You can be great too.
I’m assuming that you already know that, people have already told you, your parents, teachers, your older siblings, your grandma, your long-distace relative who comes once a year for the holidays and showers you with love becuase Oh aren’t you an adorable little thing?
You can be great too.
That’s something that all motivation gurus always say.
But another more important statement than this is that you need to learn how to stop procrastinating right now if you want to achieve greatness.
Table of Contents
We All Need to Stop Procrastination
You’d particularly love the book The 5 A.M. Club by Robin Sharma because he says the same thing. Probably in every chapter, you can be great too.
But then there is the counter argument.
Are you postponing your greatness? Are you procrastinating a little too much for someone who deserves to be great? Are you alone?
Maybe. Maybe. Definitely no.
You aren’t alone. I face this scenario almost every other day, I procrastinate a little too much for someone who wants to work, too much for someone who’s got so many things to look after.
Lately, whenever I get bored, I take this advice of Austin Kleon’s to heart, and guess what I do? I start making lists.
Let me tell you how you might be procrastinating your greatness and stopping yourself, sabotaging yourself from achieving your own greatness.
If you need to know how to stop laziness and procrastination, you need to understand these parts of human behaviour that you subconsciously display that’re holding you back from achieveing the targets and meeting the deadlines and doing the thing that’s going to bring you forward.
How to Stop Procrastinating Right Now
Signs you are postponing greatness and need to learn how to stop procrastination.
#1 Afraid of taking that one step you know is going to be groundbreaking.
Why Do we Procrastinate?
You might be procrastinating from work because you’re afraid of taking that one step that you know is going to give you the results you are looking for everywhere else. But you’e not taking that life-changing step, despite knowing its importance because…well…because it’s changing.
And you’re unsure of what changes will take place once you finally do this one thing, you’re worried you won’t be able to cope with them, you’re worried you aren’t capable or prepared yet, you’re worried poeple might laugh at you and find you undeserving if you’re at the same level as them.
And, long story short, you’re just being resistant to change, to new environments, to better lives because they bring more exposure and responsibilities, and look mighty uncomfortable at first.
#2 Always feeling like it’s all or nothing.
Or maybe you’re not stopping your procrastination yet because you’re worried that it’s either going to be all or nothing, either you’re everything, or you’re nothing.
That’s rarely the case with us. With any of us. We are constantly evolving, learning, developing, if we ever reach the top, we wouldn’t know where to go on from there because we wouldn’t have any higher goal (we would’ve already crossed the highest milestone) and it’d be a long way down.
How to Stop Laziness and Procrastination
You need to tell your mind that the real fun always lies in the journey. In the end, that’s what matters.You are constantly gaining new experiences that are going to aid you, you are never stagnant at one place. It’s always changing. Always moving. Always developing. And that’s what the real meaning is.
#3 Whatever you do never works, so you decide not to do anything at all.
Classic, typical human behaviour.
Impatience with actions, patience with results.
Naval Ravikant
And that’s a treasure-worthy knowledge to have, because many of us are frequently stuck in the web of doing a ittle work and then hoping to see instant results, but because rarely does anythng worth having comes easily, we get disppointed because we had thought we’d get the results. But we don’t.
Really simple. That’s why we seek instant gratification, because of our own impatience and disappointment within ourselves. This also leads to feelings of self-loathing because we were supposed to be perfect and drive the thing forth, but nothing changes.
To get out of this mentality of instant gratification and stop procrastination on the things we really wanna do, we need to learn how to have patience with our results. We need to believe in ourselves and just do the thing without waiting for the end. As everyone say, the fun is in the journey.
#4 It’s a mammoth-like, huge task.
Maybe you’re procrastinating because it’s a mighty big, mammoth-like task and even if you do something right now, nothing would significantly change.
I have been meaning to do a course on YouTube that consists of 82 videos in total. Pfft, that’s a big number.
I can’t ever do it. I’d be going on and on and I’d be taking endless notes and writing and solving questions and learing the definitions and theories because I’m completely new to the subject.
Here’s how I could break any task down. Here’s how I could reaccess everything in my life and organize the sh*t out of it.
