You’ll soon realize that you’re 100% committed to breathing.

Notice that you don’t make excuses not to breathe. Notice that you don’t worry about motivating yourself to breathe. Notice that you don’t need to justify your desire to breathe.

You just breathe.

Commitment is action.

No excuses. No debate. No lengthy analysis. No whining about how hard it is. No worrying about what others might think. No cowardly delays.

Just go.

What if something gets in the way of your commitment?

What would you do if someone tried to prevent you from breathing?

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Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Arbeit Macht Frei is a slogan on a sign above the entrance to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland (among other concentration camps used by the Nazis). It roughly translates as, “Work sets you free.” What the Nazis expressed with cruel irony, I say seriously. Embracing work is a path to freedom. Resisting work is a path to enslavement.

Much struggle is the result of hard work resisted, but hard work is more than just putting in the time. To ensure that hard work pays off, an intelligent effort is required.

Justifying Laziness

Laziness is an emotional impulse — a common desire to enjoy the pleasures of life before we’ve earned them — but it’s not a very effective or sustainable approach.

Do you need to earn the pleasures of life? That depends on what you want. If you want something that’s free or freely offered — by nature or by people — you can simply claim it. If you’re walking through a field and want to eat some of the wild plants, go ahead and enjoy nature’s bounty.

If, however, you desire something that was created by human hands (especially hands that expect to be fairly compensated for their efforts) such as a nice home or a speedy piece of technology, then laziness is largely a path to scarcity. Get used to being denied many of life’s benefits if your attitude is entrenched in laziness.

If you resist the emotion of laziness when you experience it, then the emotional feeling of laziness combined with your beliefs about what it means to be lazy will signal your brain to come up with plenty of logical-sounding justifications for your laziness-induced episodes, such as:

• Everything should be free without requiring effort.
• It’s okay to mooch off of others, just this one time.
• I can manifest whatever I want, even if I’m not willing to work for it.
• Laziness is more spiritual than hard work.

The problem with these justifications is that they don’t mesh well with reality. Laziness is an emotional impulse, not a logical choice. Justifying laziness with logic is like breaking your dishes in anger and then claiming that you did it because you needed new dishes. You broke your dishes because you were pissed and lost control. You slacked off because you felt lazy and unmotivated. Don’t overcomplicate this.

Regardless of your personal “shoulds,” there are lots of items and experiences in life that aren’t free but which can easily be attained by earning and spending money. A full wallet can do a lot of manifesting with grace and ease.

You can try manifesting your desires without lifting a finger. This can work for small things, and sometimes you’ll get lucky, but if you resist working towards your desires directly, it’s delusional to claim that you’re a vibrational match for receiving them.

If you want to improve your manifesting, at least meet the universe halfway. It’s hard to say you’re committed to experiencing a result if you aren’t actively moving towards it. Rest in the space of allowing when you get stuck and need inspiration, but when the next action is staring you in the face, taunting you to get moving, then release the parking brake and go, go, go!

Laziness isn’t spiritual — unless your intent is to cultivate an unrefined and slothful spirit. If that’s the case though, you should have incarnated as a rock… perhaps below the tree in my backyard where the birds like to poop.

Justifying laziness with seemingly logical explanations after the fact is pointless — pure nonsense used to explain a resisted emotion. The emotion of laziness requires no justification, however. Next time you’re feeling lazy, just admit that you’re feeling lazy, and leave it at that. Don’t try to justify it. If you decide to act on that emotion, make it clear to yourself that you’re acting emotionally. Be congruent with your emotional truth in that moment, and don’t try to layer it with nonsensical explanations to make your actions seem logical. Occasional laziness has its place — we all need a break sometimes — but if you resist it, you’re only going to expand it.

Recognize pervasive laziness for what it is — a block that stands between you and your desires. Don’t feed laziness with pointless justification. Feed your desires with action instead. If you’re going to indulge in laziness, then indulge in it fully and consciously till it runs its course.

Cultivating High Standards for Work

Hard work can be very enjoyable if you’re working towards desires of your choosing.

Let your desires motivate you towards action. Know that you can achieve them and that you will achieve them — if you’re willing to make a serious, committed effort. Don’t expect much progress though if you’re only willing to take a half-assed approach. Achieving meaningful goals requires that you commit your entire ass, not just one cheek.

It’s possible to work hard and not get much done if your standards for work are too low. These standards include:

• what kinds of work you’re willing to do
• how well you maintain focus and avoid distractions
• how well you’re leveraging your skills and talents
• what levels of quality you consider to be acceptable output
• favoring work you enjoy

If your standards for the kinds of work you do are low, you’ll get caught up doing a lot of pointless busywork that you don’t need to be doing and which doesn’t provide much social value. Doing work that’s beneath you can be a mild diversion for a while, but if you do too much of it, it’s just another time waster.

If you work with poor focus and succumb to distractions, you’re not working hard, and your results will suffer for it. Working for 3 hours with good purpose and focus is often much more productive than putting in 8 hours of distraction-laden half-work.

If you do too much work you’re not very good at, and you aren’t improving much, shift your work around to align more closely with your skills and talents. You’ll get more done in less time, and you’ll be able to take on bigger challenges as well. Regardless of whether you believe you work for yourself or for someone else, you ultimately choose the work that lands on your plate, either by direct consent or through silent approval.

Maintain high standards for the quality of your output. When you’re working on something important to you, do your best work. If you aren’t willing to do your best, then switch to work that demands the best of you.

Keep shifting your work in the direction of what you love to do. This week do more of what you love than you did last week. The more you enjoy your work, the easier it is to feel motivated. This kind of hard work feels good.

Think improvement, not perfection. Keep raising your standards over time. Strive to become more dedicated to your work this year than you were last year.

High standards require commitment. You cannot maintain high standards while simultaneously tolerating low standards. Start noticing where your standards are out of alignment with your best efforts, and make some real changes. Disconnect from those who are constantly dragging you down. Dump the uninspired work that makes you feel like procrastinating instead of contributing. Brainstorm a list of 20 things you can do to increase the quality of your work output; then implement one of those items immediately.

Hard Work and Growth

Holding public workshops is very challenging for me. I know my material well enough that I could surely wing it through a whole workshop, especially if it’s one I’ve done many times before, but I’m not willing to do that. Even if other people didn’t notice, I’d notice, and I wouldn’t feel good about it.

And so I work very hard at each workshop, from preparation to delivery to completion. I show up well prepared and well rested. I prepare myself mentally and emotionally for a demanding weekend. I arrive early, and I hang out during breaks and at the end of each day of the workshop to answer people’s questions. This work is very challenging, and I do the best I can each time, always trying to top what I did last time. After each workshop I do a postmortem to look for ways I can improve the experience for next time. I embrace the principle of kaizen — continuous improvement.

This is hard work, but it’s intelligent hard work. Small improvements in the workshop format and delivery can increase the value that people receive from it.

I could simply lock down the workshop format and coast for a while if I wanted to, but I wouldn’t respect myself as much if I did. If I’m going to teach others about personal growth, then I must embody that value. I want to keep growing and improving, both personally and professionally, and so my workshops must keep improving as well.

Perfection is an unattainable ideal. No human work product will be perfect. But growth and improvement are grounded and practical values. They’re achievable under real-world conditions. You can work smarter and harder today than you did yesterday. You can eliminate one distraction today that you succumbed to yesterday. You can do more work today that you enjoy and that matches your skills and talents. And this is all that’s required.

Make your best effort not to be perfect but to improve upon yesterday or last week. Take on one little change at a time. Find one small improvement you can make today, and do that day after day. After months and years of iteration, you’ll find your work much more productive, enjoyable, and rewarding.

Fulfillment

If you maintain high standards for your work, the work provides its own intrinsic rewards. Nevertheless, it’s well and good to be fairly compensated for your work.

A tremendous amount of neurological and psychological experimentation has shown that, barring abnormal conditions such as being a sociopath, our brains are hard-wired with a sense of social fairness. We typically reject approaches to life that are either too selfish or too selfless. People will even reject certain forms of personal gain if they perceive that those gains are unfair. Somewhere between thievery and sacrifice, we seek to find the right balance that keeps us feeling good about our exchanges with others.

These behaviors are normally subconscious. We don’t even think about them most of the time, but we often notice when such standards are violated, either by ourselves or by others.

I ask you to look within for a moment. Are you living up to your own standards of social fairness? How much value are you receiving from others, and what are you contributing in return? Are you too much of a moocher, taking more than you’re giving? Are you too much of a martyr, draining yourself to keeping giving even as you decline the best that life is willing to provide you?

I found that when I was mired in scarcity, I wasn’t contributing my best. I was usually working hard, but I wasn’t doing the kind of work that I felt close to my best potential contribution. And so my compensation was commensurate with that mismatch — weak.

When I shifted to work that I felt more congruent with, I didn’t have to put in as many hours, but I could still feel at the end of the day that I’d done my best. Writing one good article, even though it isn’t difficult work for me these days in terms of the skill required, is still an area where I invest a lot of hard work, and I seek ongoing improvement. I enjoy expressing inspired ideas through writing, and I share them through an efficient medium that allows people to receive them immediately after publication. I push myself to publish fresh content that can help people grow. I put a lot of myself into my work. I take risks. The payoff is that I respect myself, and I value what I’m contributing. I wouldn’t feel this way, however, if I constantly succumbed to laziness and then tried to justify it as “spiritual allowing” or some such nonsense.

When you respect your work and your contribution, it’s easier to allow yourself to receive the rewards of hard work. Abundance can flow through your life with less resistance. You’ll be able to receive more rewards if you make a bigger contribution because you’ll feel you deserve it; it won’t violate your biologically pre-programmed standards of fairness. But if you know deep down that you aren’t doing your best, some part of you will block that abundance. You’ll know you didn’t really earn it.

Earn It!

Fulfillment is earned, not bestowed. I know many people would like to convince themselves that this isn’t true, and I wish them the best of luck, but I still consider it a lazy and slothful mindset to expect the universe to open the floodgates of abundance in such cases. I’m privy to the results such people consistently achieve. Year after year they struggle to pay their bills. They deny themselves wonderful experiences due to lack of funds — funds that they could be earning if they’d finally devote themselves to intelligent hard work. I share from direct experience as well. I can look to my own past and see how weak my results were when I subscribed to this mindset.

It’s a serious character weakness to think you can get something of value for little or nothing, to believe that life will flood you with abundance when you won’t commit yourself to delivering your best contribution in exchange. In fact, it’s a safe bet that you’ll subconsciously sabotage yourself from being in such a place for long. You won’t allow yourself to receive what you don’t feel you’ve earned. To receive life’s bounty, you must know without a doubt that you deserve it.

I do believe it’s well and good to adopt an abundance mindset. But this mindset isn’t to be found behind Door #1: Laziness, Hope, and Wishful Thinking. It’s only behind Door #2: Intelligent Hard Work, Doing Your Best, and Making a Meaningful Social Contribution.

Do Your Best

Are you doing your BEST? Not just working hard… Not just putting in the time… Not just showing up…

Are you doing your personal best to grow and improve today? Are you besting what you did last week? Are you working on the best project you can be working on to make a meaningful social contribution?

If you aren’t doing your best, how can you shamelessly expect the best in return? If you output mediocrity, expect to receive that. That’s only fair, isn’t it?

If you truly do your best, then you have good cause to expect the best in return. Time and again you’ll see that when you really do your best, the universe will back you up. Social support will come to you. Resources will arrive. Obstacles will be overcome. Encouraging signs will appear. Life will flow with grace and ease.

Arbeit Macht Frei contains another level of irony. On the surface it may appear that hard work is in conflict with freedom. But the truth is that in order to extract real value from your freedom, you must make a serious effort. Freedom is a blank canvas. Hard work makes it a masterpiece.

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Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Sometimes they screw up and accidentally do something right. They’re usually able to sabotage these unwanted successes in short order, but they like it best when they can prevent these positive experiences from ever happening in the first place.

If you count yourself among this under-acknowledged and under-appreciated group, here are some suggestions for how you can do a better job of staving off success and ensuring absolute failure till you die.

Wrong Road

Notice the paths that happy and successful people take, and avoid those paths. Favor the popular paths since those will help you achieve average results at best, and average results should safely prevent undesirable feelings of fulfillment. The best roads are those that leave you feeling like you’re walking in circles till you’re too tired to walk anymore and must retire. Roads that are flat or which slope downhill are often good choices, and they tend to satisfy the popularity requirement as well. Avoid any paths that lead over hills or near mountains; the elevated views are disturbing. Head towards terrain you dislike since it’s easier to hate your life when you hate your surroundings. If you can manage to get lost as well, that’s wonderful.

Wrong Tendencies

Take stock of which habits are creating the best results for you, and abandon them. Replace them with habits that ensure no forward progress. Even better are habits that cause backsliding. Watch lots of TV. Eat fast food. Avoid exercising. Make Facebooking the highlight of your day.

Wrong Place

It’s important to live in a place that emanates a going-nowhere vibe. Look for spots that attract people with average or below average incomes, and favor surroundings that are so ugly, even Shakespeare would succumb to writer’s block. Live with people who will encourage you to take paths you clearly don’t want; living with your parents for as long as possible can be very helpful here.

Wrong Time

Never take action when you can justify delay. Stay on the sidelines for as long as you can, and avoid the field for as long as possible. Be non-punctual. Eventually the opportunities will pass. There’s less pressure in showing up late since no one will expect much of you. If you act too soon, you’re risking success.

Wrong Reason

People are notoriously nosy, and sooner or later they’ll inquire about your plans. There’s an unfair assumption that everyone should be looking to improve their lives, so you’ll need to get good at deflecting their queries with false responses. When they eventually take note of your seeming lack of forward progress, put the blame on external factors such as the economy, how unfair your boss is, how unreasonable your ex was, etc. If you tell people the truth, they may try to motivate you to make some changes, and you definitely don’t want that.

Wrong Day

Get up late if you feel best as an early riser, and drag yourself out of bed early if you feel best sleeping in late. Throughout the day, strive to do the opposite of whatever makes you feel happy and productive. Most people find it helpful to get a job doing work they dislike. This ensures that even if they manage to enjoy a nice morning and/or evening, the hours spent at work will drag the whole day down, ensuring an unpleasant overall experience.

Wrong Week

String several wrong days in a row, and you can create a very mediocre week — perhaps even a downright bad week if you work at it. It’s important not to do anything genuinely restorative on the weekend — burn up the time with laziness, inactivity, and pointless entertainment as much as possible. You want to head into Monday morning feeling disempowered from the get-go. If you can manage to maintain feelings of stress, depression, or boredom throughout the whole week, you’re golden. Once you’re locked into such a pattern, don’t do anything to upset it.

Wrong Method

Learn from other people’s failures, and copy them. Use methods that have proven ineffective in the past, ensuring that you’ll get similar lousy results. Look to your own past as well. Notice what has never worked for you, and keep doing it. If it didn’t work back then, it will continue not working today.

Wrong Technique

Don’t be too creative or try to innovate. Copy someone else’s technique if you can. Fitting in with the crowd is safer than standing out as a distinct individual. It’s easier to stave off success if you favor the popular techniques of the masses — don’t do anything too fancy. Style is too close to success.

Wrong Mix

Make sure the key ingredients you’re putting into your life don’t mix well together. Get a job that doesn’t pay enough to cover your expenses, so you can’t make ends meet. Get a relationship partner who can’t get along with your friends. Stock your kitchen with foods that keep you feeling slightly sick much of the time. Keep yourself off balance.

Wrong Genes

Disempower yourself by blaming your problems on your DNA. Let your genes serve as the ultimate limitation. Ignore the truth that your thoughts largely determine how your genes express themselves.

Wrong Ends

It’s hard to avoid setting goals altogether because part of your brain will want to fill this void. Keep this spot filled with analog pseudo-goals that will attach to your goal receptors and effectively block real goals from accidentally falling into place. These have been proven to work well: make more money, get a relationship, find a job, etc. The lack of specificity makes procrastination go down easier.

Wrong Means

If you ever do get sucked into working on a goal, take the most circuitous route you can. Instead of starting a real business that provides value and makes money, keep yourself occupied with pointless busywork like fussing over the design of your logo and business cards. Switch projects frequently so that nothing ever ships. Create the illusion of progress without causing anything quantifiable to occur.

Wrong Plan 

Create flawed plans to reach your goals, plans that any reasonably intelligent person would be able to poke full of holes. Be sure that at least one crucial step requires a horcrux.

Wrong Hands

Avoid becoming too good at anything. Skill is a recipe for success, so keep yourself as unskilled as possible. Avoid books, audio programs, seminars, and educated people. Your education ended a long time ago; don’t try to resurrect it. Let your unskilled hands fall further behind with each passing year.

Wrong Eyes

Use a perspective that disempowers you. Rule out the angles that would make your problems look too easily solvable. If you blow problems out of proportion, it’s easier to stay stuck. If a problem looks too solvable, you might be tempted to actually solve it, and that’s only going to speed you along the path of success — bad idea!

Wrong Prize

Set goals that others expect you to achieve, even if you don’t really care about them. Surely everyone else is right, and you’re wrong, so get with the program and pretend you like it.

Wrong Questions

Ask questions that cannot possibly provide you with helpful answers, such as Why can I never get ahead? Why are people always mean to me? Why am I such a ‘fraidy cat all the time?

Wrong Replies

Now take those lame questions, and try to answer them anyway. Be as disempowering as you can. I can never get ahead because I’m stupid. People are mean to me because I’m a loser. I’m a ‘fraidy cat because I have no social skills, so I know I’ll embarrass myself as soon as I open my mouth.

Wrong Drum

March to the beat of someone else’s drum, never your own. The best advice for you to follow is that which comes from people who seem to care about you but who are too incompetent to know what they’re talking about. Seek health advice from overweight smokers. Consider money advice from people who can barely pay their own bills. Relatives are often great choices for this.

Wrong Scum

Hang out with disenchanted losers regularly, elevating them to buddy status. Better yet, swear loyalty to them as your peer group. If anyone shows the slightest hint of ambition or brilliance, accuse them of being crazy, and either numb them with sufficient quantities of alcohol, or boot them out of your tribe. Openly welcome new members who demonstrate their adeptness at sarcasm and who wield a video game collection that rivals your own.

