5 Ways to Overcome PROCRASTINATION - #BelieveLife

Good morning, Believe Nation! Today we're going to talk about why and how to overcome procrastination.

Let's face it, you're likely watching this video in an effort to avoid some other task. You're procrastinating to learn how to stop procrastinating.

But the clock is ticking, so So why can't you seem to stop?

Though the psychological causes are still debated, there's a human tendency to over or underestimate the value of a reward based on its temporal proximity. This is often referred to as temporal discounting. For example, if I offered you $100 today or $110 in a month, most would take the $100 and run. But what if instead I offered you $100 in a year or $110 in a year and 1 month? Suddenly you might say to yourself, "If I can wait a year, I can wait the extra month." But the time and value difference are the exact same in each example. It turns out that human motivation is highly influenced by how imminent the reward is perceived to be, meaning the further away the reward is, the more you discount its value. This is often referred to as present bias or hyperbolic discounting. So being on Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, or YouTube is more rewarding than a perfect score on your test until temporal proximity increases the value of a good mark on your test and you cram all night. On top of this, every time something enjoyable happens, you get a dose of dopamine which modifies the neurons in your brain, making you more likely to to repeat the behavior. The problem is video games or browsing the internet provide many small, quick, and continuous rewards, unlike your term essay, which is a one-time future reward.

I'm stalling. I, um, I have a problem with procrastination, and I'm supposed to start the show, and I'm not, so this procrastination thing— whenever there's something I'm supposed to do, I'll do anything other than the one thing that I'm supposed to do, and then I feel bad about myself, and then I get depressed, and then I really don't get anything done because I'm depressed. And I told a friend of mine about this problem, and she said, "You should go to therapy." And I thought about it, and I thought, "Well, wait a minute. Why should I pay a stranger to listen to me talk when I can get strangers to pay to listen to me talk?" So that's when I came up with the idea of touring, and I thought, "Now I have to write a show." So I thought, "What do I want to say?" What do I want to talk about? So I sat down at my desk and I was staring at my desk and I thought, wow, that's dusty. I can't write with my desk all dusty like this. So I went downstairs to get a rag and on the way downstairs my kitten was on the stairway playing with a piece of dust or something. And I went to pet the kitten because it did the thing where they roll on their back and show you the belly. And you gotta reward that. You can't pass that up. So I sat down, I was petting the cat for about, I don't know, 45 minutes, something like that. And then I went downstairs, and by that time I'd forgotten why I went downstairs. And I was staring around trying to remember, and I thought, "I should paint this room." I wonder what color this is. It looks like a white, but I'm sure there's some fancy name for it. All these people— what kind of job is that, to come up with a name for paint colors? You know, all the different color whites. Like eggshell or linen or lily or Off, all the different ones, you know. And then I thought maybe yellow, you know, canary or banana or smoker's teeth, you know, something that would be— I thought I've got it right. So maybe if I put music on, it'd be more inspiring. So I went over to the cabinet where I keep all my CDs. You should have seen that thing. Total disarray. Just, oh, everything. Meatloaf was next to the cranberries, which I thought it'd be funny one night to organize it by food when I was drunk. Really nothing else was in there except bread. And, um, just all kinds of weird— like the Doors and the Carpenters and Nine Inch Nails were together. And that That doesn't help anything. So, um, I thought, I've got to organize this. I can't put this off. And so I'm sitting in the hundreds of CDs, and the phone rang, and it was a friend of mine. I said, I can't talk, I'm writing. And so she said, I can't believe you, you're so disciplined. I have such a problem with procrastination. And I said, well, we should go to lunch and talk about that. So we went to lunch, and We were talking about procrastination and the waitress overheard us and she said, "I have a problem with procrastination too." I said, "Really? Get my sandwich." And so— but that's when it hit me, that's what I should talk about, procrastination. That's a problem everybody has. That's universal, procrastination. And then I said, "Oh, who am I kidding? I'm never gonna get around to writing about procrastination." And so my friend said, "That's why I brought this videotape. If you watch this guy, he keeps you focused, he keeps you on track. You'll never procrastinate again." So about a week later, I pop in the tape. I find that if you don't press play right away, something's on TV.