Make a list of all my big life projects, like publishing my book, maintaining my website and improving user experience, learning how to code, learning Japanese, and watching all the YouTube courses I have my eyes on etc. Then I could make a nested list right underneath them and I could write down really small chunks of tasks that I can do in one setting. All in my notebook. No matter how many pages it takes, no matter how more conveniently and efficiently my notes app could serve me here. I’ll go old school and make a list of everything.
The tasks would be very simple. Watch one video. Trace Hiragana alphabets. Practice 30 minutes of coding. Edit 10 pages of my book.
And then keep on increasing the intensity of the tasks.
Whenever I finish the task, I tick it off. I’ve tried this and it works. I can stop procrastination now.
#5 The summer days are looooong.
Why Am I Procrastinating So Much?
Maybe the summer days are long and you don’t know what to do to pass the “extra” time on your hands.
Since you feel that it’s a very big task to do and you could never possibly achieve all of it at once, ever, even in the lengthy summer vacation, you don’t feel any particular motivation to even perform any small chance of the task. You feel it is worthless to even try.
If you need to stop procrastination, you need to find peace not in the image of the completed task, but in the process itself to fulfill it, in hitting the smaller requirements and the little milestones in the way that will ultimately lead you to do the big things.
On the last day of May I gave an exam for college and then went on to prepare a very brief, though elongated list of 100 things to do this June. 100. That’s right. (I realised that my expectations were a little falling off the scale).
And not some fun, warm-summer-vacation kind of things you do when you’re bored. These are the very things you become bored of in the first place. Read 10 non-fiction books. Learn coding. Promote my book on social media. Set up a LinkedIn profile. Get 100k engagements on Pinterest. (I did this one.) These were the boring things, things you procrastinate on.
These were all the things you would hate doing on a summer afternoon. I naturally procrastinated.
#6 Nothing works so why not just stop trying.
You feel that you’ve already worked so hard and still nothing worked so let’s have a vacation now.
When you work hard and continuously—with the image of the end result in your mind—when you don’t give yourself any rest at all, that’s when you get burned out and exhausted. And if you don’t give your body any rest, then it demands one itself and forces you to relax.
Perfection has a cost.
It’s more important to work smartly than to work hard. At one point quality always overrules quantity. At one point you have to learn how to manage and direct your focus, not your time.
#7 You’ve failed a dozen times.
You’ve got a tripod and a camera and want to shoot videos but there have been dozens of failed attempts.
The main context of this point is to remind you that failing a dozen times completely demotivates you and drains you of all your initial determination. This is one of the main reasons why do we procrastinate.
It doesn’t have to be the case.
I know when we begin a new skill that anyone can’t be perfect at once. So we keep trying but then after some time we realise that some skills require a high level of skill set to master them. And after failing ten times or twenty times or maybe countless time (so much that you stop counting at all) that usually robs you of your confidence. That’s the reason why we procrastinate.
Learn how to stop procrastination. You have got to get past the beginners’ moments of failure so that you can find yourself at the intermediate level. And then the advanced.
#8 You don’t like shortcuts.
You are always waiting for the right moment to strike. Everything aside from it seems like filler. A shortcut. Like you can’t really do anything. Preparing yourself for greatness, for the perfect moment to stop procrastination. That’s another kind of torture. Waiting. Waiting for the opportunity to present itself to you. Not taking shortcuts because you think they might end up degrading the credibility of your success.
Stop procrastination with this excuse. The time is now.
You’re immersed in how life is going on right now. The monotonous days. The regularity. Nothing out of the ordinary. It’s all set in stone. Nothing has to change because everything is just perfect, right?
I’m glad for you if it is, but if by any chance, it isn’t, you need to let go of this love story you’ve got going on with your current self-destructive routine.
Nothing changes if nothing changes, right?
You can get all the advice from all over the world, but you will only stop procrastination when you take a step yourself.
#9 You feel like you can’t do anything right.
Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will.
Suzy Kassem
Probably, you’re just under the conception that you won’t do anything right. Who knows, probably you’re right. Probably you will not be able to do it right. Maybe you’ll suck.
But you really love this thing, love this thing you need to stop procrastination on. At least, if it even matters to you in any form or field: lifestyle, academic, relationships, work, finance, then you’ve gotta give it a try, right?
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