Wrong Energy

Keep your vibe intentionally out of sync with happiness, success, and fulfillment. Visualize failure whenever you get a chance. When you feel pissed off, amplify it into rage. When you feel sad, feed the sadness into a mopey numbness that you can drag out for weeks. Worry a lot. Know that things are always going downhill for you.

Wrong Signs

Determine that you’ve consumed a sufficient number of venti lattes that your dormant psychic abilities must have finally awakened. Interpret every incoming text message as a sign that you’re on the right path, even though the only people who seem to care that you exist are just as lost as you are. Interpret the seeming lack of forward progress in any quantifiable areas of your life as spiritual growth. Inner growth is always invisible.

Wrong Intensity

Be a hapless couch potato for 28 out of every 30 days who thinks that getting up at 7am is the height of ambition. Then follow it with a 48-hour mania spree where you tell everyone you can about an inspired idea you’re never going to implement. Blow your wad with excited talk once a month; then return to the cozy comfort of inaction.

Wrong Tune

You know you’re on track to misery when you listen to the overall song of your life, and all you can perceive is discordant noise where everything sounds like it’s out of tune. If something starts working, and you begin to hear something resembling music, then figure out what’s creating those nasty harmonies, and break it.

Wrong Too Long

If you’re already applying most of the above, then you shouldn’t have to worry about success, happiness, and fulfillment infecting your dreary existence. You can relax and coast to the coffin from here. Keep it up! :)

Incidentally, this post was inspired by the song “Wrong” by Depeche Mode. Watch the video on YouTube.

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Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Your overall results in life largely depend on your ability to follow through until you achieve completion. Many projects produce essentially zero results if they’re 90% complete. The key results only appear when you reach 100% completion.

For example, if I write 90% of an article and don’t publish it, it produces no value other than being a private journaling exercise. The value cannot be delivered until the article is 100% complete and published.

Incompletes

Incompletes can produce feelings like dissatisfaction, discomfort, stress, worry, shame, and regret. We worry that we may have wasted too much time and energy on such projects with little to show for our efforts.

One way to avoid racking up too many incompletes is to give more careful thought to which particular projects you’re willing to accept in the first place. Having too many active projects at the same time makes it hard to complete them. It’s like trying to juggle too many balls at once. You end up dropping every ball.

One reason we take on too many projects is the desire for variety. Working on the same project day after day can get boring. Another reason is that projects tend to be easier and more motivating in the beginning. Starting a new project is often fun. It’s much more difficult to work through the middling grind of a project and see it through to completion.

Learning Your Lessons

In order to move forward into a better place of achievement, we first need to absorb the lessons from our incompletes. If you’re carrying around some psychological baggage from past incompletes, then take a moment to forgive yourself for those mistakes. You screwed up. It’s okay. You’re human.

At the same time, it’s wise to allow a little of that sting from past incompletes to hang around. That feeling of regret is there for a reason. It serves as an ongoing warning that we don’t want to get into similar situations again. The feeling of regret has a positive message, encouraging you to avoid starting too many projects if you won’t complete them.

Instead of trying to drug this seemingly negative feeling with excess food or drink, turn towards it. Give it your full attention for a moment, and listen to what it has to say.

Ask yourself, What lessons can I learn from my incompletes? How can this make me stronger?

You might hear something like this: I’m tired of wasting time on projects that never go anywhere. Obviously I’m only going to get results if I complete something. So before I set any new goals or tackle any new projects, I’d better be sure I’m going to see them through to completion. If circumstances really do change in unexpected ways, and the project becomes obsolete before it’s done, then it’s okay to dump it and move on to something else. But if the original decision is still sound, then let’s keep pushing through to the end and get it done.

I need to avoid overloading myself with too many projects at once. Ideally I should keep things simple and stick to one serious project at a time, perhaps two projects for variety. When I’m done, then I can add something new. But trying to do 10 things at once obviously isn’t working. I need to stop saying yes to new projects when I still have important incompletes to close.

Abandoning Failed Strategies

Notice which strategies you’ve already tried to get yourself to take action consistently. If you’ve tried something a few times, and it has never worked, stop doing it.

Quite often people get into circular patterns where they keep trying the same failed strategies every few years, hoping that somehow things will be different. That doesn’t work.

An example of a strategy that has never worked for me is trying to associate more pain to incompletion and more pleasure to completing a project, such as by using NLP techniques. I can safely abandon this strategy because I know it’s a dead end. My mind is smart enough to see right through these silly attempts at conditioning. It might work for a dog, but my mind resists such obvious attempts to make it less conscious. I always know that I have a choice. So I don’t use or revisit this strategy because it’s ineffective.

Consciously acknowledging this realization helps me avoid using the wrong approach. When I feel overwhelmed, instead of trying to get myself to feel more motivated and work harder and faster, I say no more often, cancel some items, and pay more attention to simplifying my life.

What are your failed strategies? Are you willing to drop them, so you can free your mind to figure out something more intelligent that might actually work?

Resting in the Space of Possibility

One positive step forward is to recognize that it’s at least possible for you to complete projects, even very difficult ones.

Perhaps if you think back, you can recall some projects you did actually complete, and you can remember the results you got from them. Maybe it was something as simple as completing a school project and getting a good grade on it.

Take a moment to acknowledge that for whatever goal or project you’d like to tackle next, it is at least possible for you to complete it in a timely manner. You aren’t attempting the impossible. There is a way to get it done. The action steps are doable. The project is achievable.

Accepting the Difficult Work

Worthwhile projects don’t normally complete themselves. A good project will frequently require a serious investment of time and energy. Even if the work is enjoyable, you may still need to put in many hours to see it through to the end.

Almost every meaningful project will include some unpleasant or difficult tasks. You aren’t going to enjoy those tasks, but they’re essential for the project’s completion.

You have the option of only doing what’s easy, but if you stick with what’s easy all the time, most of your projects will be pretty low on the value scale. Even if you complete them, they aren’t going to make much of a difference.

If you wish to stop having so many incompletes and see more of your projects through to completion, you must accept that certain tasks will be difficult and to decide to do them anyway.

It’s easy to say that you’re committed to completing a project. Anyone can say they’re committed. But a real commitment means that you’re willing to do the dirty work. It may slow you down. It may frustrate you. You may need to take more breaks in order to get through it. But when you’re committed, you accept the existence of difficult work, and you decide to push through it regardless of the difficulty. This is a key difference between starting projects and finishing them.

Most of the perceived difficulty has nothing to do with the true nature of the task anyway. You’re simply interpreting the task in a way that creates resistance. So a commitment to complete difficult tasks is really a commitment to face and overcome your own resistance. It’s a commitment to overcome the limiting beliefs that bias you against doing certain types of work.

To complete a project, you must eventually do the steps required for project completion. If you don’t feel like doing a particular step, and you use your feelings to justify avoidance of that step, then your project will remain stuck in an incomplete state. A better approach is to recognize that a task is just a task, and it’s subject to many different interpretations as to how pleasant or unpleasant it may be, so instead of looking at it from a perspective that creates unpleasantness, you can choose to regard the task as simply one more stepping stone on par with all the others.

Asserting Your Dominant Will

There are countless techniques you can use to push through inner resistance when the going gets tough. I’ve shared many of them in previous articles like Do It Now and Overcoming Procrastination.

It’s nice to have a toolkit of techniques, but that isn’t enough by itself. Many people know plenty of anti-procrastination techniques, but they can’t get themselves to apply them consistently. The problem is if once you fall into the trap of procrastinating, you can just as easily procrastinate on overcoming procrastination. Anti-procrastination techniques don’t self-activate. The nature of this problem is that it encourages you to resist solving it.

A strategy I’ve found that works well is more of a mindset than a technique. It’s the mindset that says, No matter what, my conscious will is ultimately in charge, and it always has the ability to step in and take command immediately.

When you tackle a challenging goal, you’re going to catch yourself going dark now and then. At some point your conscious will steps in and says, Hey, you’re procrastinating. This is a waste of time. That barely noticeable voice is your inner alarm clock. Instead of hitting the snooze button, pull that thought into the center of your consciousness and amplify it. Give it your full attention.

When you give that thought your full attention and let its voice be heard, it gets louder: WTF, you lazy ass! You don’t need to be checking the news right now. You have much more important things to be doing. Get your ass back to work!

The mindset aspect here has to do with your relationship to that voice.

When you succumb to procrastination for long periods of time, and that voice shows up, you’ll have a tendency to push it away. You define the part of you that procrastinates as “me” and the part of you that wants to get some real work done as “not me,” as if the strong part (not you) is trying to push the weaker part (you) into action. As long as you maintain these kinds of inner relationships, procrastination will be your constant companion.

To overcome procrastination, do the opposite. When that alarm clock voice shows up, realize that this strong voice is the real you. And the lazy procrastinator is not you. When you procrastinate, you go dark and become something less than your true self. When you wake up and recommit to your goals and projects, that’s the real you.

Self-Dominance vs. Self-Abuse

When you wrap your identity into the part of you that wants to procrastinate, you’ll have a tendency to beat yourself up. When you look back and realize you wasted a lot of time, you’re identifying with the part of you that procrastinates. So when you get frustrated with that part, you’re getting frustrated with yourself. And when you beat up that part of yourself for its bad habits, you’re abusing yourself.

This won’t help. It will simply perpetuate the cycle and keep you stuck.

The problem is that when you self-identify with the part of you that procrastinates, and then you beat up that part of yourself, you’re lowering your self-esteem. You’re saying to yourself, I’m such a loser. I suck. I can’t get anything done.

This is self-abuse. It cannot help you. Don’t do this.

Avoid self-identifying with the part of you that procrastinates. Imagine that the part of you that procrastinates is the animal part of you. It’s prehistoric baggage. It has many positive aspects that keep you alive, but you can’t let this part of you run amok. Your conscious mind needs to keep a tight leash on it.

The real you is the part of you that’s conscious and aware. This is the part of you that’s capable of making high-level decisions. This is the part of you that sets goals and takes on projects that aren’t essential for survival.

Your arms are a part of you, but you probably wouldn’t say that your identity is that of an arm. Your conscious will dominates your arms. You can wave them around, use them to pick up objects, train them to get stronger — whatever you desire. You’re the boss of your arms.

Similarly, you’re the boss of the lazy part of yourself that wants to procrastinate. Acknowledge that it’s there. Recognize that it’s a part of you, but it can’t fully define you, just as your arm can’t define your body. Appreciate the good it does for you, like directing your fight or flight impulse to keep you alive in emergency situations. But whatever you do, don’t give your power away to this part of you. It is your servant. It isn’t meant to be your Master.

In order to shift yourself to a place of achievement, you must claim your role as Master over the part of you that wants to be lazy and expedient. You have the power to be dominant over this part of you. Your conscious will is so much stronger.

Strengthening Your Will

Just like a muscle, your conscious will grows stronger when you exercise it regularly, and it atrophies when you fail to exercise it.

Fortunately, no matter how weak you’ve allowed yourself to become in this area, you can always train yourself back up to a place of strength.

Practicing self-dominance can actually be fun. A good way to practice is to verbalize your commands to yourself out loud. Tell yourself what to do, as if commanding the lazy part to get in line.

For example, if you have a tendency to want to linger in bed when your alarm goes off, say to yourself, On your feet now! Get dressed and brush your teeth. Imagine that this commanding voice is your true self commanding aspects of your lower self. Your fully conscious self is commanding parts of you that are less conscious. See the truth that the real you really does want to get out of bed. You want to have that experience today. Choosing to do the opposite isn’t really you.

No matter how much you struggle with this, that’s okay. It’s a lifelong challenge, and perfection isn’t a realistic standard. Sometimes you’ll go dark. But when you eventually rise again to a new level of consciousness, strive to maintain it as long as you can.

I’m taking a 10-week course where the current assignment is to check in with myself every hour for two full weeks (an hourly alarm can serve as a reminder). At least once per hour I must pause and reflect on what I’m thinking and doing in that moment. Am I behaving wisely? Or have I slipped into unconsciousness? Am I creating my life, or am I merely reacting?

I’d encourage you to try a similar challenge. Whenever you catch yourself slipping into negative emotions, unconscious behavior, or self-identification with laziness and procrastination, take a moment to reassert your dominant will. Take stock of who you really are, and issue the proper commands for what you are to do in this moment.

Don’t project your higher self as something outside of you. Embrace the beingness of your higher self in each moment. Your higher self is the real you.

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Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

In reading the biographies of very successful men and women, one theme frequently surfaces: such people have a strong bias for action. Those who achieve high levels of success in some areas of life tend to take a LOT more action than those who settle for average or below average results.

Lots of people come up with interesting ideas to pursue. You’ll probably come up with some great ideas while going about your day. But very often when you come up with an idea that could be actionable, you’ll let it fade, or you’ll talk yourself out of it, or you’ll overcomplicate it to the point where it dies on the vine.

This isn’t what the most successful people typically do, however. These people are more likely to take action — either right away or shortly after they generate the cool idea.

Bias for Inaction

When you come up with an interesting idea, it’s easy to avoid taking action. I mentioned some of these a few sentences ago, but let me elaborate a bit.

One way to avoid taking action is to lose focus. You come up with a cool idea, but instead of staying focused on it, you distract yourself from it. Instead of making the new idea a top priority, you switch your attention to something else. When you withdraw your focus from the new idea, the idea gets fuzzier. The initial enthusiasm fades. Your mental RAM gets overwritten by something else. Soon the cool idea is essentially forgotten.

Another way to avoid taking action is to talk yourself out of it. This requires shifting your focus to the anti-idea. What about this idea won’t work? Where might it lead to failure? What could go wrong? By shifting your focus to the anti-idea instead of the idea, you magnify problems instead of opportunities, so the idea becomes less attractive to you. Eventually you sense that the idea is probably more trouble than it’s worth, so you reject it.

You can also allow others to talk you out of your idea. This is essentially the same thing because you must internalize their attitudes in order to kill the idea.

Finally, you can overcomplicate the idea. Instead of focusing on the critical core, you can keep adding and expanding the idea until it’s so monstrous that there’s no way you could implement it in a reasonable period of time. Perfectionists often do this. Many implementations that are “good enough” can still provide a lot more value than doing nothing, but when you overcomplicate an idea, you make doing nothing the more attractive choice.

I don’t want to suggest that these mental processes are wrong per se, but the long-term consequence is that if you run any of these subroutines, you’ll avoid taking action most of the time when you come up with an interesting idea. These processes favor maintaining the status quo because they derail you from implementing new ideas.

If maintaining the status quo is very important to you, then it may be reasonable to apply such processes to your life. The potential upside is that you’ll avoid making errors of commission. Because you aren’t taking action, you won’t have to worry about new failures and rejections caused by your mistakes.

Bias for Action

Just as you can apply a mental process that leads to inaction, you can also do the opposite. You can run subroutines that favor action.

When you come up with an interesting idea, you can stay focused on that idea until your focus naturally flows into direct action. Instead of letting other things get in the way, you can clear your schedule and stay with the idea to see where it leads. You can elevate the status of spontaneously cool ideas in your life, so they take precedent over maintaining the status quo. When you feel you’ve been struck by an inspired idea, you drop everything else, so you can run with the new idea and see where it leads.

You can also talk yourself into taking action on an idea. You can focus your attention on the possibilities of what might work as opposed to the potential problems. You can ponder the upside more than the downside. Or you can allow others to talk you into action, which again is pretty much the same thing. When you want to be talked into action, you’ll probably seek out others who will help push you over the edge.

And finally, you can simplify the idea to make it easier to take action. You can strip the idea down to its core essence. You can scale it down until it becomes accessible and readily actionable.

If you apply these mental processes as opposed to the processes in the previous section, you’re going to take a lot more action. You’ll start more projects. You’ll ask for what you want more often. You’ll pick up the phone many more times than you would otherwise. You’ll risk failure and rejection more often.

The upside here is that you’ll avoid many errors of omission. You’re much less likely to miss golden opportunities.

Which Approach Is Better for You?

Which approach is better for you depends on how comfortable and happy you are with the status quo of your life.

Do you feel your life is about 95% where you want it to be? Would you be delighted to maintain your current situation? Do you feel your momentum is taking you down a wonderful path? If so, you may wish to favor the processes in the first group. Talk yourself out of taking action when you feel the risk of upsetting the status quo is too great. You may not experience as much personal growth on this path, but there’s no rule that says you have to. If you’re very happy and fulfilled where you are, it’s fine if you want to coast and enjoy that for a while. You can always shift gears later.

On the other hand, do you feel you have a lot more growing to do? Do you feel more drawn to new experiences? Would you rather create something new for yourself vs. maintaining your current situation?  Are you willing to upset the status quo for a shot at something better? If that’s the case, then you’re better off favoring the second set of processes that will get you into action faster and more frequently. Risking failure and rejection would be a small price to pay to ensure that you don’t let potential opportunities pass you by. You’d kick yourself more for the opportunities you missed as opposed to the mistakes you made.

Do you often catch yourself saying, “I really wish I hadn’t…” or “How could I have done something so stupid?” or “I should have thought that through more carefully”? If so, then you may be acting too haphazardly, and you need to pause and think things through a bit more. It’s okay to slow down and be more deliberate.

Or do you catch yourself saying, “Why didn’t I jump on that opportunity when I had the chance?” or “I wish I’d signed up for that years ago” or “I’m feeling behind relative where I think I should be at this time in my life”? If so, you may wish to shift yourself towards a greater action bias. Start talking yourself into action instead of talking yourself out of it. It’s okay to speed up and be more spontaneous.

Throughout your life you’ll probably shift back and forth between these sets of processes many times. Sometimes you’ll dislike the status quo, or you’ll feel a strong desire for something new. At those times, you’ll want to cultivate an action bias. At other times you may need a break from so much action and rapid change, and you may want to coast for a while.

You can also mix and match based on what you want in different areas of your life. One year you may want to maintain your health status while improving your social life, and the next year you may want to upgrade your fitness levels while maintaining the status quo in other parts of your life.

