The Magic of Sleep Thinking by Eric Maisel

Author:Eric Maisel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2018-04-09T04:00:00+00:00

Planning is just an everyday way to organize tasks, keep track of your goals, get things done one step at a time, and know what you’re doing next. The hardest part about it is the anxiety that wells up when you think about planning.

In Bill’s case, it makes him terribly anxious to think about retirement, since he’s sure there’s no way he can retire early, and doubly anxious when he thinks about writing a book, an endeavor that feels far beyond his capabilities. But still, following the program, he sits down with two sheets of paper and titles one “early retirement” and the other “book on gypsies.” Just sitting there with these two sheets makes him so anxious that he has to make himself another cup of coffee. But when his coffee is ready, he returns to the blank sheets of paper and begins.

On the first sheet he writes:

How much will I need? (Oh, God, I don’t want to know. What about inflation? Maybe I’ll need a million dollars a year to live in a hovel.)

What will my tiny school annuity amount to? (I think if I tell them a projected amount, they will tell me what I would get monthly. So I’ll have to project what I could put away over the next fifteen years and how much that would earn.)

Where will I live? (I can’t live here. It’s too expensive. I should start thinking about where I might live . . . someplace that’s cheap . . . and sunny . . . and interesting.)

This isn’t a plan yet, but it’s approaching one. You can see how a plan might emerge quickly. Bill might begin by figuring out where he’ll retire to, which is a complicated decision in its own right, but until he knows that, he may not be able to gauge how much money he’ll need to live on. So the first part of his plan might be making a list of criteria for his retirement locale, thinking about that list, researching some retirement possibilities in books or on the Internet, and sleep thinking the question, Where do I want to retire? Maybe he’ll discover that he is well suited to retiring in Italy, or Costa Rica, or North Dakota. If something clicks, Bill will have made significant progress. If nothing clicks, he can continue to devote some time each week to thinking about retirement locales and researching possibilities.

On the second sheet of paper, the one for his book on gypsies, he writes:

How do you write a book? (Oh God. Do I have to take some stupid workshops? Or buy books on writing books? Or take a class? Or join a writing group?)

Maybe everything’s been done. I should look on Amazon and see what there is.

What would my book—or books—be about? I know a lot about gypsy life, but what do I want to say? Do I have anything to say? Wait, that’s getting negative. Let me stay positive. I need to discover what I want to say about gypsy life.

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