Money

Commitment to Action Will Eventually Overcome Resistance to Getting Your Money House in Order

Here’s how to spark joy in your personal finances

3 min readJan 10

Every time I open up a blank google doc, I feel a spark of joy.

For the longest time (years!), whenever I sat down to write, I would fire up google and then change the font and size from the default Arial 11 to Nunito Sans 14. It took seconds and just a few keystrokes, but I did it Every. Single. Time. I opened a document.

It was The Groundhog Day of annoyances.

I half-heartedly poked around, trying to change the default a few times, but it wasn’t intuitive, so I gave up quickly.

One day, I reached my breaking point.

There HAD to be a way to change the default settings in Google docs, and if I had to spend a day figuring it out, I would. For whatever reason, that was the day I decided to persevere until I fixed it.

Commitment to action was required.

I resolved to invest more than a couple of clicks to figure out how to change the damn settings. So I googled it, and sure enough, there were a million people just dying to show me how.

In 3 minutes, I changed my settings.

I have a lovely teacher (literally) on YouTube to thank. But when I think of how much time I wasted compared to the time it took to learn how to do it, I felt stupid.

Why was I willing to put up with discomfort for so long?

Why did I give up learning how to do it so quickly?

What was the resistance to investing the time and finding out?

Why was a minor inconvenience more compelling than a dollop of ease?