Sometimes I’ll say aloud, as if I’m speaking to the Universe, “I’m feeling overwhelmed and need a breather. Let’s slow things down.” Other times I’ll say, “This pace is too slow for me. I’m ready to move faster. Speed up!” I can’t say if this is just a trigger for my own subconscious or a genuine message to the Universe, but I do notice that within a few days, the pace will begin to shift. Maybe I’m somehow directing the pacing of new opportunities, or maybe I’m just shifting my perspective. Either way, it works for me. I suggest you try it to see if it works for you. Ask for a shift in pacing when you feel your current pacing is too fast or slow.

Long-Term Consequences

Short-term fluctuations in your action bias tend to average out over time. Some weeks you’ll take a lot of action, and other weeks will see a slower pacing. But what does your long-term pattern look like? Do you usually run mental processes that favor inaction or action? When you come up with new ideas, do you normally decline to act? Or do you normally find a way to get moving ASAP? How many ideas do you talk yourself into vs. talk yourself out of? Are you normally busy with direct action on your ideas, or do you spend more time pondering them without any observable progress?

It shouldn’t be too difficult to see why very successful men and women tend to have a strong bias in favor of action. They lean in the direction of focusing on their new ideas, looking at the positive possibilities, and talking themselves into action.

Is it reasonable to favor action though? Wouldn’t it be better to spend more time deliberating and thinking things through carefully?

I think this depends on what you’re working on. If you’re launching a NASA mission, you want to triple-check everything to make sure it’s safe. The consequences of failure can be very high. But in cases where the consequences of failure aren’t fatal, like if you’re risking some embarrassment or a break-up or a bankruptcy, well… that may sting a little, but you’ll recover.

Ask yourself, “What are the realistic worst-case consequences if my idea fails to work?” In many cases you’ll have to admit that in the grand scheme of things, the negative consequences just aren’t a big deal. You may make them a big deal in your mind, but are people going to lose their lives if you make an honest mistake? Taking action is rarely fatal these days. You can screw up a lot, recover, and keep right on going.

If you favor an action bias in the long run, you’re more likely to experience greater long-term success.

By taking lots of action, you’ll invite a tremendous amount of experiential learning. While we can learn a great deal from books and teachers and coaches, we must still learn certain things from experience. This includes learning to walk, talk, dance, drive a car, raise kids, run a business, and so on.

If you want to learn to drive a car, an action bias will help you develop that skill quickly. Focus on learning to drive. Focus on the positive aspects of driving, like more freedom to come and go as you please. Talk yourself into it. Let peer pressure talk you into it. Keep it simple, such as by driving an automatic instead of a stick shift. Run the mental processes that encourage action, and you’ll soon be driving.

If you use the opposite approach, you won’t learn how to drive. You may think about it and then distract yourself by thinking of something else. You may focus on the negatives such as the learning curve, cost, risk, inconvenience, or your nervousness. You may overcomplicate it. Run the mental processes that discourage action, and you’ll maintain the status quo of being a non-driver.

Extend these kinds of results across many years and multiple areas of life, and it isn’t too difficult to predict what will happen. If you avoid taking action, you’ll suffer fewer mistakes and failures (errors of commission), but you’ll also deny yourself many valuable skills and opportunities. You won’t have as much flexibility to earn money, to attract positive relationships, to do work you love, etc.

If you cultivate an action bias, you’ll suffer fewer errors of omission. You won’t miss as many opportunities in life.

In the long run, missing opportunities will probably hurt your results a lot more than making mistakes. The biggest failure is the failure to act.

If you want to experience lots of positive change throughout your life, then you must be willing to embrace more change in general. You can’t always guarantee that each change will be positive. Sometimes things won’t work out the way you’d have liked. If you wish to avoid making mistakes and suffering setbacks, you’ll have to avoid virtually all change, and that means you’ll miss many golden opportunities. This is because virtually all good opportunities entail some degree of risk. To avoid risk, you must avoid positive results too. Only the low-hanging fruit remains accessible, and that usually won’t fuel much change.

Improving Through Action

Ideally we want to take actions that we predict will lead to success, and we want to avoid taking actions that we predict will lead to failure.

Unfortunately, the best opportunities tend to be unpredictable. Even when we do everything we can to reduce risk and guarantee success, there are no guarantees. We can never eliminate all uncertainty. There’s still a randomness factor. You could get injured without trying to. You could lose your money through no fault of your own. You could be blindsided by a completely unexpected setback or loss. It happens.

When you take action, there’s always some doubt as to how well it will turn out. You can’t even accurately measure this doubt. Even when people try to do this with the best processes available, they still suffer failures and setbacks. Insurance companies still go bust, even when they make the best bets they can.

It isn’t wise to be reckless. It’s still a good idea to put the odds on your side as much as possible. But it’s just as important to accept that there’s inherent risk in taking action. You might succeed. You might fail. Or you might experience something in the middle.

An action bias gives you a long-term advantage here because the more you take action, the more you learn about risk. You develop a better feel for how to tell when the odds are on your side. You become better at placing high-payoff bets, and you learn to avoid the sucker bets. In some limited domains, you can learn this from a book or a teacher. In other areas, especially new areas that are rich with untapped opportunities, you mainly have to learn by trial and error.

Trial and error may sound like a slow and tedious process, but often it’s the fastest way to learn. Humans are capable of single-trial learning. We don’t necessarily have to repeat mistakes to learn to avoid them. One bad experience can teach us to avoid specific problems for the rest of our lives. Sometimes you’ll make a mistake and say to yourself, “I’m never doing that again,” and you never will. You may have learned this lesson in a matter of seconds.

Without an action bias, you don’t gain the benefit of feedback. If you fail to take action, you’ll never know what might have been. This isn’t like sports betting, where you place a bet on a team and then watch the game from a distance. In many cases you’re like the quarterback on the field who can strongly influence the outcome of the game. The feedback you receive from the sidelines isn’t the same as what you receive on the field. So if you avoid the field, you avoid the best feedback. This greatly limits your ability to grow and improve.

When you favor action, you gain the long-term benefits of action-based feedback. In the long run, these benefits can be massive.

If you read a lot of biographies of highly successful men and women, you’ll see just how critical action-based feedback is. I can’t recall any stories where people set a clear goal and achieved massive success right away. Success came as a result of refinement over many years and decades.

You take action. You see what happens. You make some adjustments. And you take more action.

Most of the time, your first stab will fail. So will the second and the third. But eventually you’ll figure it out. Sometimes you won’t figure it out though. And that’s okay too because there are always new ideas to try, and quite often your failure experiences will help you take better stabs at future ideas.

Persistence

One thing I’ve been seeing in a lot of 20-somethings today is that they often want massive positive results without going through that long-term process of trial and error learning. Many of them have a low tolerance for failure. They give up easily. They see persistence as a 6-month commitment instead of a 5- or 10-year commitment (or longer). A 6-month commitment is an oxymoron — that’s merely dabbling.

For example, someone will read an article like 10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job, and they’ll get inspired by the idea that they can start their own business and work for themselves. If they take action, then 6-12 months later they’re often stuck in setback land. Their new business is struggling. They aren’t making enough money. They’re working for less than minimum wage. So they give up and go back to job land, concluding they aren’t cut out for this sort of thing. But again, even a yearlong commitment isn’t a true commitment — that’s dabbling. The serious contenders are looking ahead for several years minimum.

When I started my first business in my early 20s, it took 5 years of full-time work just to achieve my first profitable year. I thought I was a pretty smart guy, but there was so much I didn’t know about business. I made countless mistakes. I sank into debt. I went bankrupt. I got kicked out of my apartment because I couldn’t pay the rent. I made some bad decisions, and I suffered the consequences. Sometimes I worked with the wrong people, and I suffered the consequences. Sometimes I got blindsided by problems outside my direct control, and I suffered the consequences. But I just kept going. I didn’t let these setbacks stop me. I kept taking more action. I simply refused to stop or to be stopped.

Seriously… is getting kicked out of your home fatal? Is bankruptcy fatal? Are these reasons to quit? Hardly. These are minor bumps in the road.

Money is just a number in a bank account. If it hits zero or negative, so what? Does a number in a computer database have power over you? Can it stop you from taking action? Hardly. Short of being physically restrained, what can stop you from taking action? If you can physically move your body, you can still take action. If you use these events (or the fear of these events) to talk yourself out of taking action, this is no different than anyone else who runs the mental subroutines for inaction. If you aren’t physically tied up or otherwise immobilized, you can always act.

One reason I kept going was that even by that time in my life, I was already reading the biographies of very successful people. I kept seeing the same patterns. It takes time to get good at anything new. The early years of a new venture are more about figuring things out than they are about making things work well. I think this gave me an advantage because I was willing to stick it out through the tough times. I had more reasonable expectations about how long it might take. Of course I wanted to succeed faster, but I was willing to let it take as long as it took. I saw a lot of other people dabble in the field and then leave, but I hung around and kept going, despite experiencing a lot of setbacks.

When I started my blog in 2004, I was able to grow my web traffic to 100,000 visitors per month within the first 6 months… and to 400,000 visitors per month by the end of the first year. No money was spent on marketing or promotion. Even by today’s standards, that’s pretty solid growth, even though the Internet was significantly smaller back then. And it really wasn’t that difficult to achieve this. I largely expected it.

Unfortunately when people ask me how I did it, they’re mainly looking for techniques and tactics and tricks. What method can they apply to achieve similar results? I’ve shared some of those before, but the truth is that most of the time I probably wasn’t even aware of what I was doing. The actions I took were largely subconscious and habitual. If someone watched me working in late 2004 or 2005, they might have labeled some of my actions as random and impulsive. But there was a reason for them. My subconscious mind was good at spotting opportunities and instantly acting on them, and it was good at spotting dead ends and avoiding them. I did what I’d spent the previous 10 years learning how to do, much like a surgeon can go in and make a few precise snips, and they’re done. I was able to succeed much faster with this business because I’d spent the previous 10 years figuring out how to run an Internet business. Doing it again was about as difficult as making dinner — it just took longer. But people don’t want to hear my honest answer — that fast results are the result of many years spent building and refining your skills.

Many people, especially 20-somethings, seem to think that an action bias is a tool for short-term success. It isn’t. It’s a long-term process that plays out over many years and decades. It takes time to sculpt your mind to adopt the right focus, attitudes, and behaviors that will lead to success. But once you learn what you need to learn, then you can enjoy the benefits of running on autopilot in many areas of your life. You simply do what feels natural to you, and it tends to work well. What you can do in the short term though is to develop the habit of favoring action more often than not. When new opportunities and ideas present themselves, lean further in the direction of action.

If you’re thinking that a commitment is something you’ll try for 6-12 months, I doubt you’ll get very far. Surely you’ll make some interesting distinctions during that time, but you’ll have many more lessons to learn after that. You could get lucky of course, but too much luck is a dangerous thing. Lucky people are the ones who get blindsided by market downturns. It’s easy to succeed when all the dice are rolling with you, but what happens when they inevitably turn? When the rules change, can you successfully manage the new risks and maintain momentum?

Commitment

If you think it’s difficult to commit to something for so many years, you’re right. It is difficult. That’s why average and below average results are more common than exceptional results. Most people aren’t going to commit. But therein lies your greatest advantage. If you simply stick it out longer than most people, your odds of success increase.

Your field may look crowded, but that’s most likely because it’s flooded with dabblers. They’ll be gone within a year or less, replaced by new dabblers. These people don’t represent any serious competition. In fact, they’re most likely helping you. They’ll introduce new people to your field before they give up. Think of these dabblers as your volunteer marketing team. They help to expand the market for the products and services that you’ll eventually deliver.

If you read the bios of those who seem to have achieved tremendous success early in life, you’ll often see that their path to success began in childhood. Steve Wozniak, for instance, started learning about electronics when he was about 4 years old (his Dad was an engineer who worked on missile programs), and he was winning science fairs and building computers while in grammar school. Building the first Apple computer was the result of a progression that began many years earlier.

Commitment doesn’t mean trapping or limiting yourself. It’s not about putting yourself in a box or a cage. It’s about choosing a certain line of development and running with it, which isn’t that difficult to do when you discover something you really love. Then your commitment is a commitment to enjoy your life and to express what feels good to you. It’s still going to involve a lot of work, but that work is mostly a labor of love. The question is whether or not you’re willing to put in the time.

Commitment and action bias are teammates. If you have a strong action bias but your actions are random and haphazard, you’ll pile up a lot of feedback, but it will be tough to make sense of it. On the other hand if you make a commitment to pursue a certain direction, and you cultivate a strong action bias too, then you’re going to acquire feedback that you can use to go further and further down that path. This is a terrific way to experience a fulfilling life that makes you happy and contributes to others.

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Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

A final work product doesn’t have to be perfect to produce strong results. However, the project must be essentially complete.

A mediocre but complete film script can still be made into a movie. A beautifully crafted but half-finished script is largely worthless.

An unpolished but shippable software program can still provide value to customers and generate sales. A feature-rich but perpetually unshippable piece of software will usually generate zero sales (QuickBooks notwithstanding).

Completion generates results. Perfectionism delays or kills results.

Perfectionism vs. Polish

Perfectionism isn’t the same thing as polishing. Polishing a completed project can make it even better, as long as the polishing process doesn’t incur unreasonable delays or lead to the cancelation of the project. In many cases polishing can be done after the initial project is declared complete. A book can be revised in future editions. A song can be remixed. A website can be updated after it’s online.

I’ve done well as a blogger because I publish articles, not because I write them. I never feel that any article I post is perfect. But I push myself to publish what I write, even though the result is always less than perfect. This gets value into people’s hands, and it generates web traffic and income for me. My website is far from perfect as well, but it’s functional enough to deliver value to people. This is a better result than the perfect website with the perfect content with the launch delayed indefinitely.

Standards for Completion

While it’s great to have high standards for quality, how do those standards affect your ability to complete projects?

Are your standards for quality so unrealistic that they prevent you from being able to do the work necessary for completion?

If you claim to have high standards, but you aren’t producing much deliverable output, then I would suggest that your standards are lame. What good is a standard if it doesn’t produce results?

Make sure that your standards serve your drive for completion. When are you going to deliver something finished? How are you going to bring your project to a close and get it released?

Fantasy Standards

A fantasy standard is one that allows you to delude yourself into believing that you’re creating something of incredibly high quality or value, but you aren’t actually delivering the final work product within a reasonable period of time.

One reason people adopt fantasy standards is that they fear delivering their final work product.

It can be scary to deliver something that’s imperfect. As long as you’re still “working” on a project that hasn’t shipped, you can succumb to the delusion that when it finally does ship, everything will be rosy.

The truth is that whenever you do deliver your final work product into someone else’s hands, it will virtually never be received with 100% appreciation and gratitude. Someone will always find fault with it. This comes with the territory.

If you release a movie, people will give it negative reviews. If you publish a book, people will criticize it. If you launch a website, some people won’t like it.

Accepting the Consequences of Completion

If you expect that when you complete a project, the consequences will all be perfectly positive, this will fuel your sense of perfectionism, and you’ll suffer endless delays.

The truth is that completing a project will usually result in a mix of positive and negative consequences.

If your project is a good one, however, the best you can hope for is that the positive consequences will outweigh the negative consequences. But don’t be so naive as to presume that you’ll be able to avoid all the negative consequences.

I recently read a biography of Depeche Mode, which is my favorite music group. Given their immense popularity and their tens of millions of sales, they’ve been one of the most successful bands of all time. But whenever they release new material, some members of the music press always trash them. No matter what they do, some well-known reviewer will give them a rating like 1/5 or 2/5. The band constantly received scathing reviews.

Of course they received many positive reviews too, but there’s always someone willing to criticize their work. Some of their most popular songs like “Master and Servant” and “Blasphemous Rumours” were even banned in certain places due to being too controversial or racy, so they lost out on a lot of potential radio play.

And yet despite these and many other difficulties, they continued to publish more music, and they’ve been incredibly successful, and countless bands have said that DM has been a major influence on them.

The band has certainly had its ups and downs over the years (drug addiction, attempted suicide, divorces, depression, personality clashes, etc.), but despite all of those problems, they’ve been able to pull together and complete songs and get them released to the public. Their songs aren’t perfect (except for “Perfect” I suppose), but they’ve been very good at getting songs and albums finished. Sometimes it was very difficult for them, but they kept on publishing, as opposing to creating half-finished songs and setting them aside.

Many of of DM’s songs are only so-so, but by continuing to publish again and again, they’ve managed to create many solid hits along the way, such as “Enjoy the Silence”. And still for every hit, there’s some reviewer who’s willing to say, “That song is lame and here’s why…”

A More Realistic View of Success

Success in any venture is never 100% Smurfy. The roses always come with thorns.

When you do complete some great projects and you enjoy the success that comes as a result, you’ll invariably have to deal with some negative consequences that come along for the ride. Ultimately you’ll have to devote some time to thorn management.

This isn’t an untenable problem. Thorns can be managed. However, it’s important to accept that these thorns exist and that occasionally you’ll have to deal with them.

Perfectionism can be regarded as an unwillingness to deal with the thorns of success. But since the thorns are largely unavoidable, the only way you can realistically save yourself from having to deal with thorns is by preventing success itself. When you don’t consciously realize that you’re resisting success in this manner, it shows up as perfectionism. This gives you the impression that you’re working towards the results you desire, but in reality your projects always get sidetracked. Of course, you’re the one who’s subconsciously derailing them.

I have many friends who could be considered highly successful, and they all have thorns to deal with. Some are international bestselling authors. They’ve been on Oprah, and they enjoy a high standard of living. However, they also have to deal with the stress of busy travel schedules and lots of people wanting something from them. If you got to know them, you’d never say that their lives are perfect. But they do tend to be happier when they’re achieving new goals and getting projects completed. Most authors I know are quite radiant when they’ve just finished a new book.

Playfully Engaging With the Negative Aspects of Success

When you adopt a more realistic view of success, it becomes easier to complete projects. Perfectionism is less of a problem when you’re willing to accept the negative consequences that tag along with the positive ones.

Whenever I publish a new article, I know that some people won’t like it. Even when I feel I’ve shared some great insights, I know from experience that some people will think it sucks. Some people will criticize my article on their own blogs. Every now and then, someone actually launches a whole new blog just for the purpose of criticizing what I write. I accept all of that because it’s a side effect of success. These thorns come with the roses I receive. If I was failing, these thorns wouldn’t be arising.

