A number of weeks before I turned twenty-eight I began to experience a kind of urgency.

Maybe it had something to do with the fact that twenty-eight is only two years from thirty, or that twenty-seven is fairly close to twenty-five but twenty-eight is not. I began to feel that something wasn’t getting done quickly enough, that I had limited time (even a hundred years is such a small amount of time) and I had to move my ass to get where I was going. Something that couldn’t wait. Something important.

I began to feel that in my life I’d wasted far too many hours on deadening minutiae, and that I need to push hard to catch up. Twenty-two years until I’m fifty, I calculated. Forty-two until seventy. How healthy do I need to be to be pushing forward when I’m seventy and eighty and ninety? I need to be very healthy, I thought. And I simply haven’t come far enough to match the time I’ve used up. Time to move. Only two years until, what, the middle? The middle of what? Too far to go to be moving this slowly.

Who am I kidding? I felt this way long before I got anywhere near twenty-eight. But when I realized I was approaching twenty-eight, it got a lot worse.

When I tilt my head to one side, that all sounds like paranoid emotional workaholic crap. I hear that people have crises at thirty, so I should have one too. Here’s mine, and I’m an early bloomer! Isn’t it pretty?

When I tilt my head to the other side, I know that it’s absolutely true and I have to fucking get with it. There isn’t time for the kind of bullshit mainstream society engages as normal. There are things that need to happen now, and things that need to happen soon, and the clock is ticking on our ability to move them. If I sound like Keanu Reeves in some goddamn movie I guess you’ll just have to deal with it. This is how I feel.

It’s why when I see people sitting on their asses and languishing in the status quo it pisses me off.

It’s why I sometimes burn myself out because I forgot to (read: wasn’t willing to) take a real break. It’s why I get so frustrated when I seem to be slowed down, stalled out, becalmed or confused. Places to go. People to meet. Thoughts to hatch. Miracles to work. How can you just sit there? Aren’t you paying attention? We Americans, we’ve got it good. We can sit warm and cozy inside our fuzzy blanket of money and entitlement and instant gratification letting media and commerce jerk off our pleasure centers, and all the while we’re whining because we can’t quite get our way without expending some effort. Do I sound like a hippie or do I just sound mad?

How can we lay around distracting ourselves when there’s so much that we can do? Must do?

I just don’t understand.

No wonder I’m feeling urgency. I’m overcompensating for my culture.

But is it really overcompensation, or is it exactly what needs to be done?

Why, exactly, do you need an excuse?

Why do you need a program? Or a scholarship, or a recommendation, or a mandate, or an initiative, or somebody else’s carefully crafted plan?

Why not execute your own carefully crafted plan?*

Why do you have to wait for opportunity to knock? You can make your own opportunity, right now.

You know what it looks and feels like. You know what you want the results to be. You know that you’re craving a challenge, but you don’t need someone else to challenge you. Challenge yourself. Cut the path on your own. If you’re waiting for someone to boot your success system, you might be waiting a long time. WHY. WAIT. (!?)

Is this what they teach us? Is this the conditioning we’ve been living with? Is this what we tell our kids? Is this why so many of us are sitting on our butts playing blame games with our lives? Who told you to wait? Why do you think they were right? Stop listening to them. They don’t know what they’re talking about. It was time to get started years ago. You can catch up by getting off your ass now and doing something.

Do I have to beg, or are you going to quit jerking around and make something happen?

* “But Megan, I don’t have a plan.” Oh geeze, of all the goofy excuses. GO MAKE ONE!

I have a confession to make.

I’m a (super) lazy reader.

I have always read very quickly and easily—reading is fun. Reading is a relaxing, soothing activity. It’s like trying to absorb information while sleeping; it’s effortless. This made especial sense when all I read was fiction growing up (sci-fi, fantasy, dragons, witches, magic horses, you got it) but it continued to be the case when I started to educate myself about people, sex, business and the universe. Reading was “work”, but it was still just as easy.