It took me almost 10 years, man, to finish this book. From the first time I talked about this book And you say, "E.T., how did it happen? How did you get to a place where you stopped talking about it and you completed it?" Alright, I wanna share this with you. I got tired, right? Carl, can you go to the book and just show them the chapter that says "Enough is Enough"? Alright, I don't wanna give you the book before you get the book, but I just wanna show you because I want you to know I'm not just talking about this because of TGIM. I'm writing about it because it's my story. And so I got tired. Tired of what? I got tired of people asking me, "Yo, E.T." Where you at with the book, right? And I'm telling you, I don't know what happened. I'mma keep it real with you. I'd always write the book every year. I would start and I would go chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3, and for some reason I couldn't get past chapter 3 every single year, alright? So I picked the book up, I start, boom, chapter 1, I get chapter 1, I get chapter 2, I get chapter 3, I set the book down, alright? All kind of stuff happening. You know, sports, I'm playing video games, I'm going to the movies. Look, all kind of stuff happening, right? And then I finally got to a place where I got to chapter 4, and then I'd stop. And this year was the first year that I said to myself, E.T., enough is enough, right? Look, yesterday, yesterday, I made my last excuse yesterday. And I'm talking to somebody, the reason why you have not become successful, the reason why you are not like a locomotive The reason why you're not having success in your life is because every single day you got an excuse. I need you to do me a favor. I made my last excuse yesterday. My last reason. I came up with my last reason yesterday of why I can't do what I'm supposed to do. And so I need you to do me a huge favor. All your excuses, all your good reasons, everything, every, everything that's keeping you from doing what you're supposed to do, I need you to put it behind you and say yesterday was the last day for that foolishness. Yesterday was the last day to say I don't have enough money to do this, I don't have enough money to go to school, I don't have enough money to get a computer, I don't have what it takes, I'm not smart enough, right? I don't write well enough, I don't sing well enough, that's why I didn't do my CD, I didn't write my book because I'm not on that level. Listen to me, you better hear what I'm saying. Yesterday was the last day that I want to hear an excuse. It's over with.

The Magic of Thinking Big. This was recommended to me by one of the most successful one of the biggest product designers and licensers, licensors in the world. Millions of dollars a year licensing to people like Nestlé, Coca-Cola, etc. The magic of thinking big. So many people procrastinate because their goals lack balls, quite frankly. Their goals are just uninspiring. They're intended to be realistic and therefore they don't motivate you to plow through or dodge the inevitable hurdles and emotional difficulty and ups and downs that you'll face. And the example that sometimes I give is, you know, the trip to whatever, pick a city up, no matter what I pick, I'm gonna insult somebody. Let's say trip to Cincinnati for the weekend or trip to the Greek islands. All right, so trip to Cincinnati might be more realistic in terms of cost and logistics, attainable perhaps. It's more likely to get put off in many cases because it's simply uninspiring. To most people. Greek islands, alright, you'll put your head down and just pike through brick walls to get to that, or you'll put up at least with the scrapes and bruises along the way. So number 1 is the magic thinking game. You really need to up the ante in most cases with what you're aiming for to even generate the willpower to do it. And in that case, it's not you that's the problem, it's the goal. You've ended up picking. That's the issue.

Start habitualizing or ritualizing or systemizing or routinizing those things that are the most important things and start doing them every day at the same time. And what you'll find is that especially in the work arena, in business, if you will make rituals and routines out of the very high-value things in your life, every day you'll do them at the same time automatically. Because if you think about it, you already do the same things every day at the same time automatically. When we procrastinate, what we're usually doing is resisting doing something different than we normally do. Right? We have our routines that we're in. We're all creatures of habit. We like to do the same things at around the same times every day. And when we're procrastinating, what we're doing is going, "Oh, I don't really want to do that thing right now." Sometimes we don't know why. We're coming up with a bunch of excuses. It's usually just because it's not a habit. It's not a routine. It's not something that we do automatically every day. As an example, I struggled for years with trying to get my sleep and my exercise and my diet all in shape. Well, that all changed when I built a simple routine where I go to sleep at the same time, I wake up around the same time, and then I do my exercise first thing, and then I eat a healthy meal first thing. And then I just made a routine out of that. So I go to sleep, I get enough sleep, I wake up, first thing that I do is I make sure that I get my exercise, and then I have a healthy meal. And now I'm pulled into these routines every day, and I don't have to worry about procrastinating because it's a ritual. It's something that I do the same every day. Now it takes 30 days or so to actually create a new habit, so you gotta Force yourself to do it at the same time every day. At 2 to 3 weeks, you'll notice it gets easier and easier. And then at about a month, you're just doing the exact same thing every day. You're pulled into it. You find yourself doing it automatically.

My final one. You gotta get sick and tired of defeat. Aren't you tired of getting beat? Aren't you tired of being on the losing end? I want you to know what it feels like to finish something. I can't explain to y'all. My life has gone to a whole other level. When I finish that 4-year degree, when I finish that master's degree, when I finish my book. Can I explain to you how my life has changed in just one month? The fact that the people know I'm finished with the book, I'm getting engagements that I never got before. I got companies calling me that never called me before, not because I finished the book, but because I finished something. They see me as a person that follows through, and I want you to know, when I used to feel defeat, it felt bad, but there's a total different feeling when you accomplish stuff. You got a different level of credibility from people. People see you different. People are willing to do things for you that they've never done before. You have credibility that you never had before. And so I encourage you, I encourage you, follow through, finish. Yo, it's your boy ET. Listen to me, you heard what I told you before. I told you in the last episode when my aunt died. Listen to me, I just buried my aunt, alright? I just buried my aunt a couple days ago. But sometimes in life you gotta more, you got, it's a There's a time and season for all, but then you gotta get up. Your wife died, get up. You got a divorce, get up. You failed a test, get up. You got kicked out of college on academic probation, get up. Get up, right? Forget the past because that's exactly what it is, the past. And make the rest of your life the best of your life.

