December 20, 2024

Have you ever received good advice? Now what about practical advice? Such as, " Look, I just need you from the neck-down today." Comedian Matt McCusker was given this advice while working a normal job, as he was working at making it as a comedian. From the neck-down, meaning,don't think. Just do. The job. Move your body and keep your mind out of it. Get out of your head and into the body. Stop trying to come up with new ways of doing something. Stop giving your point of view. Stop using your brain altogether and just get busy, get after it.

Opening our mind to free thought will limit our ability to just perform the task. The space for procrastination opens up. We start to intellectualize all we face.

From the neck-down… a great mantra and reminder for each of us. That inner voice, telling us to do it later or tomorrow. Its not that you won't write the symphony,

you'll just start tomorrow, to quote the great Steven Pressfield. That voice is procrastination. For me, procrastination has an entire fucking TEDtalk. But I tell and remind myself "from the neck-down." Other moments I might tell myself to "stop thinking"or "this does not need my opinion." Once I open the book, pull out a stack of note cards or sit in front of my typewriter, i performed my "neck-down" action.

Then and only then, I can get into the mind because I did the hard thing. I sat down to write. Now I'm good.