238. To Become A Machine

He expected an organized and productive day. He expected to do everything he had written down on his list. He expected this would be no problem at all. Provided there were no emergencies, no interruptions beyond his control, he would be able to do it. All he had to do was put his head down and concentrate on his work.

He expected success, but success did not arrive. It did not arrive despite his attention being perfectly focused, despite the absence of interruptions, despite everything going right. It did not arrive because tasks that should have taken him an hour ended up taking two.

He cannot explain why this happened. In the past, he has completed at least this much work in a single day, so he knows he’s capable of it. But today he was not successful. He feels frustrated by this, because he can’t see what the problem is — beyond the obvious fact that the problem has to be him, the person he was and is.

Was he just less focused than he thought? Was there something tucked away in the recesses of his mind that was silently distracting him? Was he simply more tired than usual? He has no meaningful answers to these questions, and this frustrates him further.

He is frustrated because his future expectations of productivity could be just as wrong as they were today, and how can he plan for that? How can he construct an accurate schedule if there’s no way of knowing how long each task will take?

He wants precision. He wants control. He wants to function in way that is both reliable and efficient, in a way that produces guaranteed results. He wants to become a machine.

Sometimes he is this machine, but he wants more. He wants to be this not just sometimes but always. He decides he has to push himself harder. He decides he has to tune his every action to be more purposeful and effective. He decides he has to manifest even greater control over everything he does. Only then, he believes, will he be able to obtain the success he desires.