Okay, the 4th thing that I personally did to beat procrastination and to achieve impossible things, my most meaningful goals, was to Create distraction-free environments. Now I want to share two things with you. I read recently André Agassi's fantastic book Open. And in Open, he talks about the fact that when it comes to his tennis bag, no one touches it. And when he was asked, "Why can't anyone touch your tennis bag?" He said, "Because when there's disorder in my tennis bag, there's distraction in my mind." Similarly, when there's disorder in there's disorder in your home, when there's disorder in your physical environments, when there's too much distraction, you will not be focused, you will procrastinate, and you will not get big things done. I guess what I'm suggesting to you is in your work environments, whatever those work environments are, if there's distraction, if there's Facebook notifications on, if there's mess, all of those things will allow you or encourage you to procrastinate. You'll check your Facebook feed, you'll check Twitter. If there's papers around, what you'll do is you'll start picking up the papers. What you want to do as much as possible, what I personally did that was really another game changer was these distraction-free work environments. Even when you read the fantastic Walter Isaacson book, Steve Jobs, in here he talks about NeXT. That was the company he went to after he was thrown out of Apple.

Apple.

And one of the first things he did when he went to Next, he painted everything white. And they asked him like, why is everything white? Why is everything so perfect? Why are there no distractions anywhere? There's nothing on the walls, even the manufacturing facilities, all white. He said, because I want to be able to think really clearly. I don't want to be distracted. I want to get my most important mission done. So the fourth idea that worked for me, I know it'll work for for you is distraction-free environments. Clean out the distractions, work alone as much as possible, get rid of the clutter because mess creates stress, it diminishes your focus, and it allows you or encourages you to procrastinate.

We give ourselves so many excuses, you know, we always hear these excuses of why aren't people getting ahead and what their major challenges are and how come they haven't started, but I think my favorite excuse is sort of, it's the prettiest excuse that you ever hear. It's that, it's, I call it the perfectionist lie. You know, it's the perfectionist. It's the person who says, "Oh, you don't understand. I can't get ahead in my life because, you know, I'm a perfectionist." Or, "Brendon, I haven't completed that project because you don't understand, I'm a perfectionist. I care about excellence, so I have not completed that yet." And it's just, it's just this great vain sort of abstract lie where people blame their personality, right? It's like, "I'm a perfectionist, so I can't get it done." I just think that is the most beautiful little lie because really, if a perfectionist was honest with themselves, at least they'd be precise. They'd be able to say, "You know what? I have not started or completed that thing because I am unsure or I am distracted," right? That's really the truth. Unsure of what to do, so they don't begin, or they're distracted, so they don't complete, or even if they do complete and they don't ultimately share that thing or ship that thing, then the perfection, the challenge there is really just fear of judgment, fear of rejection. And at some point, we have to be mature and honest with ourselves and stop saying, "Well, it's because I'm so perfect that this isn't done," and say, "Actually, Maybe it's because I'm a lazy ass, or maybe it's because I'm letting the world distract me and rip me away from my passions and my day because I haven't taken control over my time. I haven't taken control over the responsibilities I have and arranged them so I can focus on my real passions, my real desires, my real dreams. You know, at some point we just have to be conscious enough to say, oh wow, I'm not moving forward because I'm scared. I haven't completed this because I'm distracted. And realizing that that scaring feeling, that fear of rejection or failure, it's not gonna go away, and it's not supposed to. There's some big ideological belief out there that we're never supposed to feel fear. The time that we finally fear no fear, we can go ahead and crush it in the world. The fear is not going away. It's always going to be there. I've been backstage about to go out in front of thousands and thousands of people terrified out of my brains. If I sat back there and waited until I was super strong and perfect and certain to go out on stage, I'd never be able to surf. You know, you hear from the great rock stars, the great public figures, the great people who, who've moved the needle of the world. They were terrified. They were scared, but they didn't stop. Even with the failure, even with the failure on their mind, even with the fear in their body, that impulse running, they did it anyway because they used their higher conscious, their higher desire to serve, and they let that— what if instead of being overwhelmed by fear, we became overwhelmed by our sense of faith? Why, we let ourself overwhelm ourselves and say, "Yes, the fear is there, but I'm going to proceed anyway because I can make my difference." You know, what if instead of getting distracted and keep blaming our distractions on perfection, we actually said, "You know what? I'm always gonna be distracted. There's always gonna be some new thing in the world, some new responsibility, some new whim or want of the people around me to pull me from my very sense of freedom." my freedom and happiness and joy in life, my very progress. I'm not going to compromise my day to serve everybody else in a way in which I can't at least complete the things that are meaningful to me. You know, we, we at some point have to take ownership of our lives and realize, no, it's not because we're pretty and we're perfect. It's because we are scared and our lives are messy and we haven't got control of it yet. So this day, let's start that. Let's be okay with the fear. Let's be okay with the fact that everything's gonna be messy, but at least begin, at least complete it. Because you know what? Nothing is perfected anyway until it's completed, right? First it has to be completed, then we can tinker and tweak it and perfect it. A lot of our major brands and the major tools and technologies, they release things, they complete things, they release them as beta. Then they perfect them, get them better and better and better and better. But at least they released, at least they completed, at least they started serving and getting their things in the marketplace. So let's do that. Let's get to work today. Let's stop fooling ourselves and saying, oh well, it's just got to be so perfect, so I'm not going to begin because you don't understand, Brendon. I have to have, I have to have things perfect because that's just important to me. You know what? How about you have them done? How about you have them out there? How about you have them serving people? How about you have the difference being made even if it's not totally right, then get it right and more right and more right and more right after you complete it. This is the time to complete those projects you've been waiting on. Don't fear them, get them done. Don't be distracted by everybody else's thing, manage your time better. Take back control, get your stuff out there and you'll see see the difference you can make in the world.

