Hello, My name is Jordon and I am an over-planner. Yes, yes, yes, I admit it! I truly am. I am constantly concocting endless methods and plans to improve my mind, body, spirit, career, my spaghetti recipes (🛑 stopping here for your sake). When faced with a priority, my mind shoots in every direction devising a plan to tackle the “what-ifs.” With the burning desire to improve my life, I am constantly planning and thinking about my life’s directions and goals.
This pursuit is self-inspiring and engaging, but when does all the planning and thinking become over-planning and overthinking?
In Ecclesiastes chapter 11 verse 4, it states “Whoever watches the wind will not plant; whoever looks at the clouds will not reap.” After countless months of planning, I recognized that the amount of time I was planning outweighed the work I was actually accomplishing. The mind can play tricks on you allowing you to believe that you’re getting so much done, but in reality, it’s just your thoughts on a hamster wheel taking you for a long ride.
For example, I spent 4-5 months playing mental ping-pong with the idea of becoming a volunteer tutor. Now let’s calculate this. That’s 2920 – 3650 hours pondering about this great opportunity and the entire process to become a volunteer tutor, paperwork and training included, took less than 5 hours. Overall, I spent thousands of hours pondering about something I clearly wanted to achieve and in reality, it only took me five hours to complete the necessary steps. Does this seem off-balanced to you? It definitely did to me!
There are times when we are too busy watching the wind, which distracts us from what we would like to accomplish in life. While we are watching the clouds pass, time is passing us by. Each day, we must plant our seeds and resist the urge to constantly look up to see what we have harvested. A tree is not grown in a day. It takes hours, days, and years of hard work and determination, but by resisting the urge to look up, you will overcome that itching need to stop, plan some more, and start over. This ultimately results in you never leaving the starting line on your life’s journey.
I have come to accept the fact that no matter how much over planning I complete, I cannot control everything and that action is the best medicine, not more thinking. Some things will just not go in my favor and some things will go in my favor. The key is to leave your starting line. We will reap the rewards of our seed planting of hard work, effort, discipline, dedication, and service if we start right now.
Today is a new day. Today is your day. Today is day one of the new you. Go get after it!
Photo Credit: Jeff DeGraffe. “Harvesting Winning Ideas.” October 16, 2013.
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