PNTV: The Now Habit by Neil Fiore (#87)

Hey, this is Brian. Welcome to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we've got a book called the Now Habit. This is my Kindle on which that book exists. The Now Habit, by a guy named Neil Fiore, who is awesome. So if you've ever been a procrastinator or maybe are currently a procrastinator, you would love this book. I am definitely one who has fallen prey to procrastination. It was awesome to check out this book and to see what the root causes are of procrastination, because procrastination isn't the problem. It's really just masking the underlying issues of perfectionism and being overwhelmed and being afraid of failure and things like that. So this book looks at those things and underlying issues and provides some really powerful big ideas on how we can move through our procrastination by developing more compassion for ourselves, more realistic goals, and learning to take the baby steps that we talk about all the time toward our goals and enjoy the process. So we're going to look at a few of my favorite big ideas in this six page PDF Philosopher's Note. Really excited about it. So, as I mentioned, the procrastination is really just kind of the surface level of the underlying issues of perfectionism, where we just have silly standards of can't be imperfect at all or being overwhelmed when we set just kind of silly goals. And what we want to do is look at those a little bit more closely. Specifically, one of my favorite big ideas. Excuse me, I'm back. Take a breath there. Favorite big ideas. Now that I've gotten through my need to be perfect, we'll keep on rolling. Is from Tal Ben Shahar's Pursuit of Perfect, another book on perfectionism that's one of the hundred we profile. Awesome book. Good guy. He says we need to look at our comfort zone. We want to move out of our comfort zone, but we don't want to move into our panic zone. We want to find what he calls our stretch zone, where we have reasonable, you know, exciting, even exhilarating goals that are a stretch for us, but they're not panic goals. We're not being an idiot about it. And it's a big thing because I certainly have gotten into what I call the self dev jackass mode, where I'm all about the most ridiculous, audacious goals in the most ridiculous, audacious and frankly, just insane timelines. And I feel a lot of stress, a lot of overwhelm, which leads to procrastination, which leads to the very fear of not being able to achieve these goals coming to fruition. So what we want to do is set stretch goals, where we're setting appropriate goals that are totally within our abilities and finding that comfortable stretch, but not getting into panic. So that was a huge thing for me that he talked about and. And that Tal Ben Shahar talks about. That's been really helpful for me is just setting more reasonable goals and then focusing on what I'm going to produce and then we're going to get to actually we're going to jump ahead. What can we do? What's the next small step we can take? I talk about this all the time. We talk about the dynamic tension quite a bit. We just did the PNTV episode on the Power of Ted. Highly recommend that book. And that note in that episode, if you haven't checked it out, where we talk about the rubber bands holding our ideals in our current reality, the dynamic tension. The way you deal with that dynamic tension is by taking baby steps. He's got this great idea. He says, rather than get overwhelmed or stressed about what we're moving toward or feel ashamed for all the things we haven't achieved in our lives, ask yourself, when you're feeling stressed, what's one small corrective step I can take right now? Just what's one small corrective step I can take in this moment right now? Because the reality is, all we need to do is take that step and then the next step. Keep on asking ourselves that question. And it's amazing when we channel all the energy that used to go into the fear and the doubt and the wondering or the obsessive planning and goal setting and we put it into taking action consistently, we feel so much better and we're actually moving in the direction of our goals, which is always a good thing. So that's a big idea, to dissolve some of the tension, taking one small corrective step. It's actually a huge idea. Another really big idea from the book that I put into the note was this idea of keeping track of what we do with our time. He suggested for a few days we keep a log of what we do when. It's an amazing thing to bring awareness to what our habits are and we can see what we want to do more of and what we want to do less of. What we tend to do when we start to procrastinate and when we're more on. It's an awesome practice. Really recommend it, just for a few days. Just take note of what you're doing during the day. You'll find that even Just taking note of it is going to change your behavior because you don't want to write down wasted another hour online, just drank five more beers. The moment you bring awareness to your life, our behaviors change. It's a really cool thing. So one of the ideas that I actually didn't talk about in the note, but I'm really passionate about doing in my own life is Stephen Covey has his four quadrant model. Quadrant two is doing things that are important and not urgent. Quadrant 4 is doing things that are not important and not urgent. Right. We talk about that more in the note on his 7 Habits of Highly effective people. And I'm going to do a whole separate video on this. But for now what I'm doing is I'm noticing when I'm doing useless stuff, not important, not urgent. Right. And I'm translating that and transferring that energy into quadrant two stuff, which is not urgent but important. You know, a little stretching I'll do or a little rebounding here. And when I'm not distracting myself by being online so much, which is my number one thing that I know I go to when I'm procrastinating, I go online and I'm being productive, but not really. And now I have some really aggressive goals that I'm hitting that are in my stretch zone that I want to get done before we go back to Bali in three months, including doing a lot of these episodes in one burst of time. And to do so, I don't turn on the computer until after I've hit my creative goals for the day and I've meditated and trained and worked out hard and done my journaling. It's just an amazing thing. Now I find that when I go online first thing in the morning, my creativity is almost non existent relative to where it is when I have the clarity and then the discipline to do what needs to be done. So this idea of transferring our useless time wasting activities into productive ones has been huge for me. We're going to talk about that more. So we talked about the whole one small corrective step. That's awesome. He's got this idea of changing. We need to move from victim to creator. When you're a procrastinator, you, you're in victim mode. You feel overwhelmed. You say things like, I have to do this or I have to do that. He says, let's get, let's remove have to from our vocabularies entirely. You always have a choice. You don't have to do anything. And if you're going to choose to do it. Then do it with all your heart and don't go at it like a victim. We're mature adults. If we're going to choose to go to that holiday party or to the dentist or whatever it is, we don't have to. We're choosing to become a creator, become empowered. Get rid of that disempowering language. It's pretty cool. On that theme, we talk about another big idea. He has replacement thoughts. He says, replace. I have to with I choose to replace. I must finish. I must finish this project. Replace that with when can I start? Get out of the fear of not finishing it. Okay. Or on time or perfectly and get into the mode of taking action. When can I start? Not I have to finish this by this time, but when can I start? Oh, I can start right now. I'll do this little small step. Really cool idea. He says, switch out. This project is so big and important. With I can take one small step. Just transfer. Learn to get out of procrastinator into what he calls producer mode. Really cool. He says switch out. Replace. I must be perfect to I am perfectly human, which means I'm not perfect, and that's great. And finally, replace. I don't have time to play with. I must take time to play. He's big on creative play and just allowing yourself to do stuff that's just fun. And when we're keeping track of our logs during the day, we can take that really unproductive time that we're wasting and put it into fun time that we really enjoy. So lots of other stuff we can cover. Again, if you're a procrastinator, I think you'll love the book and I think you'll dig the note. Both this one and the pursuit of po. Perfect. The final idea here is we want to move from procrastinator to producer. Just read a Seth Godin book called Gosh, I don't remember. Linchpin. Awesome book. He says, the number one thing about me is I ship. I get to market. I'm a producer. I know it's not gonna be perfect, but I get to market. So we want to become producers rather than procrastinators. So that's a quick look at this great book. The now habit. Let's get over our procrastination by getting rid of the perfectionism, the overwhelm from unrealistic goals. And have fun taking baby steps. That's it. Go out and rock it. Hope you dug it. Talk to you soon. Have an awesome day. See you.