'Stop Doing' Lists

For June 22

“Extra! Extra! Read all about it!” A familiar line from old movies…familiar to some of a certain era, I remind myself.

That's a phrase logged in my brain in the self-help file I started back in the 70’s when that was the hot trend in publishing. These names come to mind: Napoleon Hill, Zig Ziglar, Norman Vincent Peale, Richard Carlson, Stephen Covey, Brian Tracy, Wayne Dyer, Deepak Chopra, Leo Buscaglia, Robert Schuller and Tony Robbins. Remember them? I ordered the books, bought the tapes, took the inventories and made the lists.

Extra, extra EXTRA…unless there is application of tips to alter habits, the only ones ‘helped’ are the authors and publishers.

Research reveals there is genuine benefit to making those lists. Just under three percent of the population actually does. If you wimp out on follow-through, that is the one best task to tackle.

In one of my self-improvement paperbacks I had listed some goals/dreams after mulling over the ‘assignment’ for several days. The text became part of the bookshelf mish-mash discovered when packing for a move. As I thumbed through it, I glimpsed my handwriting and plopped down among the stacks and boxes to read through it. Astonishingly, I could have checked off all but one of the maybe twenty items I had written 13 years earlier!

If I scrounge around, I might still find many of those titles and tapes in closet corners and attic piles, but these days I tune in to podcasts and radio shows. A new favorite is the weekly Hidden Brain on NPR. Yesterday’s interviewee was Leidy Klotz, the engineer/author of Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less, who makes to do lists as well as ‘stop doing’ lists. Simplifying can open new paths.

There is a “Stop Doing’ list in my future.