In college, my friend and mentor Mark Lundstrom taught me that “earning good grades gives you more freedom.” I had struggled as a freshman, and Mark, an actual rocket scientist, talked to me about how getting straight on study habits and academic performance translates into more options later, enhancing sovereignty over your own life. It’s that simple, and that hard. Put the processes in place to get better results, and those results will deliver more opportunities and independence. In my case, following and implementing better study habits led to better grades, postgraduate scholarships, and my first job in forestry.
Years later, after working in forest operations in Aberdeen, Washington and as a procurement forester at a sawmill in Barnesville, Georgia, I sold my Jeep Wrangler for $4,500 and bought a laptop computer for graduate school and a month of Spanish classes in Alajuela, Costa Rica. In Costa Rica, I lived with a family who had never hosted a “Spanish student” before. The family of five spoke no English, while I spoke minimal Spanish. However, the mother of the house had firm routines for her family and for me, which I quickly learned and followed. The family had daily routines for eating breakfast and dinner, for washing hands before meals, and for ironing clothes each morning before leaving the house for school and work.
During that that first week, while language remained a barrier, we spoke little at the table during meals. However, the clear routines provided structure and comfort as we learned to communicate with body language and the new words I was learning each day. By the second week, the father and younger son had me out on their farm and the mother accepted my help washing dishes. By the third week, the kids were trying to teach me the Spanish phrases I’d never learn in a classroom.
The French novelist Gustave Flaubert said, “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” His call to process and routine speaks to the power of structure as an enabler of getting things done. Without processes and routines, we expose ourselves to nettlesome and distracting worries. We are human. The mind wanders. Our attention gets lassoed.
A commitment to process is a commitment to controlling what you can. Routines help us control our attention and how we invest our time. This takes effort. It requires caring less about results and what other people think, and more about the planning of our days. Nobody, except perhaps for our parents, will care as much about our own lives and goals as we do. That’s because everyone else is too occupied and ensnared with their own lives and worries.
Marcus Aurelius wrote, “If the cucumber is bitter, throw it out. If there are brambles in the path, go around.” Care less about the inconveniences, the fear of missing out, the opinions of others. Process and routine help us deal with things as they are, and powerfully support any effort towards being productive, proactive, and goal achieving.