The other day, I noticed a Huffington Post piece about busyness in my Facebook feed. It was penned by Adora Svitak, a young woman who, in addition to being a published author, speaker, and activist, at the age of 13 gave a TED talk about what adults can learn from kids that has been viewed over 3 million times.

As someone who seems to be driven to make an impact, as I read her piece I was curious how she reconciled that drive with the sense of also wanting some white space on her calendar, especially because so many people who work on social good and non-profit causes seem to have a sense that they need to be self-sacrificing in order to truly effect change.

So I asked her…and with her permission, I’m happy to share her wise answer here:

“I try to reframe what having an impact means. I think it’s often an equally valid choice to have an impact on the life of one person close to you, or on yourself–so sometimes I allot me time with the awareness that it’s not necessarily taking a step back from changing the world, it’s enabling me to eventually do that better.”

The challenge with to do lists is that they can give the impression that you aren’t there yet.

That for each thing you don’t accomplish, part of you is missing.

That you won’t be whole until you’ve reached your full potential, and part of reaching that full potential is getting everything done.

The notion of value through accomplishment – through checking the boxes and crossing things off – is our own invented hurdle.

There is no to do list you can complete that leads to completeness.

You don’t have to wait to be whole.

I could be writing this blog post because it is supposed to be good for me.

I’ve seen countless posts by other writers about how writing every day (or as often as you can) is good for you. It’s good for improving your writing skills. Good for your career. Good for establishing thought leadership.

And those potential benefits are difficult to not have come to mind when I contemplate sitting down to write.

But there’s another part of that thought process, a part that we can often lose when we are too overwhelmed by focusing on the evidence outside of ourselves that something is good for us:

What about what happens inside of us?

When I write, I feel better. I get clarity. I gain confidence. After not writing for awhile, I can feel kind of meh. And sometimes what I write has the benefit of being helpful to others. 

The challenge when we get too focused on the external, “good for your career” type benefits, is that doing the activity can become more about checking a box on the to do list of standard success than it is about living your life in a more fulfilling way.

And when anything becomes about checking a box, it usually brings with it a little friend called guilt. All of a sudden a thing that you could be doing because it makes you feel better, you are doing because you want it to advance your career, and when you don’t do it, your internal dialogue isn’t “Oh, that’s too bad – I’m sad I didn’t get to do something that makes me feel awesome today.” Instead you think “Wow. I can’t seem to do any of the 10 things I’m supposed to do to advance my career. I need to add writing 20 blog posts to my to do list so I can get ahead. This is what all the successful people do.”

There is often a double bottom-line of doing things that are good for you: they make you feel better and they help you accomplish what you want in life. But that double benefit is quickly lost when you don’t connect what you are doing to the benefit of how it actually makes you feel.

When you’ve chosen to rebel, to stand up for something, to be the champion who fights for what you believe in, the process can be equally empowering and draining.

As the women from Rebels at Work pointed out in a great session at SXSW, especially if you’ve rebelled against a massive bureaucracy, fought an old, red tape-laden system, or stood up to people who didn’t really want to change – and especially if your efforts weren’t totally successful – you don’t usually walk away from that experience immediately charged up and ready to fight another battle.

Yes, even rebels need recovery time. Often you need not just a few days or weeks or months, but a period of time equal to how long you were fighting for change before you feel recharged and ready to be a rebel again.

Sometimes when it comes to new ideas, big plans, and long-term to do lists, all we do is add.

With each conference we attend or book that inspires us, we add things to our list. We set new personal goals, new work goals. We get excited about all of the new things we can potentially do.

And this is all great…except that we often forget to think about whether there is anything we can subtract, anything we can stop doing.

It’s like constantly filling a closet with new clothes and never taking out the items that no longer fit or you never wear.

Yes, add all of the amazing new things, but at the same pause for a minute to see what you can subtract as well.

“Everything else can wait.”

I first heard this phrase from a yoga instructor who offered it as we begin the day’s practice a number of months ago.

It is now what I say to myself when I sit down to meditate.

And what I say when I feel my mind migrating towards my to do list at moments when I want to be present with those around me.

It is what I say when I have a million tasks to do and everything feels urgent but I know nothing is going to get done unless I focus.

Everything feels urgent. Few things truly are. And most of the time, everything else can wait.

For some, watching another person shine is uplifting – it’s a sign of what’s possible, of how stunning human beings can be.

For others, watching someone else shine feels absolutely horrible – it’s threatening, it makes them feel small, feel jealous, even feel angry or depressed.

I’ve often heard people explain this feeling of threat by saying something like “I’m just naturally a jealous person.” But what does that mean?

I don’t think it’s just about the characteristic of jealousy. The more I read Carol Dweck‘s work, I think it’s about something deeper than that: fixed vs. growth mindset.

The people who find watching someone else shine uplifting are the people who are in growth mindset: they believe that we can all continually improve and become better, that one person’s success is in no way a threat to their own.

The people who find watching someone else shine threatening are the people in fixed mindset: they believe that we are born with a fixed amount of intelligence or talent or natural ability and therefore that everyone is ranked on a hierarchical scale (I’m smarter than you, I’m more talented than you).

Everything then becomes about protecting their rank. When someone else shines, it threatens where they see themselves on the hierarchy. And because they believe that effort is something that you only exert if you don’t have natural talent (and that effort doesn’t really change the natural talent you have that much), they don’t react to that threat by feeling motivated to work harder. They just get angry and depressed.

It’s not a pleasant way to experience the world. And it can lead to things like lying and corruption (see Enron), as those who are in fixed mindset try more and more desperately to protect the world’s view of them.

But for many people in fixed mindset, they begin to see that there is something harmful about their way of viewing the world – they aren’t growing as much as they’d like to or they’re tired of feeling jealous all the time – and the good news is that those who find themselves in fixed mindset can shift to growth mindset. It just takes a little effort.

Arianna Huffinton pointed this out at the Wisdom 2.0 conference and I’ve noticed it in one-on-one conversations, in meetings, on panel discussions: instead of truly having dialogue that is responsive to what someone else just said, we simply trade monologues.

One person says their monologue and the other person, instead of truly listening, is simply rehearsing their monologue in their head, waiting for their turn.

In communicating monologue to monologue we never get the chance to actually hear each other or to then truly deepen the conversation and move it forward.