What works for me is having a playful attitude towards the negative aspects of success. I think it’s unwise to take ourselves too seriously. If we fully and completely accept that success naturally includes some downsides, then we can relax and enjoy the creative process without undue stress or delay. It’s like accepting that if you win the lottery, you’ll lose a significant percentage of your winnings to taxes, and your old friends may start acting weird around you. If you accept that this is okay, then you can enjoy the win without stressing over the consequences.

Perfectionists fear the negative aspects of success, such as turning in a completed work project and having their boss criticize it, or releasing a book and seeing it get negative reviews. But if you turn towards this fear of negative results and engage with it playfully, the fear will greatly diminish. It’s easier to complete projects when you aren’t resisting completion due to fear of negative consequences.

One of the ways I’ve played with this in the past was to intentionally write some articles that I expected would generate mostly negative feedback. I still thought the articles were interesting and worthwhile, but at the time of publishing, I figured that most people wouldn’t like them very much. I wrote them partly as an act of courage for myself, so I could get past any lingering fears regarding negative feedback. I thought this would make me a better writer in the long run since I’d be more willing to take risks instead of playing it safe. As I expected, those pieces did generate plenty of critical feedback. But then again, some people loved them, and ironically one of those articles (10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job) became my most popular article ever. By playfully embracing the negative aspects of success, I actually invited more of the positive aspects into my life as well.

In retrospect this was a healthy exercise because it helped me develop the willingness to publicly explore a broader range of topics.

Think of this process as immunizing yourself with respect to the negative aspects of success. If you playfully engage with the negative aspects, you probably won’t see them as such a big deal. Your reaction will become less resistant and more neutral. You might even come to enjoy what you once felt was negative. For example, you may learn to appreciate the extra publicity, links, and traffic your critics send you.

Loving the Finish Line

Whenever you cross the finish line, the result is never perfect. You’ll always look back at the days behind you and feel you could have done better. Celebrate and enjoy your finishes anyway.

Ten years ago I ran the L.A. Marathon. My performance sucked because I ran with a knee injury (which wasn’t such a good idea in retrospect), and I was in pain for most of the race. It also rained for the first two hours of the race, so I ran wearing a plastic bag, and my shoes got wet. But I still crossed the finish line and picked up my finisher’s medal. I couldn’t run for many weeks afterwards, but I’m glad to have actually completed a marathon.

It’s helpful to accept and embrace the negative aspects of success, so don’t resist success. But at the same time, we can still focus most of our attention on the positive aspects. Accept the presence of thorns, but let the rose inspire you.

Your results will never be perfect, but a pretty good result is better than no result.

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Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

If you haven’t read the previous post yet, I suggest you read it first, so you can better understand the context of this one. I know it’s a lot of reading, but it will be worth your while.

Stretch Goals

For the sake of convenience, let’s use the term “stretch goals” to refer to the types of goals for which you aren’t already a good match.

Such goals are of course relative to the person setting them. Buying a new car wouldn’t be a stretch goal for someone who can easily afford it, but it could be a stretch goal for someone who’s broke and struggling with unemployment. The first person can simply walk into a dealership, pick a car, pay cash for it, and drive away with it. The second person may be looking at tougher challenges to overcome.

Jack Canfield likes to refer to these as breakthrough goals, perhaps because when you achieve such a goal, you’re breaking through to a whole new level of being.

Vibrational Alignment

People don’t experience the same level of difficulty in achieving similar goals because each person has a different degree of vibrational alignment (or lack of alignment) relative to the goal.

A goal is only easy or hard relative to your vibe. Some vibes are weak matches for certain goals. Other vibes are strong matches. The more strongly your vibe matches a goal, the more easily and effortlessly you can achieve that goal.

For example, if I wanted to earn an extra $10K this month, that would be a fairly easy goal for me to achieve. I could probably do something this weekend that would generate an extra $10K by the end of the month. My vibe is already a good match for receiving such sums. It feels normal to me. But since the goal wouldn’t cause me to stretch, it isn’t very inspiring either. As far as goals go, it’s a bit dull.

For someone else, earning an extra $10K this month might be a seemingly impossible fantasy. Their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors create a different vibe. Whereas I see ease and simplicity, they might see struggle, obstacles, or lack of opportunity. They might also become overly excited about the idea of earning an extra $10K (which suggests it isn’t normal for them), thereby positioning the goal in the realm of fantasy instead of possible reality.

To yet another person, the goal of earning an extra $10K this month might be right in the middle — enough of a challenge to be interesting and motivating, but not so challenging as to appear impossible. For this person it’s a stretch goal. They see it’s possible, but they aren’t sure how to make it a reality yet.

Your vibe largely determines which goals you’re even willing to set. If your vibe is too far out of alignment with a particular goal, you’ll never bring yourself to set such a goal. That would be self-delusion at best, like a scarcity-minded person setting the goal to become a billionaire. The mind won’t believe the goal, so the person won’t take the actions needed to get there.

When your vibe is a very close match for a goal, you probably won’t even think of it as a goal. It will simply be a task to do, like making dinner or taking your dog for a walk. For me, writing a new article is a basic task which I often do for the sheer enjoyment of writing. So we could say that my personal vibe is a very close match for the goal of writing an article.

When your vibe is somewhere in the middle, you have a stretch goal. Your vibe is enough of a match for the goal to enable you to set the goal and take it seriously, but not yet enough of a match to experience the achievement of the goal.

One of the best reasons to set goals and work to achieve them is the vibrational shift you must undergo in order to achieve new goals, especially stretch goals.

Matching vs. Mismatching Vibes

There are two types of vibes to think about with respect to any goal:

1) Vibes that match the goal

2) Vibes that don’t match the goal

When your vibe is in the first category, then achieving your goal is relatively easy. You will still take action, but your actions will flow easily, and they won’t feel terribly effortful. Taking action will often feel like play. The actions you choose will be the right actions that will move you closer to your goal. You’ll probably experience many synchronicities too. Great opportunities will come to you. You’ll see good evidence that real progress is happening. Other people will notice that you’ve shifted.

When your vibe is in the second category, the path to your goal will seem difficult and littered with obstacles. You’ll notice the obstacles and will probably feel a strong desire to procrastinate, and you’ll often indulge in distractions. You will identify actions to take, but they won’t be the right actions. When you take action, you’ll often feel resistance, either from inside yourself or from the external world. Getting to your goal will feel like work more than play. You may invest a lot of time and effort into your goal, but you probably won’t get there. Months or years may pass, and you’ll have little to show for it.

These are the extremes. Depending on the degree of alignment between your vibe and your goal, you’ll probably fall somewhere in the middle. Some aspects will look like the first example, while other aspects will resemble the second situation. This means that your vibe is a partial match for your goal. Some parts of your vibe are very well aligned with your goal, while other parts are opposing your goal.

Stop Using Force

Now here’s the tricky part to understand, so please read this next bit carefully.

When your vibe is a good match for your goal, you’ll naturally have a sense of the right actions to take, and synchronicities will show up to guide you as needed. You won’t have to struggle to figure out what to do next. Most of the time, the next action to take will be fairly obvious, and it will feel good to you. It will be an action you want to take. You won’t have to force it.

However, when your vibe is a poor match for your goal, you’ll come up with some actions to take, but they’ll be the wrong actions. You won’t have a strong inner feeling of clarity about them. You’ll have a lot of doubts. It will be hard to choose a path, and even when you do choose, you won’t feel certain that it’s the right path for you. When you do take action, you’ll be acting under a cloud of doubt and uncertainty. You’ll also have a strong tendency to procrastinate and delay.

A common prescription for people in the second situation is to use force. Take more action. Fight procrastination. Push yourself harder. Eliminate distractions. Focus! Do it now! Get to work!

This doesn’t work well. It’s like trying to push two opposing magnets together. Even if you do achieve a goal this way, it will be difficult to sustain it, and a fall is inevitable. Your vibe and the goal are constantly resisting each other. As soon as you let down your guard, they repel each other.

Imagine trying to get up at 5am when your vibe isn’t a match for being an early riser. Instead of popping out of bed feeling alert and refreshed, you feel tired and sleepy and hit the snooze button. When you are a match for such a goal, however, you can arise early with ease. The goal requires no struggle at all. It’s just your normal wake-up time. No big deal.

It’s safe to say that if a goal seems like a big deal to you, this indicates that your vibe isn’t yet a match for that goal.

When you notice that you’re trying to force a goal, stop for a moment and think about it. Why is this such a struggle for you? Why are you fighting what you claim to desire? Why are you sabotaging yourself? Why do you keep procrastinating?

Ask yourself, Do I really want this goal? Is this a good goal for me at this time? It’s okay if it’s a stretch goal. Just be sure it’s something you really want. It’s perfectly okay to desire a goal that may seem like it’s beyond you right now.

If you realize that you don’t really care enough about this goal to take it seriously, then let it go. If you don’t desire to do what it takes to become a match for the goal, there’s no point in fussing over it. Drop it, and accept the consequences of that decision.

I often see this pattern with people who go to college because their parents expect them to. They pick a major that others will approve of. But they don’t enjoy the coursework, and they don’t even want to work in that field. That’s a no-brainer recipe for vibrational resistance. Then these students wonder why they procrastinate on their studies and don’t feel motivated. Sure it takes courage to choose your own path, but you aren’t here to live up to other people’s expectations.

Now if you still feel good about the goal and you still want the outcome, that’s perfectly fine too. Just because you aren’t a match for the goal doesn’t mean you should drop it. Some of the best goals will require you to shift your vibe in order to achieve them. It could be said that the vibrational shift is an even greater accomplishment than the external goal. For example, aligning your vibe with abundance can be a greater accomplishment than earning some specific sum of money. Once you’ve integrated the vibe of abundance, your whole life is transformed, not just your finances.

Orbiting vs. Achieving Your Goal

Let’s assume for now that you have a goal that you like, but you aren’t yet a vibrational match for it. What’s the next step?

Well, many people would say that the next steps are to make plans and start taking action, but for a goal of this nature, that approach doesn’t work well. It will usually cause you to run in circles.

It’s like trying to push two opposing magnets together. You can push with great force, but that isn’t a wise idea. If you want the magnets to stick, then it’s easier if you flip one of the magnets around. If you do that first, then you can pretty much let go, and the magnets will attract each other. You may give them a nudge, but forcing them together isn’t necessary.

Now this is a very simple analogy, so let’s expand it a bit. Your vibe is much more complex than a single magnet. Your vibe with respect to any single goal is like 100 pairs of magnets. Some magnets have their poles aligned to attract each other, but some are repelling each other. So when you try to achieve your goal by taking direct action, sometimes you’re in the flow, and sometimes you’re out of flow. Some parts of your vibe are pulling the goal towards you. Other parts of your vibe are pushing the goal away.

You don’t have to be in perfect 100% alignment to achieve your goal. You just have to make enough shifts such that the overwhelming force is attractive rather than repulsive. But it has to be strong enough to overcome inertia and any repelling forces.

If there’s too much repelling force or inertia and not enough attracting force, then you’ll fall into the trap of running in circles when you try to take action.

The Earth and the Moon attract each other gravitationally. But they don’t crash into each other. The Moon just runs in circles around the Earth. But what if we could somehow slow down or stop the Moon’s motion relative to the Earth? Then the Earth and the Moon would attract each other till they collided. This would be bad for people on Earth, but the Earth and Moon would become one. Similarly, if you wish to become one with your goals, you’ll need to work with the various forces and motions that are present until a collision course with your goals becomes inevitable. This is essentially what it means to become a vibrational match for your goal. If you’re not a match, you’ll end up orbiting your goal instead of reaching it, despite having a lot of gravity on your side.

Understanding the New Vibe

Now here’s another tricky part, so read this carefully and ponder it a bit.

The #1 reason people struggle to achieve their stretch goals is that they don’t have a solid understanding of the matching vibe.

Because they don’t understand what the new vibe looks like and feels like, they don’t understand the right actions to take. So they take the wrong actions, they struggle, and they get results they don’t want.

The most important thing you can do to achieve a stretch goal is to deepen and clarify your understanding of the matching vibe. What will your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors be like when you’ve already achieved the goal? What kind of person will you be when you’re already there?

Someone who earns $1 million per year doesn’t have the same vibe as someone who earns $50K per year. The thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of each person are very different. If you’re earning $50K per year, and you set a stretch goal to earn $1 million per year, the first thing you must do is study and understand the vibe you’d be emitting if you were already at the $1 million per year level. It will be very different than your current $50K vibe. Energetically speaking, you won’t be the same person.

Your greatest risk of failure stems from the problem of projecting your $50K vibe onto the $1 million goal. You can’t use a $50K vibe to create the action list to achieve this goal. You have to use the $1M vibe to create the action list, and you can’t do that until and unless you understand the $1M vibe well enough.

Most people don’t do what it takes to understand the new vibe. They project their old vibes forward in time, but that doesn’t work. It only keeps them orbiting the same goal, running in circles for years.

You must figure out which of your 100 internal magnets are aligned with the new goal’s magnets, and which aren’t aligned. When you dive into action without this understanding, the odds of success are very low. The opposing magnets will simply repel each other, and you’ll be kept in orbit indefinitely. The closer you get to your goal, the stronger the opposing force will be. This may look like you’re sabotaging yourself each time you get close to your goal. Forcing it won’t work. It will only frustate you. Then you’ll say to yourself things like, “Why is this taking so long? I should be much further along by now.” or “Why do I keep procrastinating?”

How to Learn the New Vibe

There are many ways to deepen your understanding of the new vibe that pairs with your goal. Here are some suggestions.

First, be humble as you enter this process. Admit that you don’t yet understand the new vibe. If you did understand it, you’d already be coasting effortlessly to your goal. Accept that if you’re struggling, it’s because you don’t understand the new vibe well enough. You might also be clinging to some false assumptions about it.

Try to set aside any preconceived notions about the new vibe. Start with a blank slate. Open your mind to new possibilities. Don’t pretend to know something you haven’t yet experienced. If you aren’t already living it, it’s safe to say that you don’t know it yet.

It may help to think about a goal you’ve already achieved. Remember your vibe before and after the goal was achieved. Think about the goal of learning to drive a car. Notice how different your vibe was before you learned. It probably seemed like a big deal. You may have put the goal on a pedestal. You may have felt a bit stressed about it. But as you got closer to achieving this goal, your vibe shifted to the point where driving seemed like no big deal. If your vibe didn’t shift, you still wouldn’t be able to drive yet. We could say that practice is what helped to shift your vibe, but we could also say that you shifted your vibe by spending time with people who already had the right vibe (i.e. experienced drivers), and you picked up the right vibe (not just the know-how) from them. Once you matched the vibe of a confident driver, you could drive confidently too.

This leads us into the next step. If possible, identify people who’ve already achieved the goal you want to achieve (or something similar). Buy their books, and read them for starters. Join clubs where these people are members. Do whatever it takes to get face time with such people. Don’t admire such people from a distance. You need to connect with them in person, and preferably one on one. This means not over the phone and not over the Internet. In person means in person. This is easier than it sounds if you make it a priority. When you hang out with such people in person, you’ll learn so much about the new vibe you wish to create. Some inner shifts will happen automatically. This is very important. Don’t blow it off unless you prefer to orbit your goals instead of experience them.

So if you want to be a millionaire, go to places where millionaires hang out, and spend time getting to know them. Talk to them about money. Don’t worry about getting how-to tips. You won’t be able to apply them yet anyway. Instead, get a sense of the other person’s thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about money. Contrast their vibe with yours. What’s different about their vibe? Why is it that they’re a match for having lots of money, and you aren’t? The vibrational differences tell the story.

If you’re shy or socially dorky, go to a park or coffee shop in a wealthy neighborhood. Sit down, shut up, and observe. Listen to people’s conversations. Do this again and again until you start getting a clear sense of the vibe of such people. Contrast their vibe with yours. What’s different about them? Are you willing to embrace this vibe?

Notice that such people don’t usually say, “Holy frak! I can’t believe I have all this money! It’s so unreal!” Having lots of money is just normal and routine for them. It’s no big deal. That’s the vibe you want to understand. If you think having a lot of money is a big deal, that’s why you don’t have it. That’s the vibe of wanting money and not having it. The vibe of having money is totally different.

Next, spend time visualizing yourself as already having the vibe needed to achieve your goal. You’ll learn about this vibe partly from being around people who’ve already achieved your goal. Visualization can help you personalize the vibe. Other people will give you clues with respect to where you need to make shifts, but your vibe is uniquely your own. Your wealth vibe, for instance, won’t be quite the same as someone else’s. However, you’ll still have a lot in common with other wealthy people when you make the shifts that work for you.

I recommend spending about 10 minutes per day visualizing how your life will be different once you’ve achieved your goal. How will you really think, feel, and behave on the other side of that goal? Try to make as few adjustments as possible to your current vibe, just enough to realistically see yourself in that situation and having it feel normal to you. This is important. Realize that if you’re going to achieve this goal in reality, then it’s still you on the other side, with all your dorkiness coming along for the ride. It’s not your higher self or your ideal self. It’s just a slightly adjusted version of your normal, everyday self.

Try doing it like this. Imagine a scene that represents your goal. Now put your current self into that scene. This is the person you are right now, your normal self. Imagine yourself going through that scene as if it were completely real and happening right now. You just quantum leaped right into it. Do your best to imagine this not as a dream or fantasy, but as solid reality, like a real event that’s happening today, perhaps a few hours from now.

Now let your character interact with the scene. How would you realistically react to what’s happening? What you want to understand is your character’s vibrational interaction with the vibe of the scene. This will tell you where some of your magnets are pointing in the wrong directions. The more realistic you can make this scene, the more you’ll learn from it.

Daydreaming isn’t the same thing as visualizing. You can visualize yourself being in a sex scene for the purpose of taking care of yourself, but that isn’t the same thing as visualizing a sex scene that you actually want to experience in reality. Your mind can tell the difference between a fantasy visualization and a serious goal. Otherwise you’d manifest lots of sex just by imagining it. You can imagine anything you want, but it won’t become real until you match the vibe of that experience too, and that part takes a bit more work.