At a certain point my desire for information began to outstrip my reading speed. I tried not to crave information, but it’s so hard! Listen to me whine. I spent more of my time reading, but the books tended to pile up anyway. I stopped buying everything on my list. I started choosing material more carefully, researching reviews, picking up the ones I knew would be really perfect and letting the rest go. This was a great approach, but it has one flaw: What do I do when the really perfect books breed and multiply?

That’s exactly what happened. I couldn’t choose anymore. There were just too many! How much time was I really going to spend reading?

I decided to learn to read faster. I took a photoreading course (after coming across Steve Pavlina’s posts) and was very pleased! I’d never done any sort of speed reading and I loved how fast I could get through nonfiction, even long before having mastered any of the unconscious processing techniques. But there was one problem, and it’s the problem I’m working to solve now: I’m a lazy reader!

For all its awesomeness, photoreading takes effort. Maybe more accomplished photoreaders than I don’t notice the effort, but many of the photoreaders I’ve met came from hating to read. I came from loving to read, and the idea of taking a relaxing activity and turning it into homework is something I can’t help but balk at. Of course, I still read all my fiction the “usual” way—fiction is less suited to photoreading anyhow—but I’m finding it difficult to adjust and use photoreading as my automatic solution, every time. Part of my brain is a little offended that I’m taking this awesome, relaxing work and making it… work.

What the hell? my brain says, indignant. Who do you think you are?

I’ve been mulling this over for a few weeks, and I’ve thought of a few probable solutions. I still photoread quite well (if not perfectly), so all I need to iron out is my motivation.

I speculated recently about starting a super-fast readers club, so that anticipating conversation about many different books in short spans of time would give me a “reason” to read them fast and be ready to discuss. (I’m letting that percolate. Something might come of it. Right now, I’m taking advantage of the Alternative Alternative MBA, and that’s a great “reason”—though maybe we should have another discussion, sometime, about why I feel I need more of a “reason” than just wanting to read the damn book!)

I’m thinking about coming at new books from a direction Seth suggested a few months ago: Use information to do something, not just learn something. This is great because photoreading involves setting a purpose for yourself, information you’re looking for, questions you want to have answered and identifying the most useful parts of the book—and the next step, after finding what you want, is to use it to make something happen. Well, of course! If I start to associate reading with an active approach (instead of with relaxing and getting all the information I want without expending any effort), I may find that my motivation as regards reading changes a lot.

This is all just speculation so far, but you’ll know what it means when I start making posts about books and actions together in the same space, instead of just gushing about my recent reading crush. It’s time for this to happen. I have a hell of a lot of books to get through, but feel free to translate: I have a hell of a lot of change to make.

Remember this: Would you like to rephrase that more positively? Yes, that. Remember that?

Tonight Tim Ferriss made a post regarding the ejection of certain words from one’s vocabulary. He suggests this for slightly different reasons than I originally discussed, but still interesting, still valid! He takes familiar staples such as ‘should’ and adds grand old warhorses such as ‘happiness’ and ‘success’ (and ‘good/right’ and ‘bad/wrong’). I happen to think he’s absolutely right. And also, er, absolutely correct.

Tim (who sometimes links multisyllabic words to their entries in Wikipedia as if to say, ‘Look at this cool word I know’, which is exactly what I would do) suggests that the usage of words such as these does not require a lot of complex thought, which is why we have used them to the point of meaninglessness – and might consider exercising our brains in order to find suitable alternatives that better describe the situation at hand. We love them, he says:

Because they remove the heavy lifting of real thinking. These socially-accepted throwaway terms are crutches for unclear thinking, just like “thing”, “stuff”, or “interesting”–enemies of good writers worldwide.

If you stop for a moment and think about it… there are quite a few words that are likewise easy to use. I sure as hell use them! Perhaps we should all spend our next date night with a raspberry merlot and a thesaurus…

Should. You know, scouring this entry for instances of Tim’s outlawed words is a pain in the ass, this late at night. (And ‘should’ was the one I’d ditched already!) But I still think he’s got a point. I definitely see the weakness in myself, and it sounds like an interesting challenge – especially since half the words he listed are words I use over and over and over. And over.

Sounds like rather a fun game, actually. Want to play?