How To Overcome Procrastination 1. Turn your want into a need 2. Get excited about your desired outcome 3. Make striving for your goals a central part of your identity 4. Reward yourself when you get after it 5. Punish yourself when you're lazy ~Tom Bilyeu
Hunter Powers: How to overcome procrastination? Step one, turn your want into a need. Step two, get excited about your desired outcome. Step three, make striving for your goals a central part of your identity. Step four, reward yourself when you get after it. Step five, punish yourself when you're lazy. All said, Tom Bilyeu. I am Hunter Powers and you are listening to the ONE, One Idea, broadcasting live from our nation's capitol, DC Proper, Washington, DC.
Hunter Powers: So this idea for today comes from an image Tom tweeted out of him holding a giant whiteboard with these five steps on how to overcome procrastination. If you're not familiar with Tom at all, he's probably most famous for creating the Quest bar, the nutrition bar that became quite popular, which he sold off for a lot of money. And now he's diversified into many different businesses, but also does a fair bit of leadership, training, and investigation, and lots of really good interviews around the subject.
Hunter Powers: So today we're going to take a look at Tom's idea on how to overcome procrastination. So we have five steps. What do we think about them? Do they make sense? Is there something to unpack there? Do they work? When will they not work? Is there anything novel about them? I don't know. That's why we're here though.
Hunter Powers: Let's go over the five steps one more time and then we'll start making our way into each one and see what we can find. So once again, how to overcome procrastination? Step one, turn your want into a need. Step two, get excited about your desired outcome. Step three, make striving for your goals a central part of your identity. Step four, reward yourself when you get after it. Step five, punish yourself when you are lazy. Five steps and apparently procrastination just goes away.
Hunter Powers: All right, here we go. Step one, turn your wants into a need. Now I happen to know that Tom, amongst probably many others, follows Tony Robbins. And I've been to a few Tony Robbins events, and I know that one of Tony's things is that in life you don't get what you want. You get what you have to have. And one way of looking at your life is that it's the absolute minimum that you're willing to accept. That is the current state of your life. Because you only get what you have to have. You don't get what you want.
Hunter Powers: I think that's probably a little bit of what Tom is tapping into with point number one, turn your want into a need. So you're starting ... We're talking about procrastination. It usually is revolving around some sort of a goal or some sort of a task that you know you need to get after, but you're not. You're not starting. You're not beginning the journey. So Tom's first note is that you're probably not beginning the journey because it's not something that you truly need to have. It's just a want. Because if it was a need, if your life depended on it, if you're going to be dead 60 seconds from now if you didn't start, you would have already started. But you haven't. Why haven't you? Because it's just a need. Yeah, I need it, but I don't have to have it. Again, the fact that you didn't start is just evidence that you didn't have to have it, right? You're still here. Maybe there's even a smile on your face. But that task hasn't moved one step closer towards completion. And why? Because it's not a have to have. It's not a need.
Hunter Powers: I think I agree with that basic principle. But the challenge is doing it. How do you turn your want into a need? I mean, I guess it's easy when it's something grand. I don't know about that because a lot of times the grand things require grand effort. I was thinking in my head of like just a simple example. I want something from Chipotle but I'm not going there right now, because I don't know. I got to go to my car. I got to drive over there. There's probably a long line. Last time it wasn't all that great anyways. I don't know. I don't know that I'm really going to do it. Very clearly it's not, it's not a need. I don't need Chipotle to make it through the next hour. So how would I turn that from a want into a need?
Hunter Powers: I think Tom's next four steps might be about that, how do you turn your want into a need. And I think that's how I'm going to read this. So while Tom has said this as five separate steps, I actually think that the next four steps are kind of sub bullets of the first step. So the simple answer for how to overcome procrastination is to turn your wants into a need.
Hunter Powers: Next question, how do you turn your want into a need? And then Tom has the following four bullets. The first one is to get excited about your desired outcome. You have to imagine what it will be like when you do the very thing that you're putting off, how will you feel. You must be doing it for a reason, right? There's something that you want from it. Put yourself in that head space. It's that Chipotle and it's going to come out perfect and oh my. Or it's the promotion that you're going after? Or it's the new relationship? What will it be like? How will you experience it? And it better be exciting.
Hunter Powers: If it's not exciting, because I don't know, maybe rethink this, the whole task that you're doing anyways. But let's assume that you can get excited about it, that you can think exactly what it's going to be like the moment you accomplish it. Then I guess it's really about getting back to the roots of why you want to do this thing in the beginning. Why did you set out on this journey? There must've been something. Let's identify it. Let's get excited about it.
Hunter Powers: And in the next bullet, make striving for your goals a central part of your identity. We've gotten excited about it, but now it's connecting it back to who we are. And again, turning it from a want into a need. If accomplishing this goal is part of your identity, part of who you are, and it could be a simple, like we used the trivial example of I'm going to go get some Chipotle. You're like, "Well, how does that ever become part of your identity?"