For example, suppose one of your goals is to live in a mansion and have a staff of servants. In most of your visualizations, you imagine how great it will be, but that doesn’t get you any closer to your goal. However, when you take the time to imagine it as 100% real, and you plop your current self into that new reality, you notice some issues coming up.

Maybe you feel nervous and anxious living in such a big place. Perhaps you feel uncomfortable telling your servants what to do — maybe you feel bad about the idea of other people cleaning your toilets and making your meals. Maybe you also feel some excitement about having such a cool place to live, but that also suggests a mismatch because if you actually lived there, it would probably feel normal to you. You might appreciate your home, but you probably wouldn’t feel excited about living there every day.

Take notes about these experiences. Write down things like: I don’t feel good about paying 20x bigger tax bills. I don’t like telling other people what to do. I’d feel stressed if I had to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars per year minimum just to cover my expenses. What are the thoughts, beliefs, and feelings you have that indicate you’re still a mismatch for your goal?

Sometimes it’s the extended consequences of the goal, rather than the goal itself, that reveal a lack of alignment. For example, if you want to be a famous actor, what do you think about being in the public eye? Can you handle public criticism from people who don’t know you? Can you accept that as being a normal part of your life, or does that seem like something you’d want to avoid? If you want to achieve a goal, you must accept the logical consequences of that goal. If you resist the consequences, you resist the goal.

Now ask your mind to show you what vibrational adjustments you need to make to be congruent with your goal. Imagine that your character is downloading a new personality subroutine. Let your adjusted self interact with the scene anew. Allow your mind to keep making tweaks until your character seems to be a comfortable, natural fit for the scene. Get a sense of your character’s new vibe. What’s different about it? What had to be changed?

Again, take some notes that you can refer to later. You may notice things like: My new character is more confident. My new character jokes with the staff; s/he appreciates them but also retains an air of authority. My new character feels that it’s easy to earn enough to cover all the expenses; this isn’t a big deal.

A very helpful final step is to broadcast your desires. Share your goal openly with the people in your life, and talk about it seriously as if you intend to make it real ASAP. Notice how the people in your life react to your announcement. This will quickly reveal which relationships in your life are helping you become a match for your goal and which are holding you back. You’ll need to drop or transform the relationships that will otherwise hold you back. Don’t get clingy since that just holds everyone back and builds resentment. Accept that you’re here to grow. You’ll have the opportunity to connect with much more compatible partners anyway, so no worries about being alone.

Turning Repulsion Into Attraction

This process will help you create a vibrational to-do list. This is even more important than your action list. Once you take steps to adjust your vibe to be in harmony with your goal, the action steps will begin to flow rather easily.

What’s a vibrational to-do list? It’s a list of the personal development work you need to do in order to become a match for your goal.

Ultimately it will include three types of growth experiences:

1. You’ll shed limiting beliefs and perspectives that align with the old vibe, replacing them with new truths that align with the new vibe.
2. You’ll shed negative relationships that are bad match for your new vibe, and you’ll add positive new relationships that are well aligned with it.
3. You’ll stop feeding your power to excuses and obstacles, and you’ll begin emitting a more powerful vibe that draws your goal increasingly near.

These personal growth experiences are the inner magnets that you must re-align. Let’s consider each category in turn.

New Truths

Suppose your goal is to earn $1M per year. That’s about $80K per month. If you currently earn $50K per year, then this may seem like a very large sum. But if you were a match for this goal, then $80K per month must look and feel like a normal sum to you. It’s just your regular paycheck. There’s nothing special about it. If you’re going to turn it into a big deal, then you’re pushing this goal away.

So your new truth might be, “Earning $80K per month is normal. It’s easy and natural for me.”

To help you align with this goal, you might go to your bank, withdraw $1000 cash, and carry it around in your wallet every day. That may feel uncomfortable at first, but keep doing it till it feels normal and natural to you. How does it feel to carry two hours’ worth of pay in your wallet? It’s no big deal. Embrace your new truth, and it will help you create a more abundant vibe. If you want to earn 20x more money, then you need to change your relationships to money by a factor of 20. A $1000 sum in your new vibe is equivalent to a $50 bill in your old vibe.

If you can’t make little adjustments like this to get started, then you aren’t yet serious about your goal, are you? Are you going to make it real or not? If you’re going to make it real, then you’d better get used to dealing with larger sums of money as if it’s a totally normal experience for you. So start building that comfort now. Otherwise you’ll repel those larger sums because you’ll freak yourself out when they start to show up.

New Connections

Suppose your goal (once again) is to go from earning $50K to $1M per year. When you imagine yourself as already there, it becomes clear that some of your current friends won’t be able to handle it. So part of your inner work will be to either (1) drop these people from your life, so they stop blocking you, or (2) have some deep conversations to transform these relationships, so these people can get behind your goal.

Build new relationships too. What kinds of people would you have in your life if you already achieved your goal? Start building those relationships now. They’ll actually help you get there. Don’t do the “I’m not worthy” thing. If you’re going to make this goal a reality, then you’re going to have to overcome those feelings of unworthiness. You might as well start now.

The same goes for family members. In my early 20s when I decided to start my own business, I distanced myself from my parents and siblings because they were so immersed in the employee mindset. I had to be around other entrepreneurs to understand the vibe of success on this path.

Don’t cling to relationships that aren’t a good match for your goal. This is an area where you may really have to do some house-cleaning. Yes, you’ll see a lot of relationships come and go. That’s part of life. You’ll get used to it. If you want to be a match for having lots of growth experiences, then you’d better embrace the idea of seeing your personal relationships shift around a lot. Otherwise, you’ll be a match for stagnation and foot-dragging. This sort of shifting is nothing to fear. It can be quite exhilarating to connect with a variety of cool people in your lifetime. Clinginess isn’t a vibrational match for growth.

Embracing Your Power

The third area for personal development work is to notice where you’re giving your power away, and begin to reclaim your power. It’s time to stop making excuses, stop blaming others, and accept the full consequences of what it will take to achieve your goal.

Suppose you want to have a threesome (sexually). Obviously there are plenty of people on the planet who are willing to engage in this, so it’s certainly possible for you to have such an experience if you’re willing to do what it takes to make it a reality. It’s certainly not that difficult action-wise. Ask enough people, and you’ll get some yeses. Arrange a time to get together, and have fun.

And yet despite the simplicity of this goal, you can massively overcomplicate it if you give your power away.

Suppose you ask your current partner, and she says no. You can blame her for being a stick in the mud, or you can try to convince her (a form of force), but you’ll probably end up with a bad experience if you go that route.

You can also accept your partner’s no and learn to live without the threesome. But if this is a strong desire for you, then this will only build resentment. Settling for less than you desire certainly won’t lead to greater happiness and fulfillment. It may appear to be a more socially acceptable choice in some circumstances, but that’s just another instance of your feeding your power to something that blocks you (the delusion of being socially accepted by others in this case).

The deeper inner work is to ask, Why am I with a partner who doesn’t naturally want the same things I do? Why am I settling for less than I desire? Why am I being so clingy with someone who wants different experiences than I do?

To make the threesome real (not merely a fantasy), this inner work has to be done. These apparent conflicts need to be resolved. You have to learn to use your power to feed your desires, not obstacles.

If you were already a strong match for having threesomes, you could make one happen this week, perhaps even today. I know someone who claims to have had 500+ threesomes. For him it’s a fun but also an easy thing to experience. He can go out and make it happen with two women he just met, and he certainly doesn’t look like a swimsuit model. While most people block such an experience from happening, he directs his power to creating the experiences he wants to have.

I hope you can see that logistically, this really isn’t that difficult of a goal. The action steps are pretty basic, mostly involving some communication. But if your vibe isn’t a good match for such an experience, then it may appear to be virtually impossible for you. It will seem like the external world is opposing you, but that isn’t the case at all. Your own vibe is what’s creating the mismatch. If you adjust your vibe enough, the goal becomes easy and straightforward. It may even happen on its own without your having to ask.

Achieving stretch goals requires fixing the magnets that aren’t turned the right way. This includes dropping limiting beliefs and false assumptions, dumping disempowering relationships, and letting go of excuses and blame. If you avoid this inner growth work and try to jump ahead to cause-and-effect action steps, you’ll simply orbit your goal.

Do the Personal Growth Work

Once you’ve identified the personal growth work you must go through in order to become a match for your goal, then get busy working on it. If you’re conscious about it, you can compress lessons that would otherwise take years into a few months or weeks, creating big shifts in a short period of time.

There are tons of methods you can use to do this personal growth work. This website is filled with them. Here are some examples:

1. Journal to gain new insights (contrast the old vibe with the new one).
2. Have deep conversations with people who are intelligent and aware.
3. Meditate on feelings of gratitude and appreciation.
4. Keep visualizing yourself as already there; feel it as real.
5. Disconnect from people who aren’t a match for your goal.
6. Join a club that will help you align your vibe with your goal.
7. Move to a new city that’s a better match for your goal.
8. Replace the books on your bookshelf with books that match the new vibe.
9. Donate possessions that aren’t a good match for the new vibe.
10. Catch yourself giving your power away, and reclaim it by directing it back towards your desires.
11. When someone says no to your desires, say no to that aspect of your relationship with them (or to the whole relationship, if necessary).
12. Create new empowering belief statements to replace old limiting beliefs.
13. Hang out regularly with people who can naturally help you align with your goal (i.e. people who inspire you in that direction).
14. Intend and expect to reach your goal.
15. Use the word “when” instead of “if” when talking about your goal.
16. Blog about your goal or talk about it publicly (this will reveal mismatching relationships and help attract compatible connections too).
17. Conduct experiments like 30-day trials to immerse yourself in the experience of a new vibe.
18. Change your diet, clothes, etc. to eat, dress, and live as if you’re already there.
19. Put up pictures or other inspirational messages that represent the new vibe.
20. Read books written by others who emit a vibe that’s compatible with your goal.
21. Go to lectures, workshops, seminars, and retreats that will help immerse you in the new vibe.
22. Forgive people who’ve wronged you, and release the hurt and resentment.

I think you get the idea. The exact processes you use here aren’t that important. Last year I went to a talk where Joe Vitale asked everyone in the room (a room full of professional speakers and authors) to shout out their favorite personal growth processes. He had two people writing them down on a large white board. Within 10 minutes the board was completely filled, and they still kept going by writing over the previous items. This drove home the point that there are countless ways to do inner work.

Use your favorite three-letter acronym process. Get therapy. Poke yourself with your finger a few times. Go to Sedona and consult with the vortex aliens. Whatever. The specific process doesn’t matter. What works best for me may not work at all for you, and vice versa. The important thing is that the processes you use are helping you become a match for your goal. Don’t stick with a process that isn’t giving you results.

Results in this area may involve a lot of inner processing, but they should still create tangible effects. For many years I’ve wanted to travel a lot more. But I didn’t have the right vibe for a travel-rich lifestyle. I had limiting beliefs about how difficult it would be to make travel a regular part of my life. I had home-centric relationships that didn’t support a travel-rich lifestyle. I gave my power away to reasons (i.e. excuses) for why I couldn’t travel as much as I wanted to. I did some serious inner work to resolve those blocks, and as I did this, travel began showing up in my life very easily. Now it seems normal and natural to travel often. Two weeks ago I was in Canada. This week I spent a couple days in Sedona (consulting with the vortex aliens, no less). And next week I’ll be in New Orleans. Travel has become an easy and natural part of my life. It took some inner work to integrate the frequent traveler vibe, but I’d say it’s pretty well integrated now. I like being a travel slut.

When you’ve integrated the new vibe well enough (perfection isn’t necessary), you’ll find that the right actions begin to flow with ease. It feels natural and casual. There’s little or no resistance. When you want to experience something that’s aligned with your vibe, you just create it. It’s no more difficult than making a meal.

Now here’s the rub. The personal growth work will not be easy. It may be very challenging. But this is the area where you’ll make the fastest progress when working towards goals that you aren’t already a good match for experiencing. Once you resolve the alignment issues, the goal almost takes care of itself. You won’t have to worry so much about problems like procrastination and self-sabotage.

If you want to get through this part faster, read my book Personal Development for Smart People. It covers the 7 fundamentals of personal growth and how to speed up the process, regardless of what type of goal you’re trying to achieve. I’ve alluded to 3 of those 7 principles in this article. For the others I have to refer you to the book because it would take way too long to explain them properly in an article (and this one is already pushing 8000 words). A full book was necessary to do this topic justice.

Avoid Delusional Role Models

I feel very fortunate because I have a privileged perspective that isn’t available to most people. I get to observe lots of people going after different goals, and I get to see who succeeds and who flounders. And because I’m exposed to all this raw data, I’m able to learn patterns that most people don’t have the opportunity to learn within their lifetimes.

One thing that’s become very clear is that when people succeed, they tend to get there by taking actions that are easy and natural for them. Force doesn’t work well. Force can sometimes get you to a goal, but the form of the goal will be a bit off from what you wanted, and it will be hard to hold onto it. When you achieve a stretch goal using this vibrational alignment process, however, it’s easier to hang onto it afterwards — and to further build upon it. And you’ll enjoy the process of getting there so much more.

This is a very personal process, however. You have to keep coming back to what works for you. You have to stop projecting false imaginings onto other people, especially people you’ve never met. That’s delusional thinking that will only push your goal further away.

For example, if you set a goal to become a millionaire, search your thoughts for the kinds of images that come up. What associations do you already have in your memory? Where did you learn them? Are they accurate? Do they apply to you? Did you pick up fictional characters from TV or film for your role models in this area? When you think of millionaires, do you imagine Ebeneezer Scrooge or Gordon Gecko? Do you imagine millionaires that you’ve only seen on TV but which you’ve never met face to face? Such mental clutter will screw up your vibe in this area.

Go back to basics and re-learn the right vibe from scratch. Admit that you don’t really understand the true vibe of what it’s like to be an actual millionaire in the real world. I have many millionaire friends, and none are anything like the way I’ve seen wealthy people portrayed in fictional books, TV shows, or movies. Their real vibes are totally different than the fictional versions. Their vibes are also quite different than what I’d have expected based on interviews I’ve seen with other millionaires, or from what I’ve read in books written by millionaires.

When you only experience certain people through indirect media, don’t pretend that you know the person being represented. It’s too easy to project false assumptions and beliefs onto someone else when you only connect from a distance. If you later interact with such people one-on-one and face-to-face, those interactions will often throw you for a loop. The other person’s vibe won’t be what you expected.

Obviously I’ve shared many details about my life via my blog, but it’s safe to say that someone who spends 30 minutes chatting with me one-on-one in person will know me significantly better than someone who’s read all of my articles but has never met me in person. The second person will have a lot more information about me, but the first person will have a much better understanding of my actual vibe. I feel the same about others. If I haven’t met you in person, then I don’t claim to know you at all.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve met someone in person who’s clearly shy and introverted, but from their blog postings, you’d think they were a social butterfly. In most cases, they didn’t intentionally create a false image to deceive people. It’s just that their real vibe doesn’t get transmitted over the Internet. This leads people to project all sorts of false assumptions onto them, making it hard to use such people as good role models.

One of the reasons it’s so important to favor in-person communication (especially when you want to understand a new vibe) is that your skin cells are covered with tiny antennae that pick up electro-magnetic fields emitted by other people (such as their heart waves and brain waves). Every human being is like a walking transmitter and receiver. This aspect of our biology, however, is essentially a local phenomenon. It drops off massively if you’re more than a meter or two away from someone. Even watching someone from a stage is too far. You really want to be no farther than the distance of sharing a meal together. That’s when you’ll learn the most about someone else’s vibe. Of course you’ll learn even more about someone’s vibe if you sleep with them, but you don’t have to take things that far.

Consequently, if you’ve never spent any real time with me in person, then it’s not such a good idea to use me as a role model for any goals I might have achieved that you also want to achieve. If you only know me from my blog posts or podcasts or from watching me give a speech, you don’t really know what my normal daily vibe is like. You’re better off finding someone local who can serve as a role model, someone you can hang out with in person, if only for a short time. If you use primarily Internet-based role models, you’re probably going to spend a lot of time running in circles instead of achieving your goals because it will be very hard for you to lock onto the right vibe. You’ll merely be creating a false projection that doesn’t much resemble the real vibe that matches the goal.

The Process in Review

Here’s what our overall process looks like step by step:

1. Define your outcome.
2. Develop a deeper understanding of the new vibe that matches the goal (get face time with people who’ve achieved it, visualize yourself as already there).
3. Contrast your current vibe with the new vibe to see where you’re out of alignment (use contrasting visualizations, broadcast your desires).
4. Identify the personal growth work necessary to adjust your vibe (new truths, new connections, smarter application of your power).
5. Use your favorite processes to do the personal growth work until you achieve enough alignment to experience the flow of inspired action.
6. Allow the flow of inspired action (not force) to guide you to your goal.
7. Enjoy the harmonious manifestation of your goal.

It’s a simple process in essence, and it works amazingly well.

No goal is out of reach with this process. But what if you can’t find any role models for a particular goal?

Then you’ll have to rely more heavily on visualization. This may require more experimentation to find the right vibe. It’s one reason that new goals that have never been accomplished before by anyone usually take longer to achieve. It takes a while to figure out the right vibe that aligns with the goal. For example, human beings are always building faster computers than the ones that exist today because the vibe of “building a slightly faster computer” is already known and understood by enough people to make that possible. However, the vibe of “building a sentient android” is not yet understood and integrated, so we don’t have a Mr. Data yet.

Some fun areas for vibrational “play” involve exploring spaces with stretch goals that no one has ever achieved before. Can you figure out the vibe that aligns with the goal? Can you do the personal growth work to become a match for that vibe? Or will you stick to the vibes that represent a “been there, done that” experience for someone else?

What about the action steps? When your vibe becomes a strong match for your goal, you don’t even have to think about the action steps. That would be like telling you how to make dinner. There are countless resources to inform you about the action steps to take. When your vibe is a match for your goal, those action-step resources will tend to effortlessly flow to you. If it seems like the action steps are unknown or a struggle, then you need to do more work on aligning your vibe with your goal.

