Stress

As a follow up to yesterday’s post about each person now being actively accountable for their paycheck, I wanted to write a little bit about the source of the majority of my day-to-day stress.  Each day, I write my to-do list down in a Rhodia Notebook.  One of the things that’s on my list is “Make __ Calls.”  The actual number of calls depends on my workload and the rest of my to-do list, but it usually varies between 10 and 25.

So here’s the cause of my stress…  Since I put it down on the to-do list, it’s something that I want to accomplish.  If I get distracted or if I procrastinate, I feel awful later.  Since I know that my success is measured very simply ($$ in my bank account) then if I’m not making calls, I’m not doing anything to make myself successful.  When I walk in the door at the end of the day, I know I’ve either made an honest effort to make my calls or I haven’t.  If I haven’t, then I feel it for hours afterward.

I remember hearing somewhere that pain can come from two places…  The pain of discipline or the pain of regret.  You get to choose.  While it’s easier in the moment to forgo the pain of discipline, the pain of regret stings a lot more in the long run.