The Five-Minute Renaissance

The Discovery I’ve read my share of self-help books. All promise happiness and success if you’ll just do this or think that. They did help. I’d do this or think that and feel better for about, well, five minutes. Very little stuck and I felt more frustrated than before. I could now tack on a lack of stick-to-itiveness to my many flaws. Sometimes, while thumbing through books in the self-help section, I’d have the urge to do something, anything except stand there reading self-help books. I would flounce out of the store and actually begin to feel better as I walked. This reinforced the funny feeling I often had in that particular aisle of the bookstore, a feeling that seemed to urge me to stop reading, stop thinking so much, stop looking for an answer and start doing. Action always made me feel better and it was, of course, the only thing that worked. Anyway, life went on, I did lots of doing and I never went down the self-help aisle again. Yet, there were still things I wanted to do. I had a million excuses; some even made sense, like a lack of time. A few took on an aura of fearfulness. I was genuinely afraid to do some activities. I had a myriad of reasons for this fear. I possessed the ever-popular fear of failure, dreaded the idea that someone might laugh at my endeavor, and saddest of all, didn’t think I deserved even to try the thing I most wanted to do. The craziest reason probably was feeling like my wants didn’t matter. My wanting to do something might take away from the needs of my spouse, my friends, my work, my children. Through painful experience I learned that forsaking one’s needs for another’s never works. Life goes out of balance. Just as the inverse is true, ignoring the needs of another eventually produces an out-of-balance relationship. Then of course there were things I knew I should do-- pay those bills! clean out that refrigerator! --but sticking needles in my eyes sounded like more fun. Then my kids turned into teenagers. They didn’t want to do anything I wanted them to do. Practicing piano, exercising, reading and cleaning their room all fell to the wayside for want of time and/or inclination. It was the trials at the piano that led to my discovery. No one in my household is going to play Carnegie Hall so practicing to get there, as the old joke goes, was totally unnecessary. Still, I believed there was great value in learning to play an instrument and I wanted my children to have that experience. I spoke to music teachers and professional musicians and asked all of them about practicing. The musicians were unanimous; someone had encouraged them to practice. Well, I was encouraging my kids and it wasn’t working. The teachers all said, “One half hour a day, minimum.” No way were my kids going to practice for a half hour a day. Finally, a friend who teaches the fiddle said, “You can practice five minutes or five hours”. He meant, of course, practicing is up to the individual. Again, my kids were not going to practice five hours, but it occurred to me that five minutes was doable even in the busiest of lives. So I set up the five-minute rule. Just five minutes a day. No more. The secret here is that everyone has five minutes a day. I even joined them and began, a rank beginner, tapping away at the piano for five minutes a day. We all instantly went from never practicing to practicing five minutes a day. From week to week the teacher noticed the improvement in our playing. My kids were happier. They saw that even a tiny bit of doing produced a result. Occasionally, the five minutes would spill over to a few more as the simple act of doing produced positive feelings. Hey, I was on to something here. Maybe I could expand this rule to encompass cleaning and exercising. In the coming months I did just that, expanding the rule and finding life becoming more fun. I felt more confidant and in control of my life than ever before. I wanted to help others feel this way. I even used the five-minute rule to write this book. It is my heartfelt desire that you find the rule as revolutionary as I have. Certainly it is worth a try. After all, it is only five minutes….