Now if I could only figure out the vibe of writing a typo-free article on the first try.

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Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Now it’s time for the advanced version: The 30-Day Supertrial.

[cue trumpets]

A Quick Review

When conducting a 30-day trial, you pick one habit or behavior you’d like to change, and you commit yourself to sticking with it for 30 days straight. If you miss even one day, you start back at Day 1.

It can be very difficult to change a habit for life, but if you use the psychological trick of telling yourself that it’s only for 30 days, your odds of success increase substantially. And of course once you reach Day 30, the new habit is already installed, and it’s much easier to continue it on Day 31 and beyond.

Some examples: Get up at 5am every morning. Eat a vegan or vegetarian diet. Avoid watching TV. Say “You are loved” to someone each day.

A 30-day trial is partly an experiment and partly an exercise in self-discipline. It’s an experiment in that you see for yourself how your life would be different if you made a certain change and stuck with it. A good 30-day trial will also push you to build your self-discipline, helping you grow stronger mentally and emotionally. It’s a workout for your willpower.

The more 30-day trials you successfully complete, the stronger your self-discipline muscle becomes. This will benefit you tremendously in all areas of life. On top of that, you get the benefits of the new habits you’ve installed, such as the educational value of reading lots of new books, the metabolic boost that comes from regular exercise, or the financial benefits of working on your Internet business every day.

When most of us reach adulthood, we have lots of crappy habits that don’t serve us, and our self-discipline tends to be very weak. For example, about 50 million Americans smoke, yet most of them would prefer not to. That’s a behavioral conditioning nightmare. What habitual actions are you succumbing to that you’d prefer not to?

Your level of self-discipline will have a strong impact on your self-esteem. The more disciplined you are, the more you can adopt positive habits and shed negative ones. Positive habits yield positive results, and positive results feel good. Feeling good gives you more energy, and that feeds into more positive actions, which in turn become positive habits.

30-day trials can be very challenging, but they’re also very effective. This is my #1 favorite tool for habit change.

Now in the past, I’ve cautioned people not to overdo it. Many people who are new to the concept of 30-day trials go kittywompus and try to install 5-10 new habits simultaneously. And almost without exception, they crash and burn. Usually they don’t even make it past Day 3.

It’s like trying to juggle too many balls at once. You end up dropping all of them. Zero results.

So I’ve advised people to stick with one 30-day trial at a time. One trial will be plenty challenging. And you can do 12 of these per year if you’d like. Even if you only succeed at half of them, that’s still a tremendous amount of improvement within a year.

Now I’m going to explain how to actually do the opposite.

Yes, Dr. Venkman, under certain conditions we can cross the streams. There’s definitely a very slim chance you’ll survive.

I love this plan! I’m excited to be a part of it! Let’s do it!

What Is a 30-Day Supertrial?

A 30-day Supertrial is when you attempt to make several significant behavioral changes in one 30-day period.

For example, you might attempt to install the following habits all at the same time:

1. Check email only once per day, and completely empty your inbox each time
2. Exercise every morning for 30 minutes minimum, alternating weight training and yoga workouts
3. Read positive, inspirational material for an hour before bed
4. Go to bed by 10pm every night
5. Spend 10-20 minutes per day visualizing your goals/intentions as already accomplished
6. Avoid consuming dairy products
7. Work on your screenplay for 2 hours per day

For 30 days you commit yourself to doing all of these things without exception.

If you’re like most people, then you’re going to fail. You probably won’t even make it through the first day, and the odds of making it through the first week successfully are more than 100-1 against you.

So if you want to have a chance in Sto’Vo’Kor of succeeding at this, you can’t be like most people.

You probably won’t heed my advice, but let me succumb to the delusion anyway and share some practical tips on how to increase your odds of success.

It’s Possible But Almost Not

First of all, it is possible to succeed at a Supertrial. It’s just extremely difficult. But like the Siren’s song, many of us can’t resist the seductive lure of instant behavioral nirvana.

Yes, it’s possible. It’s possible to flop a boat with 7-2 offsuit too, but the odds are against you.

Knowing how difficult this is, however, gives you a slight advantage. If you maintain a healthy respect for the challenge, you’re less likely to underestimate how tough it is, so you’ll be better prepared when you begin.

A Supertrial does make some sense because our behaviors are intricately linked. One behavior triggers another, which links to another, and so on.

Oversleeping in the morning leads to skipping exercise, which leads to a crappy breakfast and a late start on your day, which leads to feeling unproductive and lazy, which leads to low performance at work and a feeling of being drained at the end of the day.

On the flip side, getting up early gives you extra time to exercise, which boosts your metabolism and energizes you. You’ll also be more attracted to healthier foods after exercise, and this positive start can kick you into a productive workday, which leaves you with a delicious feeling of accomplishment in the evening, where you’ll still have plenty of energy to work on your personal goals.

Habits reinforce each other. They overlap. So the main idea behind a Supertrial is to collapse a whole chain of negative habits and replace them with a new chain of positive ones. In some ways this can actually be easier than trying to change habits one at a time since a Supertrial gives you the opportunity to cut out an entire chain of unhelpful behaviors.

Prepare Well

Read the article Habit Change Is Like Chess to understand the 3 phases of habit change. A 30-day trial occurs in the third and last phase. Make sure you devote sufficient effort to putting the right scaffolding in place and preparing for the trial as best you can.

For example, if you’re doing a dietary change, stock your kitchen with healthy foods and make sure the off-limit foods are out of the house before you even begin your trial.

Whatever you can set up, take down, or prepare in advance to make your life easier during the Supertrial, do that first. Give yourself a few days to get everything in place before you begin. You may be itching to start Day 1 as soon as you can, but that inspiration is only going to fizzle into disappointment if you don’t take enough prep time.

The more prepared you are when you kick off your Supertrial, the better your odds of success.

Train Up First

Supertrials are like triathlons. You don’t just show up for one with no advance training. You won’t even make it through the swimming portion if you do that.

This is a level you must build up to. Once you have at least 5-10 successful 30-day trials under your belt, then you might consider a Supertrial. Otherwise you’re wasting your time.

Supertrials are the advanced version of 30-day trials. Even a regular 30-day trial is well beyond the beginner level. The beginner version is a 5-day or 10-day trial.

You must learn to walk before you can run. Training up your self-discipline is a lifelong process. Start with what you can achieve, and keep upping the challenge level as you grow stronger. But don’t keep attempting to lift weights that you’re always dropping. Go lighter until you see what your capabilities are.

There’s no shame in being a beginner who accepts that s/he is a beginner. For the unwilling and impatient, there are humility lessons.

Eliminate Social Drag

If there are people in your life who will resist the changes you’re making, distance yourself from them as much as possible. Otherwise the social drag they create can decrease your motivation and hold you back.

For example, if part of your Supertrial includes working on your new Internet business for 2 hours per day, and you have a friend who thinks that the only people who make money online are scammers, that isn’t a good person to be connecting with during your trial.

Make yourself scarce to anyone who would drag you down. You’re going to have enough of a challenge without the unnecessary social resistance.

Don’t Announce It

With a normal 30-day trial, telling people about your commitment in advance can increase your chance of success because they’ll help hold you accountable.

But with a Supertrial, I’d advise you to do the opposite and keep it to yourself.

One reason is that you’re going to be attempting so much change at once, that most people won’t believe you can do it. So when you tell others about it, you’ll probably add more negative social drag. People will be watching for you to fail. That isn’t going to help you succeed.

The exception is that it’s okay to share this with people you genuinely expect will be encouraging and supportive. If you can secure more social support, then go for it. It can definitely help.

By the time you’ve built your self-discipline to the level where a Supertrial becomes potentially achievable, you’ll be so far beyond the average level of performance in society that most people will be turned off if you talk about it. You’ll just upset them, and they may secretly wish to see you fail. So my feeling is that you’re better off keeping them in the dark.

Many years ago I set a goal of going through a 4-year university in only 3 semesters by taking about triple the normal course load (as explained in Do It Now). I shared this goal with several people in advance. Most of them laughed or said I was deluded. Not a single person was encouraging. So I learned to keep a low profile, and I kept other people out of the loop. Further into this experience, one of my professors became curious about what I was doing, so I shared the details with him. He was able to relate because he had a very high-performance daughter. It was nice to gain that little bit of social support.

It takes more than discipline to get through a Supertrial. There may be unforeseen interactions between your habits that you didn’t account for. You may realize you didn’t set it up right after the first day or two, and you need to go back and revise your plan. So much can go wrong. With a Supertrial you really don’t need the added social pressure of accountability to others.

A Supertrial is more of an inner journey anyway. It’s about digging deep within yourself and giving birth to a whole new you. You need the space to focus on doing what needs to be done without worrying about other people’s reactions.

By the time you’re ready to attempt a Supertrial, you’ll have already trained your self-discipline to a high degree. And you’ll have a clearer understanding of what kinds of weights you can lift and which are too heavy for you. At this point you’re going to rely more on your inner resolve; social accountability won’t be as important. If you can’t hold yourself accountable, you aren’t ready to attempt a Supertrial anyway.

Don’t Wear Yourself Out

One of the most common mistakes people make when stacking multiple 30-day trials is that they include something in there that’s going to wear them out during the first week.

The craziest example is when people attempt polyphasic sleep, which is insanely difficult by itself, and then they stack a bunch of other trials on top of that. I’ve never seen anyone succeed this way. It’s like going to the gym for the first time ever and trying to bench press 300 pounds. Nice try, grasshopper… but no.

Only slightly less deluded is including something in your trial that’s going to make your energy levels wonky during the first several days. For example, if you currently drag yourself out of bed at 8am each morning, and getting up at 5am is part of your Supertrial, you can expect to be a bit sleep deprived during that first week until your body adapts to the new rhythm. Being tired will make it VERY difficult to succeed at the other parts of your trial.

Another example would be trying to switch from the Standard American Diet (SAD) to an all raw vegan diet. You’re probably going to deal with some intense detox (cold-like symptoms) during that first week or two. To stack even more on top of this is going to be too tough.

Any yet another example would be diving into a new weight training regimen, one that leaves you very sore during that first week.

If you’re going to attempt a Supertrial, do your best to avoid including a new habit that may wear you out during that first week. Do a separate 30-day trial for that item first, get it locked in, and then conduct a Supertrial afterwards. So go raw first, or become an early riser first, or start weight training first. Get the sleepiness, detox, and soreness out of the way. Then you can stack more on top with a Supertrial later. This will make your Supertrial much less stressful and a lot more achievable.

Guard your sleep during your Supertrial. Don’t push yourself to stay up later and later trying to squeeze everything in. If you can’t complete all your actions by your desired bedtime, then cut out some actions. Don’t deprive yourself of sleep. Sleep deprivation will increase your stress levels and your risk of illness. You don’t want to be fighting your own fatigue while you’re trying to complete a Supertrial. Supertrials are tough even when you maintain stellar energy levels.

Stagger Your Starting Days

Instead of launching every new habit on Day 1, you can stagger your starting days a bit. This gives you the opportunity to focus on adding one new habit every day or two, so Day 1 isn’t so overwhelming.

It’s a judgment call if you want to do this. It isn’t necessary, but it may help if your intended Day 1 looks a bit daunting.

Count Day 1 of your 30 days as the day you add on the final habit, so you’re still doing the full 30 days with every habit.

Have a Fallback Position

Prioritize the habits in your Supertrial, so if the going gets too tough, you can drop one or more of them and fall back to a smaller number that you’re committed to installing.

I suggest splitting your Supertrial habits into 3 lists:

1. A-list = definitely want these installed, would make a huge difference if I succeed
2. B-list = great to have, would certainly enhance my life, but not worth sacrificing my A-list items for them
3. C-list = nice to have but it’s the icing on the cake, but not worth sacrificing A-list or B-list items for them

If you feel too overwhelmed or stressed, and you’re at serious risk of failing your Supertrial, first cut out the C-list items. If you’re still overwhelmed, then cut out the B-list too. And worst case, fall back to your single most important A-list item.

Knowing in advance which items to cut in an emergency will at least allow you to fall back to a regular 30-day trial and still get something installed. That’s a lot better than dropping every single ball and achieving nothing.

Do the best you can, but don’t beat yourself up if you can’t get everything installed at once.

Design for Balance

Perhaps the best use of a Supertrial is to conduct a holistic rebalancing of your life across all key areas.

A well-balanced Supertrial will increase your chances of success. An imbalanced trial will generate inner resistance and make you want to quit.

Pay particular attention to the following:

Body – Include something to boost your energy and sense of well-being. Exercising in the morning is great because it will boost your metabolism, making you feel more alert and energetic during the day. It’s much easier to conduct a Supertrial when your energy is high.

Mind – Develop your mind during your Supertrial. Daily nonfiction reading is a nice practice. Then you’ll gain some educational value during your trial. Reading in the area of your career can be especially beneficial.

Career – Add a habit to benefit your career or your general work productivity, such as checking email only once a day, or saying something encouraging to each of your coworkers each day.

Finances – Add habits to improve your finances, such as updating your accounting records each day or working on a new Internet business for 2 hours per day.

Relationships – Add a habit to improve your social courage or relationship skills. Attempt to initiate a conversation with one new person per day. Or share lunchtime with a different coworker each day to improve your networking.

Emotions – Include habits that help you maintain a positive, action-oriented attitude. I listened to inspirational and educational audio programs for about 2 hours per day in college, mostly while walking to and from classes, and it kept my motivation levels very high.

Order – Add a habit to reduce chaos and increase the order and organization of your life, such as devoting 30 minutes per day to sorting and purging clutter in your home or office.

Spiritual Development – Include a habit like daily meditation or journaling, so you can enrich your inner life to keep pace with your outer enrichment.

Fun – Including at least one fun daily activity in your trial, such as playing a game with your family. This gives you a daily reward and something to look forward to. It also helps condition your mind to believe that self-discipline is fun. The more disciplined you are, the more time you’ll have to enjoy your life, and the less stressful your life will be.

This may sound like a tall order, but such a blend of habits will help to mutually reinforce each other, thereby increasing your chances of success. For example, improving your finances means you can afford to buy healthier foods, pay for yoga classes, etc. A holistic approach will help you make advances across the board, so no area of your life drags down the other areas.

Use Crisp Parameters

Define your habits crisply by spelling them out with nouns, verbs, and prepositions. Avoid the use of adjectives like more and better, since that’s a sign of wishful thinking (and it’s also dumb).

These are delusional goals: Exercise more. Eat healthier. Read faster. Complain less. Be nicer. Work harder.

You can’t succeed if you set delusional goals. Plus your cheek will be hurting after I smack you upside the head.

This is a crisp goal: Exercise on the treadmill at 60-80% max heart rate for 30 minutes per day.

With crisp goals you can’t delude yourself. It’s obvious if you’ve done it or not. An objective observer would give you the same thumbs up or thumbs down that you give yourself. There’s no room for debate.

To the maximum extent possible, define each habit in binary terms. Either you did it or you didn’t. Eliminate the middle gray area, unless you just want to do a make-believe trial with make-believe results.

Focus on Actions

The point of doing a Supertrial is to lock in some serious gains that will put you on a path for a major long-term boost in your results. However, during the Supertrial itself, it’s usually counter-productive to be too outcome-focused. Keep the end results in mind, but put your attention on the daily actions you need to take, and do them one at a time as they come up.

For example, “Write for 2 hours per day” is a better choice for a habit goal than “Write every day so as to complete the first draft of a book in 30 days.” The first one is more directly under your control, and it’s clear whether you’ve done it or not.

Supertrials are all about action. What are the daily actions you want to condition into habits, such that if you passively maintain beyond the initial trial, they’re likely to serve you well for many years to come?

How would your life be different if every day you… Did yoga for 45 minutes? Limited web surfing to 30 minutes max? Initiated a conversation with someone new? Read nonfiction for 30 minutes? Worked on an Internet business for 1-2 hours? Cuddled and caressed your significant other for 20 minutes? Took a shower? Organized your home for 20 minutes? Planned your next day for 10 minutes? Made travel plans for 30 minutes?

Schedule It

If you’re going to perform some action each day, decide in advance what time you’re going to do it.

If you have a lot of items to schedule, write out a schedule for a typical day, so you can see how everything fits together.

Give yourself some breathing room between activities. Don’t assume you can stop exercising and start showering in the very same minute, for instance.

If you don’t set aside a time for it, you haven’t yet committed to doing it.

Compensate for What’s Missing

Bad habits are sticky for a reason. They provide you with some benefits.

Before you drop a bad habit, consider what the benefit is. Then be sure to add something to your Supertrial to compensate for the benefits you may be losing when you cut out those bad habits.

Suppose you’re spending way too much time checking Facebook and other online forums during your workday. This kills your productivity, which in turn drags down your self-esteem and energy levels, preventing you from feeling the motivational boost that only a truly productive day can provide. Deep down you know this bad habit has to go.

But each time you attempt to drop it, you feel isolated and disconnected. You miss those frequent social connections, and pretty soon you’re back at it again.

Recognize that even though this habit is destroying your productivity, it’s actually helping you in a different way. It helps you periodically renew the feeling of being connected to others. That isn’t a bad thing at all.

What else can give you this feeling of connection without destroying your workday? There are many possible solutions.

One solution would be to timebox your online socializing by assigning it a time slot in the evening, so it doesn’t interfere with your workday. You can give yourself a liberal amount of time to socialize all you want, but not when you’re supposed to be working. If you want more frequent socializing, you can chop it up and schedule it during the natural breaks in your day, such as during lunchtime or with your afternoon snack.

Another solution is to reduce or eliminate the online socializing, and add a stronger habit that gives you even more of these benefits. Spend 30-60 minutes talking with friends on the phone each day. Arrange a social event at your house every day for 30 days, like a 2-3 hour game night. Or invite a different friend or coworker over for dinner each night. Communicating online can be fun, but nothing beats face-to-face connecting, especially when it comes to sharing laughs.

Still another option, which may be outside the scope of a Supertrial, would be to switch to a career that has you interacting with people a lot more, so you don’t feel disconnected during your workday.