Hunter Powers: Maybe part of your identity is when you say you're going to do something, you go do it. You don't think twice. You go and grab it. You make it yours. That's my Chipotle. Or if it's a ... We just use the example of a promotion. It's a promotion. Well, that new job title, job description, day to day task, that will define who you are and will allow you to achieve several things after it. And if that starts becoming part of the story that you tell yourself about you, who you are, what you do, what you're capable of, and you see that, then the gap between not having that and getting it, it becomes a need.
Hunter Powers: The next bullet, reward yourself when you get after it. I think the most common sort of reward, there's the old ... What is it? The stick or the carrot. And I guess it kind of covers both here, with reward and the punishment. We're starting with reward. That's the carrot. You hold the carrot out in front and it keeps you motivated to go forward.
Hunter Powers: So what most people do is they come up with some kind of a reward that they will give themselves when they accomplish this thing. It's that promotion. Maybe you'll go on the vacation. Maybe you'll get the new car. It's often a physical thing. It doesn't need to be, but it often is. There's this thing that you will, you'll treat yourself with. That's probably the most common. The second most common, I think is, I'm going to go treat myself so that I'm ready to do this thing, ready to overcome this procrastination. I'll give myself a little jumpstart with a nice vacation right now so that I'm going to be relaxed and I'm going to come back and I'm going to go hard.
Hunter Powers: By the way, that's probably what I do more than I should. I figure out what the goal ... what the reward should be for the goal, and then I just divvy it out right away. And boy, that's a trap because now you've gotten the reward for doing the thing and you're never going to do the thing, because why should you? You already got the reward.
Hunter Powers: So I do like what Tom is suggesting here, which is that the correct placement for the reward is after you get going, because the real challenge is overcoming the procrastination, overcoming the coefficient of static friction. There's far more energy required to get an object moving than there is to keep it moving because we have this concept of momentum. I think what Tom correctly identifies is that you want to use all your extra gas to get you going because once you're going, as long as this is indeed a need, you're going to stay going.
Hunter Powers: So Tom says, insert that reward after you've gotten after it. But go back to Tony Robbins for a second. Tony says, "Motion creates emotion. When you're stuck, just get up and start moving, and that that alone will start connecting you with what you need to be doing. And then it's all about creating massive action towards your goal."
Hunter Powers: So Tom's last bullet is punish yourself when you're lazy, that there has to be some consequence when you don't move forward. This ties back to the idea of setting your boat on fire, that when the new explorers would come to a new land where they're about to go into battle, they set their boat on fire so that retreating is not an option, and they march forth into the night, into their destiny.
Hunter Powers: So there has to be some way that you set your boat on fire once you get started. It has to cost more for you to stop than it will for you to continue forward. That's the point. I think finding that's challenging. Or it's really, it's not finding it, it's enforcing it because, okay, great. So you say, "Well, I want to go to the gym. I've got this new goal. I want to go to the gym four days a week. And you know what? If I don't go, I'm going to punish myself and I won't eat any ice cream that day." Okay, but good luck, good luck enforcing that. It's not going to work.
Hunter Powers: Or you've come up with a goal or a punishment and let's say, "Well, if I don't ..." Let's say I'm going for that promotion and there's some form of a certification that I need that's going to allow me to get it. "Well look, if I don't finish one chapter of the book for the certification every single day, I will pay a $10 fine to a charity." But that $10 isn't actually that much of a punishment. In fact, in some situations, yeah, take the $10, or maybe it's $100, or maybe it's even $1,000. It doesn't hurt. It doesn't sting.
Hunter Powers: Many people say the best way of doing these punishments ... Or it's really about holding yourself accountable. It's probably a better word than punishment. It's not about how do you punish yourself. It's about how do you hold yourself accountable, is by involving someone else. Having someone else that you're checking in with, that is this independent party. If you're exercising, have a trainer. But maybe there's a friend who you can say, "Look, if I call you every day, and I've either done this, I've either read the chapter, studied for it, I have. And if I haven't, you take these funds and you give them away." And it's got to be enough that it stings, that it will crush you if it happens.
Hunter Powers: Again, really it's just that it should cost more to go backwards than it does to go forward because otherwise your mind's going to seek that safe space. Why go forward, man? I could just go back. Look how nice it is back there. Before I started reading this horrible book, to take this horrible exam, get this new position, maybe I don't even want this position. No. Like I can guarantee your mind's going to go there, and you need to make it so that your mind doesn't have that option. And that's the punishment part.
Hunter Powers: But I also think that's the hardest part of this. The other thing is you can do yourself, that punishment, that's hard to do yourself. But I like this framework that Tom's put together. I think it borrows ideas from several other people, and I think that points two through five are really sub bullets of the first point, which is turn your want into a need. That's how you overcome procrastination.
Hunter Powers: I'll read it one more time in case you're taking notes. How to overcome procrastination? Step one, turn your want into a need. Step two, get excited about your desired outcome. Step three, make striving for your goals the central part of your identity. Step four, reward yourself when you get after it. Step five, punish yourself when you're lazy. That's all for today. Until next time, I am Hunter Powers.