A Stoic Wake-Up Call For Procrastination

This guided reflection is meant to make you slightly uncomfortable. You will sit with the questions procrastination helps you avoid: Am I using my time well? Am I making excuses and calling them reasons? What would I do next if I stopped waiting to feel ready? I leave space for the questions to land. The discomfort is part of the practice. Use it when you know what needs doing and still cannot get yourself to begin.

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If you look back at the last five years of your life, what are the times you suffered the most? I think when we think about this question, we tend to think of the the most intense negative events. We don't really look at the small steady background hum of negativity and anxiety that our day-to-day actions cause. There's a famous saying, it's not the mountain ahead that kills you, it's the pebble in your shoe. And I think that for people like us who are on this type of quest who want to better ourselves, the pebble in our shoe is often simply our inability to do the things we know we should do. We may not be struggling to get food and water and shelter. But we struggle to get up on time, or exercise when we know we should, or eat the right food, or read the right books, learn the right skills, avoid bad influences and bad people, face our fears. These are luxury problems to have, but they are still problems and still cause a lot of suffering in us. Let me ask you something. Do you feel like you waste any of your time? Do you use your time as wisely as you possibly could? Is each week of your life structured how you'd like it to be? And do you follow it as you'd like to follow it? Now I know that you could cultivate this attitude of acceptance and non-judgment and just go with the flow. Do what you can and love yourself anyway. And I think that we need this. We need to balance self-improvement with self-acceptance. But we also don't want to deceive ourselves. We know in our hearts the type of people that we want to be, the type of activities that we want to do. And no amount of acceptance is going to ultimately make us feel better about not fulfilling our potential. Let me give you an example. If you take someone who is naturally very creative, they are high in the big five personality traits, openness, and you put them in a job where they are not being creative, and you take away all of their time outside of that job so they can't be creative, they will be miserable. There's no way about it. No matter how much they try to think their way out of it, they might get somewhere along the way to doing that. But if they're creative by nature, they need to live in agreement with their nature for them to be happy. So if you have aspirations that you are not fulfilling, maybe there's a project that you're putting off, hobbies that you are not pursuing, are you procrastinating on something? Are you being lazy? Are you not being the type of person in relationships that you want to be? If so, then the only way to feel good about yourself is not through magical positive thoughts, but to cultivate real competence in your ability to execute. I want you to think for a few moments now about the areas of your life where you are telling yourself lies. Areas of your life that you know you really should be improving, you really should be putting time into. But you're not You can imagine that you are a billionaire. You have nothing to do to make money. What are you doing with your time? And could you be doing that now but aren't? Now take a look at all of the habits in your life. Good habits, bad habits. This applies to your biological needs like eating, sleeping, sex, as well as your creative pursuits. Think about them all now, and I want to ask you something. Which habit causes you to mistrust yourself the most? There's got to be a habit that you keep saying you're either going to start doing or stop doing, and you keep lying to yourself about it. Can you think of any like that? Now let's continue along this thread. If you were a friend to yourself, and you really wanted to help you become as healthy psychologically as possible, as healthy and present and content and tranquil to achieve the state of ataraxia, what would you have you stop doing? And what would you have you do more of? If you know this, why aren't you doing it? You have one life, you have one mind, and ultimately your mind is the only thing you can offer to other people. Your mind is everything in this world. Your mind affects every decision you make. Your mind affects how other people feel around you, your mind affects the impact you can have on the world, your mind affects your family, it affects your mood, it affects everything. It is by far the most important thing, the most precious thing in your universe, and yet you're not taking care of it as you should. Why so we can look at all the different discipline techniques in the world, they all have value. But it starts with your identity, starts with who you want to be. When someone gives up smoking and they stop smoking permanently, they go through an identity shift right then and there, where smoking is from now on disgusting and not something that they do. People who try to give up smoking and they kind of have this attitude of, oh, I really I love smoking, I love having the cigarette, I'm just trying, I'm trying to stop smoking, uh, I've gone six days. That person hasn't had an identity change. That person is likely to relapse. To truly change a habit, you need to have this attitude of never going back. If you think, oh, I really like something, I really like doing something, or I really like not doing something, but I'm just going to try to do it differently for the next 30 days, it's probably not going to stick. The emotion of disgust is actually useful. And this is, I think, why sometimes many of us who are leaning toward the self-acceptance paradigm struggle to make really deep changes and achieve what we want to achieve. There is some virtue in being hard on ourselves from a place of love, of training ourselves like we would train our child if they were acting up in public or not brushing their teeth before bed. You wouldn't simply go, well, you know, I accept you for who you are, I love you, you don't have to brush your teeth. You see that for your own child's best interest, it's your job to help them reach their potential. Not in an extreme way, but just to give them at least some encouragement and training to the best of your ability so that they can go through life with as much opportunity as possible. And I'd like to ask you, are you taking that approach with yourself? The other problem as well is intelligence. Intelligence is a gift, but it's also a curse. Because people who are intelligent typically like their own thoughts. They like to think. And when they are faced with a task or an action that they must do, they will think about it and come up with a very elaborate, well thought out reason for why they are doing it or not doing it. Where's sometimes it's better to not think and just to move forward, to do it, one foot in front of the next, and just act. Now I'd like you to picture yourself in three years from now. If you let all of the bad habits that you have now exacerbate, get worse, and snowball, realistically, where are you going to be in three years' time? Will you be desperate to come on another kind of self-development journey because you are struggling, because you didn't execute, because you've gone backwards? What exactly is your life going to be like in three years from now if you let your bad habits get the better of you? Picture that in vivid detail? Now let's think of the other side of the coin. What if you did what you needed to do and you executed on the habits and tasks you knew you needed to execute on? In three years' time, what would your life look like? What would the state of your mind be like? What would your relationships look like? What kind of member of society would you be? How much more would you like yourself? Picture in vivid detail everything that would be your life, your unique life if you executed on the tasks you know you need to execute on the manifest this version of the future. Even if you get twenty percent there, thirty percent, fifty percent, it will still be absolutely transformational for you. Aiming up is the most important thing you can do. The fact that you are listening to this shows you already are aiming up. The next step is for you to figure out a plan, a daily plan, something small and achievable that you can do every day. If you are struggling with your mood, what kind of meditation habit can you practice? What kind of reading habit can you cultivate? What stoic authors will you read and reread and read and reread? If your issue is in work or creativity, then can you turn pro and just get the work done every day? Set aside some time. And remember, you can't be successful at everything. In order to be successful at some things, you need to be unsuccessful at some things. So how will you prioritize your time? You want to be a writer, you want to be an artist, you want to be a sculptor, you want to be a musician, you want to be an amazing meditator and a bodybuilder and a martial artist, you want to be a blogger, and you also want to have a family and a relationship and a social life. Can you see the issue here? It's better to pick a few things and just go all out on those areas. Trying to do it all is actually a poor strategy. You can spend a couple of months focusing on one thing, a couple of months focusing on another thing. So I want you to think about what are you gonna focus on? What are the things you must focus on? The three areas you must focus on for your own well-being and success. Good luck.