Replace smoking with meditation and massage. Replace junk food with cuddle time. Replace masturbation with sex (or vice versa, depending on your priorities).

Notice the hidden benefit behind your bad habits. Instead of dropping those habits completely, look to replace them with new habits that provide even stronger benefits but without the drawbacks. This may take some trial and error experimenting to discover what works best for you, but it can certainly be done.

Include Downtime

Supertrials can be energizing, but they can also be physically and emotionally taxing, especially in the beginning when it takes a lot of conscious thought.

I recommend that you include at least 2 hours per day of downtime for rest and relaxation. Give your body and mind a complete break from the potential stress of your Supertrial.

You can use this time to lie down, take a nap, connect with friends and family, enjoy a relaxing bath, play video games, cuddle a loved one, or anything else that helps refresh you. Unplug and relax.

Putting this near the end of the day, such as right after dinner time, gives you something to look forward to. You may not always need it, but some days you’ll be glad to know it’s there.

Stick With Daily Habits

For a Supertrial it’s best to stick with habits you’ll do every day, including weekends. Maintaining a consistent daily rhythm with no days off is important for creating a sense of flow.

So if you’re going to get up at 5am or write for 2 hours per day, then do that 7 days a week.

It may seem harder and less flexible this way (that’s what she said), but it’s actually easier. A major point of failure is when people slack off on the weekends and then try to get everything working again on Monday. It’s almost like starting the Supertrial all over again each week.

A habit is a memorized solution. This memorization will occur faster if you maintain daily consistency with no breaks. Once your brain has the solution memorized (your 30 days are up, and the habit is installed), then you can cut back on the frequency, such as by skipping weekends, with less risk of complete slippage. But it’s better to stick with daily actions while you’re getting these habits installed. Remember — it’s only 30 days!

If you still wish to include non-daily habits in your Supertrial, read How to Maintain Not-Quite-Daily Habits to educate yourself on how to do it.

Define Your Baseline Performance

To reduce the difficultly level, define each habit in baseline terms. What’s the minimum level of performance that will still give you some worthwhile positive results?

For example, instead of reading for an hour per day, you might set a baseline goal of reading for 15 minutes per day. If you’re running late and can’t squeeze in your hour of reading without losing sleep, you can just do it for 15 minutes those days. Some days you may go longer, but 15 minutes is your minimum.

Once you complete a trial at your baseline level, now you have some success under your belt. You also have a basic version of the habit installed. Now you can push beyond the baseline level to a more optimal level for the long term, such as by doing another 30-day trial focused on improving or expanding that one habit.

It’s better to install a baseline level of performance in each area of your Supertrial than to try to go for the full monty and fail to make any habits stick. The results may not be as good as you’d hoped, but at least there will be some results to speak of.

It’s much less difficult to exercise for 45 minutes per day when you’ve already conditioned the habit of exercising for 20 minutes per day… as opposed to installing the 45-minute habit from a cold start.

Adding 5-10 new baseline habits (15-20 minutes per day here and there) can be a terrific use of a Supertrial. Afterwards you can maintain these new baselines and then try to increase them, either with a new Supertrial or with individual 30-day trials that focus on one habit at a time.

***

If you do attempt a Supertrial, I wish you the best of luck. You must be really disciplined, really crazy, or really naive — or some combination of those.

Today is actually my Day 1 of a new Supertrial that involves a major rebalancing of how I invest my time each day. I’m not going to share the details or blog about it along the way (as explained in the “Don’t Announce It” section above), but if you follow this blog for the next 30 days, you may be able to guess at one or two of them…

… unless every molecule in my body explodes at the speed of light, that is.

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Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

What if you could see procrastination from a more empowering perspective? What if you could even fall in love with procrastination?

The Anti-Procrastination Brigade

One of the reasons procrastination gets such a bad rap is because it’s generally perceived as contrary to corporate agendas, which rely heavily on time-is-of-the-essence execution driven by command and control authority to hit financial targets. When employees procrastinate on key projects and tasks, it can cause delays that hurt the corporate bottom line.

Managers are typically held accountable for these delays. Managerial pay is frequently linked to the corporate agenda, so procrastination issues with team members can personally impact a manager’s income. This incentivizes managers to turn procrastination into an enemy and to do what they can to squash it.

Consequently, you’ll commonly find that anti-procrastination books are written by current or former corporate managers. I’ve read many books on this topic, and I have a hard time recalling one that wasn’t written by someone with management experience.

Since I’ve managed a team in the past as well, I’ve also witnessed the effect of procrastination on team results, so it should come as no surprise that I too have been a member of the anti-procrastination brigade. One of my earliest article hits was Overcoming Procrastination. I wrote the original version of that article in 2001 while running Dexterity Software, three years before I started blogging, and for most of the intervening years, it has held a top position in search engines.

Anti-procrastination, however, is merely a perspective — a lens through which we can view reality. In this article, I’d like to offer you a different perspective to consider. Instead of favoring what’s best for the manager, the team, or the company, let’s consider what’s actually best for the individual.

What Do You Do When You Procrastinate?

When you’re coming upon a deadline, and you seem to be putting off what “needs” to be done, what are you doing instead?

Some people tend to freeze in this situation, doing virtually nothing. They get some impulses for things they’d rather be doing, but then they guilt themselves out of acting on them.

However, if you were to set that guilt aside and flow with those impulses, what would you end up doing instead? And what might be the long-term consequences?

Perhaps the consequences of procrastination are not as negative as they initially seem. The pressure of the moment has a way of distorting your perspective, just as physical pressure can distort a glass lens.

When I was in high school, I used to procrastinate heavily on certain school assignments, almost always waiting till the night before the due date to begin working on them. Most often I’d procrastinate on writing essays and doing various reading assignments. I generally found them boring and tedious. Looking back, I don’t see that this has hurt me at all over the long run. I still don’t care about analyzing the works of Chaucer, and since then my mind has seen fit to reallocate the neurons once devoted to such tasks.

What would I do while I was procrastinating on school assignments? I spent many hours playing video games. I also read programming books and wrote small programs on my Atari 800 and then on a PC.

And this actually benefitted me in a huge way. Many years later I started a game development and publishing company and ran it for more than a decade. Thanks in part to my previous gaming experience, some of my games won industry awards. So while it seemed like I was procrastinating on the important stuff in high school, in truth I was putting off what was less relevant to me personally, so I could spend more time doing what actually mattered to me. Somehow I never got around to writing a computer game based on the life of Chaucer.

Years later, I found myself procrastinating on programming projects in order to read personal development books, listen to audio programs, and write articles. My early article writing was actually a form of procrastination. I always had to put off something seemingly more important to free up time to crank out a new article.

I’d also coach other game developers as a form of procrastination, helping certain people gain the knowledge and skills they needed to quit their corporate jobs and start their own indie game development businesses. But the funny thing is that further down the road, I ended up licensing and publishing games from some of those developers I helped.

In retrospect, this pattern of procrastination has benefitted me tremendously in the long run, although at the time it often seemed like a bad habit I needed to resist, and I’d feel guilty about it. It caused me some extra stress and a number of all-nighters. I’ve also had to deal with the occasional late fee or penalty now and then. But overall I have to say that all that procrastination wasn’t such a problem after all. I can make a case that it’s done me more good than harm.

Whose Agenda Are You Fulfilling?

Whose deadlines are you really working on? Are they your deadlines or someone else’s? If the deadlines aren’t really yours, why do you care so much about them anyway?

Quite often you’ll find yourself procrastinating on someone else’s agenda so you can spend more time working on your own. Much of the time, however, people aren’t in tune with their own agendas. They spend more time fussing over what they think they should be doing as opposed to what they actually want to be doing.

So what if you’re late? Do you really care all that much what your teacher thinks of you… or your boss… or the government?

Other people’s deadlines are just that — other people’s deadlines. They won’t always mesh with your desires.

Even if you choose to take on a certain project, and you’re the one defining the milestones along the way, you may find that at some future point, you seem to be resisting your earlier decisions. You may have a hard time getting yourself to take action when you know that you “should.”

Where do you think this resistance comes from? What if this isn’t a failing at all? What if your procrastination is actually a signal that your priorities are askew? What if procrastination is a sign that a greater intelligence is trying to nudge you in a whole new direction?

How Much Is Procrastination Really Hurting You?

When you feel that you’re procrastinating, take a deeper look at what’s going on. First of all, is your procrastination really hurting you all that much? Or are you making mountains out of molehills?

In the grand scheme of things, having to pay a late fee is hardly the end of the world. Same goes for doing an occasional all-nighter. The money can be recouped. You’ll have a chance to catch up on your sleep later. You’ll recover easily enough. The consequences are little more than a mosquito bite.

Even when something seems really bad at the time, years later you may look back and realize it wasn’t such a big deal after all. And maybe it actually helped you get onto a better path.

For example, if your procrastination is so “bad” that you end up failing your classes and getting kicked out of college, initially it may seem like a huge blow. You may be inclined to beat yourself up with guilt, and the people around you may heap loads of disappointment onto you. But later in life when the emotional sting wears off, you may realize that this was a powerful step along your path of growth. You’ll begin to see the good in those trying times.

Perhaps your procrastination helped you escape the wrong major. After all, how can you purport to be majoring in something that’s aligned with your passion and talents if you got yourself expelled because when push came to shove, you consistently opted to do something other than tend to your studies? Maybe your real mistake was further upstream, and procrastination helped you escape a dead-end track.

Another possibility is that the timing just wasn’t right. Maybe your procrastination is telling you that this is the wrong time to attend college. Perhaps you should travel the world for a while. Maybe you don’t need a college degree at all. Maybe you should dive right in and get to work doing what you love. What if the decision to earn a degree was just a fear-based delay tactic?

The Benefit of Hindsight

Even when it seems like your procrastination habit is a purely destructive one, there may be hidden benefits that can be difficult to see at the time.

When I got expelled from UC Berkeley after 3 semesters — I think that in my final semester, my GPA actually started with the decimal point — it was a huge blow to me at the time. Even worse was that I’d just gotten out of jail after being charged with felony grand theft, and I was awaiting my court date. This was a major low point in my life. I was only 19 years old at the time, and I constantly beat myself up about the stupid mistakes I’d made. I thought I was a fairly intelligent guy, but apparently my choices had been incredibly stupid. I procrastinated endlessly on my studies, so I could do things like drink alcohol, go to parties, play poker, and shoplift.

My original plan was to earn my degree in computer science, then maybe go on to earn a Ph.D. Afterwards I could get a nice job as a computer programmer somewhere. That was my “should” path.

Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, however, the seemingly crazy path I ended up taking turned out to be tremendously valuable. It was very stressful at the time, but to this day, I remain immensely grateful that I didn’t stick to my original plan and graduate from UC Berkeley. If I’d followed that course, I might be working as a computer programmer for the government or some corporation today. That wouldn’t necessarily be a terrible outcome, but I’d much rather be where I am today than where I expect that path would have led me. I think my original plan would have been a heartless path for me in the long run.

Instead, my procrastination put me in a position where I had to learn entirely different lessons. Through shoplifting I pushed myself to face my fear again and again and to control my adrenaline response, so I could maintain my composure even when taking big risks. That has been of tremendous benefit to me ever since, especially in business. I really love that I’m able to look at something that scares me and motivate myself to plow right through it without freezing up. It’s very unlikely I’d be doing public speaking today if I’d never learned those courage lessons via shoplifting.

Secondly, I learned how to handle negative social pressure. When I hit that low point in my life, everyone who knew me at the time seemed deeply disappointed in me. A lot of criticism was heaped upon me, and I can’t say that it was unwarranted. But in order to make forward progress and turn things around, I had to learn to tune out unhelpful feedback, decide for myself what was best, and take action without the benefit of social support. Otherwise I’d have gotten stuck in a place of self-pity or defensiveness. This ability still comes in handy today. For instance, I feel quite comfortable opening up about topics that will predictably generate a lot of negative feedback (such as polyamory or divorce). It’s hard for me to get worked up over anonymous Internet criticism after what I’ve already been through.

Thirdly, I had to learn to love myself unconditionally. The beating I gave myself at the time was worse than what anyone else could have done to me. I was terribly disappointed in myself, and I felt guilty about blowing everything that seemed important. As I recovered from those experiences, which took a long time, I gradually learned to accept myself in spite of my apparent flaws. I had to learn that I’m still worthy of love. We all are. By loving myself, I feel more inclined to care about others. A few days ago, I noticed that a friend seemed to be feeling down on herself, so I wrote her a note to offer her some support and to remind her that she’s loved and appreciated. And of course I had to procrastinate on something “important” to do that. Perhaps our to-do lists should include more items like this to begin with.

Fourthly, I became more motivated than ever to do some good with my life. I was so disgusted with the way I’d been living that I pushed myself to the opposite end of the spectrum. I began spending a lot of time working on my character development. Changes were slow and gradual, but eventually I grew into a man who felt good about himself and his contribution to the world.

Fifthly, I became a lot less judgmental towards others. Given my sordid past, who am I to judge someone else for their choices? I learned that accepting others and accepting myself are two sides of the same coin; you can’t love and accept yourself without doing the same for others. In my writing I will sometimes temporarily adopt a very opinionated position to stimulate people to think about the ideas, but that’s simply a literary tool I employ to make articles more impactful and memorable. People who hang out with me in person know that I’m ridiculously accepting of others, regardless of their lifestyles. Consequently, I seem to have a habit of attracting friends who are often subjected to harsh judgment by society, including psychics, strippers, porn stars, polyamorous people, pot smokers, people with non-mainstream spiritual beliefs, and of course those “crazy” jobless folks. This has added tremendous richness to my life, including many fun and educational experiences that I’d have otherwise missed. Associating with such people has also helped me feel a lot more comfortable in my own skin.

And finally, I gained much more freedom. Since I had failed in such a big way, everyone else’s expectations of me hit rock bottom. No one expected anything from me after that. This gave me the social and emotional freedom to begin taking control of my life without feeling that I had to live up to anyone else’s expectations. Even though I was in a low place, I felt like I finally had the wherewithal to steer my life as I saw fit without worrying about what other people might think. I could hardly make things worse, so it was easier to take some risks.

To this day I’m immensely grateful for these lessons (and many more), which came about as a result of procrastinating on my studies in order to follow other impulses. I can’t be sure where those impulses came from, but I’ve since learned not to reject such urges out of hand. Perhaps there is a greater intelligence at work here.

Stop Beating Yourself Up

If you have a tendency to beat yourself up for procrastinating, maybe you should stop doing that. It doesn’t help you anyway, does it?

Perhaps procrastinating isn’t such a bad thing after all. What if there are important growth experiences to be found within your procrastination?

Are the items on your to-do list really so important? Are they important to you personally? Why do you feed them so much energy?

Even the stuff that seems really important in the moment may look totally different with the benefit of hindsight.

You may be beating yourself up because your procrastination seems to be leading you astray. What if you’re even at risk of losing your home? Is it possible that this may turn out to be a good thing in the long run? Who’s to say that losing your stuff is bad?

Maybe you’ll find newfound freedom in a life of minimalism. Maybe you’ll end up living in a much nicer place down the road. Maybe the experience will help you develop more courage and self-acceptance. Maybe you’ll gain a cool story to blog about someday, whereby you’ll be in a position to help other people learn valuable lessons.

Realize that someday, all of this will be gone. Eventually you’ll pass on and leave this world behind. What will matter to you most when you’re on your deathbed? Will you wish you’d hit more of your assigned deadlines ahead of time? Or will you perhaps wish that you’d spent more time following your heart? Will you regret those late assignments? Or will you regret those amazing life experiences that you missed because you were too busy working to meet someone else’s deadline?

Procrastinate Harder

What if… instead of resisting your impulse to procrastinate, you threw yourself into it more fully? What if you dove headfirst into your biggest procrastination impulses? Where might they lead you?

Maybe procrastination won’t seem like such a curse if you follow those impulses without so much guilt and resistance.

You’re probably going to procrastinate anyway, so why not do it in style?

When you feel the urge to procrastinate, what are you driven to do?

Do you feel like watching movies? Perhaps you could become the next Roger Ebert.

Do you prefer to play computer games? Maybe someday you’ll start a game review site or become a game designer. Maybe playing games will evolve into a fun hobby that you can enjoy with friends and family. You might even find a new relationship partner via an online game.

Do you like to escape into books? If you read enough books in a certain field, you can eventually become an international expert. I learned a great deal about personal development by reading hundreds of books, but at the time it often seemed like I was procrastinating on something more important.

Do you invest a lot of time and energy in online socializing? Maybe you’ll meet your next relationship partner that way. Or perhaps you’ll become a highly paid social media consultant. Corporations are throwing thousands of dollars at such consultants just to learn how to use Twitter and Facebook like any teenager can. You may not even realize just how valuable your expertise can be to the right people.

Maybe you could do what the worst procrastinators in the world frequently do. Start your own productivity blog.

Having a Life

What would you rather be doing than working to meet someone else’s deadlines?

Quite often when you procrastinate, you’ll find yourself doing what it takes to have a life.

If you stopped resisting the urge to procrastinate and simply went with it, what new experiences would you invite into your life?

What other emotions are hidden behind those surface feelings of stress and resistance? Do you also see some potential excitement staring back at you? What about the feeling that maybe you could get all the so-called “important” work done in half the time you originally estimated while still carving out space to do what you love? Maybe it’s not such a bad idea to blow off today and go have some fun.

Isn’t it a more natural tendency to do what you enjoy first… then do what you supposedly have to do as urgency dictates? Perhaps you should allow those “have tos” to build up a certain level of urgency-based pressure before you tend to them. Such pressure has some benefits, doesn’t it? Once it reaches a certain level, you may be able to plow through tons of work with unrelenting speed and focus, drawing on inner resources that you could never bring to bear when you were swimming in extra time.

Maybe you’ve been over-thinking this problem, turning it into a phantom boogieman. What if you simply relaxed into the idea of following your heart? Let the procrastination happen. Let the pressure build. If there’s something that really does need to be done, you’ll find a way to get it done. You always do when it truly matters, don’t you? It’s not like you’ve procrastinated yourself into starvation. Despite all your worst procrastination episodes, you’re still breathing, aren’t you?

