PNTV - Time Warrior by Steve Chandler
17 Dec 2025 · 11 min
Steve Chandler's Time Warrior teaches you to beat procrastination by focusing on what's in front of you right now, stopping mental replays, and asking what your next action is. Resistance is growth, like a kite pulling against the wind.
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Hey guys, what's up? This is Brian with another Philosopher's Notes TV episode. This one's on another great book by Steve Chandler. Check him out. Stevechandler.com it's called time Warrior. How to Defeat Procrastination. People pleasing Self, Doubt over commitment. Broken promises and chaos. Who doesn't want to do that? So big ideas. This book and this note packed with big ideas. We'll start with Overwhelm. How to deal with that? We want to quit drawing monsters and watching horror films. It's a fun idea. We want to just get into action. 3 minutes. What can you do in 3 minutes? Taking decisive action. What's my next action? How to end procrastination. Here's a hint. Do what you're procrastinating on. Seriously flying a kite. We got to embrace the wind, AKA challenges in our lives. We're going to talk about killing hagfish. Pretty funny one. And you want to be proud of your time in hell. Pablo Coelho says you got to wear your scars like metals. Talk about that and there you go. Let's see how much we can get through. Start with overwhelm. One thing to do, Chandler tells us in a simple life in which you only do what's in front of you, there can be no overwhelm ever. That life is yours to create and it never arrives. It must be created. So if you want to get rid of overwhelm, focus on what's in front of you. There's never more than one thing in any given moment that you can do. Period. So focus on doing that one thing as impeccably as you can. Just take action again and again and again. It's an amazing way to deal with overwhelm. Try it out. Notice when you're feeling overwhelmed, you're trying to do too many things at once. Narrow it down, focus, get one thing done after another, after another, after another, etc. So next big idea here is called drawing monsters and watching Horror Films. He's got a great funny story about how great it would be if there was a movie created where some guy walks into a kind of an insane asylum type of place and he draws a picture. And then he screams at the picture that he drew with his crayons, right? Just freaks himself out. And he says, look, as crazy as that looks, we ourselves do that each day. We use our crayons, our imagination, to scare ourselves instead of to create horror movies. We all constantly play horror movies. In our minds again and again and again. Tony Robbins talks about that. He said, if you have a bad memory, why keep on replaying it to yourself again and again and again and again? That's like watching a terrible movie and paying for the admission again and again. It makes no sense. Vernon Howard calls them mental movies. The chief cause of unhappiness is these mental movies. Are these mental movies where we replay terrible scenes in our life again and again and again. So quit doing that. One way to quit doing that is to, as Steve says here, forget considerations of happiness and just get into action. Happiness is something you notice you are feeling later after you've been in action for a while. It's not something to worry about ahead of time. And don't hold your happiness hostage to the achievement of a long term goal. If you do that, happiness will always be in the future. Just get into action. Viktor Frankl, I quote him I don't know how many times in these notes. He says, don't pursue success. Success, like happiness, cannot be pursued. It must ensue. Isn't that beautiful? Cannot be pursued. It must ensue. And it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself, or as the byproduct of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen. Let your happiness follow you. Taking action. It's an amazingly powerful, simple idea. Just get into action. Get into that state of flow that comes when you are fully engaged in the moment. Here's an idea on how to do that. Keep your life creative and simple. What needs to be done now in these three minutes? What can I do in the next three minutes? Steve asks us, what can I do in the next three minutes? Focus your energy like a warrior. Focus your energy on this moment. The next three minutes. What can you do? You line up a day of that type of consistent action, you are going to feel great. It's that whole plus one minus one thing we talk about quite a bit. So, more on taking action. What do you want to do? What should you do if you're afraid? Steve quotes a friend of his who says, take decisive action and your fear won't matter. Take that decisive action enough times and your fear won't exist anymore. Take decisive action and your fear won't matter. Do it a lot and your fear won't exist anymore. Emerson echoes this. He says, always, always, always, always, always do what you're afraid to do. Yes, he uses that many always is. And he says, do the thing you fear, and the death of fear is certain. In order to be busy, George Bernard Shaw told us, you've got to have time to be miserable. Spit on your hands and get busy. Just get to work. Your blood will start circulating, your mind will start ticking, and pretty soon this whole positive upsurge of life in your body will drive worry from your mind. Get busy. Keep busy. It's the cheapest kind of medicine there is on the earth and one of the best. That's Dale Carnegie. How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. Great stuff. Another way to take action and be a time warrior. Ask yourself, what's my next action? Chandler tells us, I learned I can solve all this worry and decision making anxiety by taking action. By admiring action, by having action plans, by asking whenever stuck, what's my next action? And then doing that action now. Action, movement. Decisive energy solves most everything. Action, action, action. That is the key hallmark of a time warrior. Here's a fun one. How to end procrastination. What are the steps I should take to overcome procrastination? Someone asks Steve. He says, do the things you're procrastinating on. Those are the steps I would take. That is awesome. What are you procrastinating on? One, two, three. All right, that's step one. Now go do those three things. If you need to press pause and come back to this video, go do those three things. It's way more important than anything else you're going to do. Go take action on the things you're procrastinating about. It may sound absurdly simple, but guess what? It's pretty much what it takes. And don't resist your procrastination. I was actually chatting with Steve today and he was saying, you know, we can't give ourselves a hard time about procrastination. It's a good part of ourselves. We're not going to do every single thing someone wants us to do, but sometimes it rears our head in negative ways. We want to deal with that. Here's a cool way to look at challenges. Think about flying a kite. If you want to fly a kite, you need wind. You need resistance. Well, same with a great life. If you, if you want to fly your kite in life, you need resistance. Here's what Steve says. I can choose to perceive every circumstance as an opportunity to grow and stay on my mission. And if this opportunity is also challenging, it's even better. I have a chance to rise up like a kite rises against the wind. If there's no wind, the kite can't fly. Have you ever tried to fly a kite when there's no wind at all? Have you ever tried to have a great life when there's no challenge? If there's no challenge for me, I cannot become stronger. I cannot grow. If you're facing a challenge, perceive it this way. That challenge is moving you upwards just like a kite is moved by the wind's resistance. Really powerful stuff. We can always reinterpret our challenges in the most positive way as a gift for our own growth. Here's a cool idea. Hagfish. You ever heard of them?
Here's.
Here's the deal. Hagfish are these little creatures, blind, little eels, apparently slimy, deep water eel like creatures that dart into the orifices of their prey and devour them alive from the inside. Ick. That is a hagfish. Guess what? Chandler says we all have hagfish in our life.
Hagfish is in our life.
They are our worries about the future and our resentments about the past. We want to kill the hagfish in our life and then we can live in the now and maybe procrastinate later. So kill the hagfish stuff that's eating you from the inside out. And here's the final idea. Be proud of your time in hell. Drop the drama about your difficult past. Be proud of your time in hell. Amazing. It's another way to look at it. Paulo Coelho says, I don't regret the painful times. I bear my scars as if they were metals. We have a long Campbell quote quoting Nietzsche who says, look, you get to a point where you say, whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, this is what I need. It may look like a wreck, but go through it as if it were an opportunity, a challenge. And you will become stronger. So powerful. We want to approach life with that attitude. There you go. We could obviously talk about this for a entire week. That's a quick 10 minute look at Time Warrior. How to defeat procrastination. People pleasing self, Doubt over commitment. Broken promises and chaos. Hope you dug it. What was your favorite big idea? Time to put it in your life. Have a great day. See ya.
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