John Green, author of teen mega-sellers The Fault in Our Stars, Paper Towns and Looking for Alaska, has become a beloved geek hero not only for his earnest, unformulaic writing style, but also for the candid wisdom he often shares with young fans, many who feel like they don’t quite fit in. In the Reddit community Nerdfighters, a group that spawned from his exploding band of online followers, he showed up for an impromptu AMA (“I’m also stuck in the airport in Amman, Jordan for the next hour,” he wrote), where he discussed topics from the state of the presidential election to his experience with refugees from the Syrian crisis to his ideal grilled cheese.

One of Green’s responses was particularly meaningful. It was about showing up to life even when it’s hard.

Redditor pranav_koundinya asked this question:

“How do you motivate yourself to do things you don’t want to do but have to do?”

Green wrote that he used to be really bad at this, partly as a result of his obsessive compulsive disorder. But then he shared a mind trick he uses whenever he feels stuck.

How does it work? He gave the example of walking to the mailbox, a real life challenge that he had to work through.

“As an extreme example, I found it impossible to put mail in the mailbox for many years. I don’t mean that I found it difficult. I found it impossible. This is the stupidest thing in the world, of course; it is neither physically nor intellectually challenging to place an envelope you have already sealed, addressed, and stamped into a mailbox, and yet I could not do it. I would take the bus all around town to pay my bills in person so as to avoid the mailbox.”

Now, here’s what he does.

“I acknowledge that the thing is hard.”

“It is hard to put the mail into the mailbox,” Green writes. “Maybe it is not hard for some people, but it is very hard for me, and since I am me, it is hard. I tell myself that doing difficult things is difficult. It requires guts and ambition and follow-through and commitment.”



“I break the job down into pieces that feel slightly more manageable.”

“I know this will sound ridiculous to most of you, but yeah, okay, so I say: Here in your hand you have the sealed and stamped and addressed envelope. First of all, let’s just pause to congratulate ourselves on having accomplished that. So now you are going to stand up. You are going to walk to the doorway, where you will put on shoes. While you’re putting on shoes, you’ll put the envelope on the kitchen table. Then you’ll pick the envelope back up, open the door, and walk to the mailbox. The walk won’t be bad, actually; even though it’s cold, it will be nice to get a sense of how the outside world looks today; maybe you’ll see a bird of a squirrel or something.* Then you’ll walk to the mailbox, open it, place the letter inside the mailbox, and raise the little mail flag indicating to your mail carrier there’s mail inside. And then it will be over. In like two concentrated minutes of effort, it will be over.”

“And then once I do the thing, I celebrate.”

I don’t tell myself the that thing I just did was a small thing, because it wasn’t to me; it was a big thing, and I should be lauded for it!

Green adds, “Obviously, there are more efficient ways of doing things you don’t want to do, but this is the way that works for me with my particular brain.” When you are doing something much bigger, you’d need to break down the task into “many, many smaller steps.” In the middle of the process, he still might become anxious, but he writes, “At this point, I’m pretty good at just telling myself to stop and continue with the plan.”

Redditors appreciated the life advice.

Read the full discussion with Green in the original Reddit thread.