How > What | Why

It’s not uncommon for me that I enter into a stall in action because I focus too deeply on the latter 2 words in the title rather than the first. Whether it’s 30 minutes or multiple hours, often carrying into my evening or until I go to sleep, there have been moments where I’m unable to choose a definitive course of action because I’m too distracted by the loop in my internal dialog asking myself what I am doing and why I am doing it. Instead, as I’ve been learning to condition myself over time, the question to prompt yourself to action should be questions that begin instead with how.

A series of content I’ve consumed over the last few weeks prompted me to think deeper on this concept that I read originally in The Bhagavad Gita. There, Krsna originally expresses the idea to Arjuna that one can more quickly find the path to doing His work by asking questions that begin with how rather than what or why. This theme is carried heavy throughout the book and eventually evolves into the Trichotomy of Nature, The Enjoyer and Consciousness which is the title of chapter 13.

Hovering for a moment here on what is meant by ‘His work’, this is something I think we read in many places under different words of choice depending on the medium. The Bible might call this ‘God’s work or following in his footsteps’, I interpret it as what Cal Newport calls ‘Deep Work’ or even what Steven Pressfield refers to in The War of Art as ‘Listening to his muse’. In the Articulate Ventures Network, we commonly refer to this as something along the lines of ‘Following the path of our…