Subtle mental brake that sabotages any chance of ever escaping procrastination
If you’ve ever wondered why no productivity advice ever works for you, at least not for long, here’s what might be stopping you. It certainly stopped me for far too long.
Most people are aware that if they want their life to be different, their actions need to be different, and ultimately, that means they have to part ways with at least part of who they currently are.
Long story short, we fear change. But it is a 100% irrational fear, and dissolving this fear is the first and absolutely crucial step that a lot of people ignore, which keeps them indefinitely stuck.
Imagine you were born in a prison cell. That’s all you’ve ever known. Life there sucks, but there is one thing that makes it a bit more manageable: there’s a PlayStation in your cell, which you can play at any time to alleviate the suffering of the prison cell, at least a little bit.
Now imagine, after years in prison, someone threatens to take this PlayStation away from you. It would trigger horror, panic, and an existential crisis. Understandably.
But now imagine that after 20 years, someone comes to you and gives you the key to the prison cell. You are free to go at any time, but you have to leave the PlayStation behind. The one thing that made your life at least somewhat manageable.
The thought of losing it would still cause panic and horror. After all, you have never lived life outside, so you have no experience of how much more exciting it is, or that you probably wouldn’t even bother playing PlayStation anymore.
So, there’s no rational reason not to leave the prison cell today, the same way there’s no rational reason to postpone working on your goals until tomorrow. But fear is not always rational, and it’s the reason why even the best and easiest to implement productivity advice will fail you:
Because you are afraid it might actually work, which would bring change to your life, which on one hand you fantasize about, but on the other hand you are also irrationally afraid of.
I will leave it to you to explore what your fears might be about. But regardless of what they are, here’s a mental note that helped me enormously:
You can always go back to your prison cell and PlayStation if it turns out life outside sucks. There are no long-term commitments to be made today, just taking a peek outside and only then deciding whether you want to go back or stay for at least a little while.