James Lim delivers ten hard truths about action and procrastination: ideas mean nothing without execution, you stay in toxic situations because you avoid leaving, and breaking promises to yourself destroys your confidence. Time keeps slipping away while you make excuses.
Chapters
I'm going to go over 10 increasingly painful truths that I feel I learned the hard way. But once I learned to accept them, it drastically put me on track and helped me sort my life out and get me motivated. So let's get started. Number one, no one cares about the ideas you have and never execute on. And they're probably fed up of hearing you talk about them. Just think about it. How many times have you heard someone, they've mentioned, they've mentioned an idea about starting a business, putting themselves out there, writing, writing a book, all these kind of things. And the next time you see them, they keep saying the same thing. They get excited and they talk about it and it keeps going around time and time again and you're just thinking, what's the point in you saying that? Right? Because you're not starting it. Well, it's very easy to be caught out. And you being that person, I mean I've been that person. Someone actually called me out on this years ago. It was really, really painful. Anyway, get your head down and get on with it. Okay, now this will be a theme for, for a lot of these points because it's all about taking action. Now number two, people less knowledgeable and intelligent than you will do better because they're executing. It's so easy to just get obsessed and binge on all of these courses and learning more knowledge. There's so much information out there and it's so quickly available to us. The problem is you get theory wise, right, but not in terms of the practice of it and, and what it's like to do it and the feelings you will get when you try and do it and you realize it's really difficult and maybe you fail at certain things. That side of it is so much harder. I noticed this because I had a few friends who were not so intelligent in the traditional sense and they'd like left school but they started their own thing. And now quite a few of them are really successful. I remember nearly looking down on them in some way because I had gone the traditional route of acquiring knowledge, you know, going studying and all of this stuff. But really I was just picking up all this theory and not taking any action and they just sailed ahead so far, so far forward. And now, you know, a few of them are people who have helped me out and mentored me. So again, you've got to get your head down now. 3. Most of your business is procrastination disguised as productivity. I find this where you get to the end of the day and you feel like you're exhausted and you've been doing so many other things. Now many of those things you do actually have to do, but there are lots of things that you, that you spent a lot of your time and energy, energy on but didn't really get you anywhere toward your kind of long term goals and you end up not doing the things that matter the most. You have to try and focus in on what your priorities are and what will really move the needle in your life. Right. Number four, no one is going to change your situation. For you. It is incredibly easy to sit there and blame other parties around you. Sometimes you're in a bad team, managers are bad, your company is bad, the people around you. But if you're sitting there and not trying to move yourself from that situation, it's very unlikely to change. Number five, the feeling of potential you have probably won't see the light of day. Maybe you feel like you have a lot more to give to the world and you're kind of sitting there thinking, oh, one day I'll be able to show the world about this. The reality is it probably won't happen because it requires the steps above, right? To start working at something, to start taking some action in this way for you to tease out what this potential is. It won't just magically happen. And many of these things, even with your potential, you still require skill sets and you won't gain those skill sets just by thinking about it and just by reading about stuff. It will require you to do something. So the reality is it probably won't ever happen. So you might as well get comfortable there. Now, talking about comfort, there's another one. If you're in a toxic environment, work, being mistreated in certain way, relationships, if you, if you are not willing to do the painful thing and be uncomfortable, have difficult conversations, you're probably going to be in that situation for a lot longer than you think because that friction for you on a day to day basis override doing the necessary thing to get you out of that situation. Okay, Number seven, no one likes hearing you complain constantly, then not doing anything about it, just flip it on its head again. If you hear someone coming to you complaining about their life situation constantly the first time, understandable. And maybe some, some empathy there and maybe some help, but then they go away and they don't do anything about it. Then they come back and they complain. They spend the whole time talking to you, complaining about it. Then they go away and don't do anything. How does that feel for you? Probably not good. If you're that person. Think about how the person you're talking to would feel. If you're going to complain, at least try and be proactive about the situation and do something. Number eight, constantly breaking promise to yourself is a cause of low self confidence. Essentially. If you're not showing up, what have you got to show? You've got very little evidence to show that you can do whatever you say you're going to do. And then it's very difficult to be confident about anything because you're going to be confident when you feel a degree of certainty that something can happen. And if you keep breaking promises to yourself, it's very unlikely to happen. Number nine, no one wants to hear your excuses. I mean, this is pretty obvious, right? How many times do people hear. Do you hear excuses? And you can feel yourself eye rolling? You don't want to hear it. It's painful. No one wants to hear them. Okay? And 10, your life is slipping away from you while you do nothing, unfortunately, the years just accelerate away from you. And before you know it, you, you've been coasting through life, same routine, same everything, and life just slips away. Now, if you are enjoying your life right now, then that's fantastic. But the people I'm usually speaking to are people who are not enjoying where they are right now. The problem is that the kind of the, the sand timer is just ticking, right? The sand is falling and before you know it, you won't have much of it left and it'll be even harder to move once you have been stuck in that same position for a very long time. Right? That's all for today.
