I’m reviewing the results from yesterday’s Procrastination Quiz. Making a quiz is super time consuming and it requires me to flex brain muscles I don’t normally use, but it’s fun and I find that it has a very high engagement rate compared to all the other things I usually do. I like to ask a lot of questions that have numerical range answers because it gives me some kind of statistic to look at, so let’s talk about one thing I noticed from the numbers.
The one question with everyone answering the same number: “How excited would you be if you were taking your desired action effortlessly all the time?”. Everybody answered with a resounding 5, which is the maximum score. This was a bit surprising to me, because in the real world cases I worked with many people actually procrastinate on things they think they have to do but don’t actually have to do.
A big part of action is wanting to do the action. This includes enjoying the action itself but also the ability to foresee the results and connect to the emotional experience of having the results in your hands. With this, an interesting set of answers come from this question: “How much of your time YESTERDAY did you spend on the action you have in mind?”.
The majority of the answers is 0%. This thing you want to do, this thing that would make you so excited; you spent 0% of your time doing it yesterday. Isn’t that interesting?
Many times we do things without understanding the full chain of consequences for the actions. Yes, it’s easy to see how smoking would be generally bad for your health. But when we light up a cigarette, do we think that? There’s a big discrepancy between what we know and the actual actions we take, and often times the reason for that is because we can’t really tell what the way of living our life will lead to in the future.
If I want to be good at jiujitsu, I need to train. I cannot expect to get better at jiujitsu by not training. Some times I’ll forcibly take a break from injury and find myself with a bit of a refined technique because during rest my body memorized the movements with more finesse, but as much as I gain I would have lost by not training.
It doesn’t matter how much I want to be better. Mat time corresponds to skill development. It doesn’t matter how much I want a new job. Possibilities of new jobs correspond to number of jobs applied to. If I apply to a 100 jobs, is there a possibility I’ll be rejected from all of them? Yes, because nothing guarantees that you’ll get a job. But when you apply for a job, the chance becomes nonzero. By not doing anything, the chance becomes closer to zero.
So we WANT to do something and we feel excited about the prospect of not doing it. And yet we are living a life that makes the probability of that result closer to zero. Before we get to tackling why we don’t take action and how to overcome those reasons, we have to see this reality in its face.
Of course, is it required to always be working on something? No. You’re allowed to rest, you’re allowed to go at your pace. Why this is of my concern is, blocked action tends to be a big reason why people suffer. I don’t want you to suffer in your own life.
Why I’m asking you to take the reality you’re currently generating a bit seriously today is not because I want you to feel bad. In fact, many people responded that they feel horrible about the inaction. The two primary reasons why I want you to take this seriously are, 1) clarity on what kind of results I’m creating will be beneficial in the future when you DO take actions and 2) you need to understand that feeling bad does nothing to help the situation.
Feeling really bad about inaction may motivate you to take an action. But does the action care if I felt good or bad about it? Suppose I have to water my plants. Do the plants care if I watered happily or sadly? All that matters is I take the action. Then, if I need to take action ANYWAY in order to get my results… Doesn’t it make more sense to take the action happily?
When you have clarity around the relationship between action and results, you can take away a lot of the emotional weight around action. This will make action effortless and you’ll be swimming in executive power. That is the power of a suffering-free life! Learn more about action in my in-person workshop on May 30th, 3PM at Valley Hot Yoga in Woodland Hills, California!
