this works for me, but I've found it a reliable method to make progress. In fact, in January of 2024 I began logging time I spent on a particular personal project. Since that time I have averaged 30 minutes every single day for 576 days. I didn't work on the project every day, but when averaged out over that period, I spent about half an hour every day for over a year and a half working on a personal project that was important to me. This is a huge win for anyone who struggles to move dreams forward. 

 And it very often started with five minutes...