Thank you guys so much for watching. I made this video of Believe Life because one of you asked me to, and I can't see who it is because I did not, I did not download my notebook on Evernote. So whoever it was, thank you so much. If you have a request for the next edition of Believe Life, leave it in the comments below and I'll see what I can do.

And we want to know what's the biggest thing you've ever procrastinated on?

I like it. Leave it in the comments below and we'll join in the discussion. Thank you guys so much for watching. Have an amazing day. Continue to believe and we'll see you soon.

The first thing to do to stop procrastinating is to stop trying to do things that don't matter. Okay, stop trying to get yourself to do things that you know you're never going to do anyway. Give yourself permission to cross off the list all the stuff you're never going to do anyway. This just like dumps a mental load off your brain. You feel lighter, you feel like, "Oh, right, exactly. I'm never going to do that anyway, so why was I even thinking about it?" So first thing, get it off your list.

The last thing I'll say is set your bar— this seems almost the antithesis of the goal recommendation, but it's not. Macro level, you have a big goal. Micro level, on let's say a daily basis, you need a small goal. IBM salespeople killed everyone in the industry for ages, and part of the reason was their quotas were set very, very low, which meant they were not intimidated to pick up the phone and make calls because they knew they would, almost knew with 100% certainty that they would hit their quotas. This is counterintuitive, but also one of the most successful ghostwriters of writers I know. He's written 60 books. I mean, how the hell do you do that? He is prolific and super consistent, and I asked him how he does it, and he said, "Two shitty pages. That is my quota. Every day I have to write two shitty pages. That's it. If I write two shitty pages, that day is a win." So you need to set that bar very low or you won't get started. If you then exceed that, let's say two pages, Well, then you can end up with, like it or hate it, a book like The 4-Hour Body, which is 570-some pages after cutting 150. So even for the biggest, you need to have small goals on a micro daily basis so that you are not inhibited from taking action.

The third way that I beat procrastination is through the power of exercise. Now, you may have heard me talk about exercise before, but this is a little different, and I want to show you something It's sort of an acronym. The third way that I beat procrastination is a second wind workout. 2WW is the acronym.

And here's the idea.

The latest research is actually revealing that when we exercise, we actually rewire the way our brains work. We create massive resistance against chronic stress. We release endorphins when we exercise. We release norepinephrine. We release dopamine and we release serotonin. What does that mean to you? It means that when you exercise, not only in the morning, but a second wind workout. So work out for 20 minutes or 30 minutes first thing in the morning, okay? And then what you do is around 4 or 5 o'clock— this is an incredible strategy that really changed the game for me— around 4 o'clock or 5 o'clock or 6 o'clock, you go for another 30-minute workout. And here's the The primary principle is really this: exercise is one of the best productivity tools or peak performance tools known to humankind. So if you go for that second wind workout, you release all the endorphins, you start feeling very strong, you jumpstart your metabolic rate, you find you almost get an extra day every day because in the evening you're full of energy, you're full of focus. There was actually a study that was done at University of Toronto. Two groups of people, one exercised one group didn't. The group that exercised actually had more focused, better learning powers, and stronger memory than the non-exercisers. So the point is, take a Second Win workout every single day, and it'll dramatically improve the way that you beat— no, destroy— procrastination.