You may think that procrastination is hurting you, but is that harm actually real? Or is it just imaginary harm? Are you still whole and intact?

Perhaps there is some greater intelligence nudging you to delay tasks and activities that merely seem important but really aren’t.

“Having a life” might just be what happens while you’re procrastinating on something else. When you delay to the limit those uninspired tasks, you’ll create more space in your life for inspiration and joy.

* * *

I hope you enjoyed this article since I procrastinated on lots of accounting work to write it. I’m sure I’ll feel plenty guilty about that later.

In the meantime, please ponder these quotes from Geoffrey Chaucer:

• Love is blind.
• Forbid us something, and that thing we desire.
• The life so short, the crafts so long to learn.
• First he wrought, and afterward he taught.
• The greatest scholars are not usually the wisest people.
• The guilty think all talk is of themselves.
• Time and tide wait for no man.
• Women desire six things: They want their husbands to be brave, wise, rich, generous, obedient to wife, and lively in bed.

You had to procrastinate on something to read this article, didn’t you?

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Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Unfortunately he’s dead wrong.

I can understand Tony’s intent in making such a statement. Sure it’s part of his overall sales pitch, but essentially he’s telling people that they have the power to break from the past and use their power to create a new future. In general that’s a positive message to convey. Unfortunately it seems to do more harm than good. Quite often it makes people all gung ho about changes that never quite materialize. The underlying idea that we can escape the past actually wastes a lot of people’s time.

I know it feels good to think about the idea that we can somehow break with the past and create a whole new future for ourselves, but how often do people actually pull that off when they attempt it? How often have you pulled it off?

So what’s the truth?

The truth is that past performance is in fact the best predictor of future performance, not just with individual human beings but with teams, companies, technology, political bodies, and other time-bound entities.

Even when it comes to personal growth and conscious living, for all intents and purposes, the past DOES equal the future.

Looking to the Past

If you want to know where your current path is taking you, look to your past. That’s the best way to predict where you’re headed.

Looking to your past is more reliable than looking at your goals and intentions.

If I want to know where someone is headed, I’ll take a look at their past, especially their recent past, and make a prediction based on that. I don’t need to hear about their goals and intentions — that information isn’t relevant. (I’ll explain why I say this a bit later in this article.) Just let me see what they’ve been up to for the past few months, and that will give me a pretty good idea of where they’ll be in a year or so.

Obviously there’s some randomness in life. There are chaotic events we can’t very well predict. Sometimes the unexpected happens, and it spins our lives in completely new directions.

But most of the time, our lives succumb to predictable patterns, especially in the long run. We may not be able to predict what will happen tomorrow or next week with much accuracy, but barring an unusually consequential chaotic change, our lives tend to be a lot more predictable over longer stretches of time than we usually care to admit.

Eat a little bit more than you burn in an average day, and you’ll be heavier a year from now. The result is fairly predictable, given the patterns observed in the past.

Is your expected future really so difficult to predict, at least in a general way?

If you go to college and major in a subject with little or no market demand in terms of jobs, isn’t it largely predictable that you may struggle to find paying work after graduating… and if you do find work, that it will likely be outside the field of your major?

If you linger in a relationship that you wouldn’t rate as a 9 or 10 on a scale of 1-10, isn’t it predictable that dissatisfaction or resentment or apathy will develop over time, as opposed to love and gratitude?

If you eat unhealthy foods and experience high stress levels, can you not make certain predictions about what kind of lifestyle problems you may experience down the road?

Looking to Others

Consider some of the people in your life — people you know pretty well.

Can you reasonably predict where they’ll be a year from now? Can you make a decent guess at where they’ll be in terms of their career, finances, relationships, health, daily habits, spiritual practices, etc?

I’m not asking you to predict with any sort of exactitude here.

I’m simply asking you to paint a general picture of what you expect each person’s life will look like in a year or so.

Pick one specific person for starters, someone you know well but not someone you’re in a romantic relationship with. (Pick someone where you don’t have too much of a vested interest in where they’re headed.)

What kind of career or job situation will this person be engaged in a year from now? Blue collar or white collar work? A job to pay the bills or a dedicated career path? What is this person’s attitude towards their work? How hard do they work? What kind of hours do they put in each week? Where will they be in a year?

What kind of income does this person earn? Make a ballpark guess. Are they making $50K a year? $500K? Millions? How much money does this person have? What assets does s/he own?

What kind of relationships does this person have? Is s/he married? Is there a significant other? Living together? Solo? Looking for someone? If this person is in and out of relationships all the time, don’t worry about predicting the exact relationship position at the end of a year since that could be a coin toss. Just predict what general relationship patterns you’ll expect to see play out over the course of that year. How many new partners will this person have during that year, and what will those partners be like?

How will this person do health-wise over the next year? What kinds of foods will they eat? What kinds of exercise, if any, will they do? Will they gain weight, lose weight, or stay the same weight this year? Will they diet or yo-yo at all?

What kinds of daily habits will this person have? When will they get up? When will they go to bed? Are they lazy? Super productive? Highly or minimally effective at getting things done?

What spiritual practices will this person have a year from now? Will they go to church regularly? Will they shun all spiritual practices? Will they meditate often? Will they put candles around their bathtub and label it spirituality?

See if you can get an overall picture of where each of a few people in your life will be a year from now.

Where Predictions Come From

Notice how you made your predictions.

If you’re like most people, you based your predictions on how each person has behaved in the past, particularly the recent past.

To predict the future, you simply projected the past into the future. You looked at the momentum of where this person is headed. You also looked at where they’re stagnant.

For example, if you know that someone got a 10% raise last year, you might predict another 10% raise this year. You might also predict that this person will still be in the same job.

If someone has been in a relationship for 10+ years, you might predict they’ll be in that same relationship next year.

If someone’s company has been downsizing like crazy, you might predict they’ll be out of work within a year and either unemployed or working at a similar job in a year.

If someone is late on their mortgage payments and is getting foreclosure notices, you might predict they’ll be out of that house within a year and maybe living in a smaller house, an apartment, or a condo somewhere.

Now you might say that we need to include the present as well as the past in making decisions, but since the present is just an instantaneous moment, that isn’t necessary. The past includes everything from the last microsecond back to the beginning of time, so that’s as much data as you really need. If you think you need to include something that really is happening in the present, wait one more second. Now it’s in the past.

If you can claim to know anything about a person, it’s from the past.

Recording Your Predictions

I suggest you write down some of your predictions about the people in your life. Record them in your journal.

Then put a note on your calendar a year from now that says something like, “Review journal entry on predictions from a year ago.” If you use an online calendar, this takes only seconds.

Then when your reminder pops up a year from now, review your predictions. How did they turn out?

If you were basically right about certain things, how did you know? Why was your prediction so accurate?

If you were wrong about anything, why did you miss? Did something unpredictable happen that you couldn’t have anticipated? Did you not have enough information to make an accurate prediction? Did you over-emphasize or under-emphasize the importance of certain factors?

What can you learn about this exercise to make better predictions?

You’re More Predictable Than You Realize

Sometimes it’s easier to make predictions about other people instead of ourselves. When we look at other people’s lives, our egos don’t get in the way as much.

It can be pretty tough to look at ourselves so objectively, especially when we don’t like what we see.

No one wants to predict that a year from now, they’ll have lost their home due to foreclosure, gained 20 pounds of fat, and endured a string of bad relationships.

If you’re fortunate to have some intelligent friends who are willing to make honest predictions about where you’re headed and share them with you, you’ll find it very eye-opening to have a candid discussion with them on this subject. However, this will require turning off your ego as much as possible and really listening, which isn’t easy for most people to do.

Try this: Make some predictions about where you’ll be in a year, but base your predictions only on hard factual evidence from the past 30 days of your life.

Take note of how you ate, slept, exercised, worked, communicated, related, created, etc. only during the past 30 days. Assume those same patterns in every area will continue for another 12 months.

If you feel the past 30 days were very atypical for you, such as if you were on vacation or traveling during that time, then use the past 90 days instead.

Use this time frame to predict where you’ll be in a year. Project those same patterns forward in time. Where will they lead if you largely repeated the patterns of the past 30-90 days for a full 12 months?

Aligning With Truth

A huge part of aligning yourself with Truth is being able to make honest, objective predictions about where you’re headed. How will different aspects of your life evolve over the coming year — or longer?

In order to make accurate predictions, you cannot look to your goals or intentions. For all intents and purposes, you can consider goals and intentions irrelevant.

Imagine that you’re in a court of law that’s trying to make a ruling based on the facts of the case. Goals and intentions for the future are inadmissible as evidence because they aren’t hard facts. They’re merely opinions or speculation about what may be.

In order to make accurate predictions of where you’re headed, you must look to your past and only your past.

This may be something you didn’t want to hear, but I’m playing it straight with you.

If you start getting emotional about your predictions (either positive or negative emotions), stop and take a break. This is an exercise that requires logical, left-brained thought. This isn’t the time or place for emotional or illogical thinking. Pretend you’re a Vulcan or an android, and have at it.

Review the questions I asked you earlier about your friend (under the subhead “Looking to Others”). Now ask those same questions of yourself. Look only to your recent past to predict the future, i.e. the past 30-90 days.

Pretend for a moment that you’re Mr. Spock or Mr. Data, and make your best determination as to where the person whose body you inhabit will be a year from now — in terms of your career, finances, relationships, health, daily habits, spiritual practices, etc.

Whichever parts of your life you consider important to you, make some predictions for those areas.

Then do the same thing with recording your predictions in your journal, and mark your calendar a year from now to review that entry.

And don’t give me that pathetic eye-roll. So what if it takes a year to complete this exercise? The time is going to pass anyway, and a year from now you’ll find this data very valuable. Would you rather be feeling intrigued when you see that message on your calendar a year from now, and open up that tremendous gift of growth, or would you rather have another “normal” day instead?

The Gung Ho Dufus

When you study and learn from your past, you’ll notice certain patterns that come up repeatedly in your life. Many of these patterns are ineffective for you. Based on your own history, the results are predictably bad. But how easily we forget and repeat those same mistakes…

One of those bunk patterns I’ve seen in my own past — and you may recognize this in your past as well — is what I call the Gung Ho Dufus approach to personal growth.

This is when someone gets all amped up about a change they’re going to make. They feel a surge of something — adrenaline maybe… sometimes caffeine — and decide that finally things will be different. They usually believe it too.

They make some new decisions and start taking some actions, but their actions are inconsistent and chaotic. Most of their actions are one-offs, meaning that they never get integrated as permanent habits. For example, they’ll tell a bunch of people about their desire to change, and maybe they’ll ask for advice to get started, but that’s often as far as it goes.

Eventually the excitement over the new direction fizzles, and the person gets sucked back into their usual behavior patterns from the past. No real lasting change occurs.

If you look to your past, especially if you’ve been journaling, you may have seen yourself cycle through this pattern, along with some other patterns that you can see have never worked for you. Armed with that knowledge, you can intelligently reject such strategies. You can see evidence that they don’t create lasting change in your future. Those approaches haven’t worked in the past, so there’s no reason to suspect they’ll suddenly start working in the future. If you repeat them, you’ll get a result that looks strikingly similar to what you’ve seen in the past. Journaling is a great way to become aware of some of those patterns and avoid repeating them; otherwise it’s too easy to forget and remain stuck in dufus-land.

What other patterns do you observe in your past that haven’t worked?

What patterns actually have worked? When you experienced your biggest breakthroughs, how did they happen? Can you reverse-engineer and re-apply those same general strategies today?

Change the Past, Change the Prediction

My next suggestion may sound a bit odd, but I think it will give you a fresh perspective on how to create lasting change.

Instead of trying to change your present or your future, focus on changing your past.

In other words, if you want to improve some part of your life, your must inject evidence of change into your past.

Obviously you can only do that by taking action in the present, but not just any action.

If you take haphazard action, such as was mentioned in the Gung Ho Dufus approach, then what are you injecting into your past? Not success. We could say you’re injecting failure and even stupidity into your past because you’re simply repeating a strategy that’s a known failure. And that leads to a perpetuation of the past in your future.

Instead what you need to do is inject some form of consistency into your past. You need to establish a new pattern of behavior. That new recent past, if it looks consistent enough, will alter your predictions about the future.

Like I said, this may seem an odd way of looking at things, but it can get you thinking in new directions, and that’s what we want.

What kinds of actions will you need to take that will inject a fresh chain of consistency into your past, thereby giving you enough certainty to alter your predictions about the future?

As you might guess, the best kinds of actions — in terms of their predictive value — are those that are done regularly and that can be sustained for at least a year or more.

Those are the kinds of actions that we base our predictions on when we make predictions about other people.

What kinds of meals have we seen this person eat? What sorts of partners does this person hang out with regularly? Where does this person go to work each weekday? What kind of paychecks does this person bring home each month? How does this person spend their Sunday mornings?

These sorts of actions have a name of course.

They’re called habits.

Evidence, Not Wishful Thinking

You’ll cross the threshold of being able to predict success instead of failure once you establish certain habits. But until that happens, the perpetuation of the status quo (i.e. failure to change) will remain the dominant prediction.

If you don’t establish new habits, your goals and intentions are toast. They will not come to pass.

Those habits could be new ways of thinking, but even if they’re thought-based, they’re going to surface in the form of new behaviors too.

No new behaviors means no new predictions.

If you want change, you must create evidence of change. Evidence of change equals new habits. No new habits equals no change in prediction.

Predictable Change vs. Changing Predictions

Now it’s possible that your existing habits are serving you well. Maybe your predictions for the future are very positive already, and you expect them to remain good for a while.

This is a great place to be. I enjoy this situation in many parts of my life. It’s nice to observe that if I just keep doing what I’ve been doing, some parts of my life will probably keep getting better and better.

That’s predictable change — the good kind. That’s an easy situation to manage because if you simply maintain the status quo in terms of your habits, you’re golden.

The focus of this article, however, is on the situation where you dislike some or all of your predictions. You don’t feel good about what you see coming up. Maybe your predictions are negative or neutral. Or maybe they just aren’t positive enough for you. In that case you want to change the predictions.

You can’t just fudge your numbers because that means falling out of alignment with Truth, which is a great way to bring your personal growth to a halt. Don’t lie to yourself or exaggerate where your current habits are taking you. Remember — this is for posterity, so be honest!

Again, forget about your intentions, and focus on making predictions from reliable past data. Don’t predict that you’ll double your income this year if last year you saw less than a 10% increase — unless some reliable indicators have shifted to make that prediction likely from an objective standpoint, and you can name other people who’d agree with your predictions.

If you can’t fudge your numbers, the only way you can change your predictions without losing accuracy is to change the past. Ironically, that will take time, but it can be done.

You can change the past by installing a new habit or breaking an existing habit. Really these are the same thing, since you can’t break an old habit without installing a new one to replace it.

So this is where to focus your efforts of personal growth. Focus on changing the consistent patterns in your life, and begin injecting new consistent patterns into your past by performing them in the present (which instantly becomes the past). If you can’t do that, your honest predictions won’t change. You’ll just continue to head in the same direction as before.

Breaking the Past

Look at the elements from your past that are contributing to your predictions. Which habits are causing you to make negative predictions about your future?

Do you feel miffed about your patterns of eating or sleeping? Are your dating habits letting you down? What results are you getting from your work routine and productivity habits? Where are your current spiritual practices leading you? Are your spending habits leading you astray?

Habit change can be tough, but a great place to start is to use the 30-day trial method. There’s also a whole chapter on habits in my book, so I recommend that you review that as well. This will get you off to a good start with tools that have worked well for large numbers of people.

If you really want to create some serious changes, another perspective I can share is that you want to think about breaking your past. Shatter those past patterns, so they absolutely cannot continue in their current form. Deliberately create a disconnect with your past which — at the very least — makes your previous predictions impossible… even if it means trading the comfort of certainty for the discomfort of unpredictability.

For example, break off a disempowering relationship that contributes to too many negative predictions. Drop the lazy friends from your life, and start befriending the most productive and organized people you know. Move to a new city where you can expect more career and financial opportunities. Drop the most health-destroying foods from your life, and offer $100 cash to anyone who catches you eating them within the next year. Make it impossible to continue the same past patterns for another 30 days.

If you can’t break the past by injecting a discontinuity into it, then the past will essentially be your future.

To Change the Future, Change the Past

Consider two scenarios.

Bill and Ted both want to have written a book within the next year. Neither has written a book before.

Bill has no habit of daily writing. But he has a clear written goal/intention for his book. He knows what kind of book he wants to write. When people ask him what he’s working on, he tells them he’s writing a book. In the past 30 days, he has spent a lot of time thinking about his book. He’s even jotted down some ideas for it, but mostly at random intervals.

Ted has no written goals, intentions, or plans for his book. He hasn’t told anyone he’s writing it. He’s not even sure what the chapters will be. But for the past 30 days, he’s gotten out of bed every morning at 5am, and he’s worked on his book till 7am before having breakfast. He has averaged about 2 pages of potentially usable content per day. He’s been working only on his book during that time and nothing else. He’s done this every day without fail. Nothing has come up in his life during that time that would disrupt this habit or indicate that it’s likely to be disrupted.

If I told you that only one of these two gentlemen finished their book within that year, which one would you bet on? Which approach do you believe is more likely to lead to a completed book within a year?

Which approach are you betting on in your life right now?

How’s that approach working for you?

Is your success predictable? Is your lack of success predictable?

Goals and Predictions

Now don’t get me wrong. Goals and intentions are awesome. Having clarity about what you’re going to do next is certainly important. But deciding what you want is only the first step. And if that’s all you do, then I predict some occasional spotty successes for you against a far more consistent backdrop of long-term mediocrity. I’ve seen that pattern play out enough times across enough people’s lives that I consider such results fairly predictable.

Eventually you must inject your goals and intentions into your past to create the evidence that will alter your predictions about where you’re headed. This is how you change course.

Setting a new goal is like punching in a new course at the helm of the Enterprise.

Creating a new habit is the act of saying, “Engage!”

The ship doesn’t move until you say that word. Wesley Crusher will just give you a blank stare, and no one wants that.

Sorry, Tony.

… and Wesley.

For more on this topic, especially the how-to aspects, read Goals Into Habits.

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