Make Today Day One

This is it! We’re so excited! All the inspiration we’ve been looking for has just descended like manna from heaven. We just read a book, article, or a quote that is going to change our lives…forever. Now it’s just time to get started, to execute. In no time, we will be living the life of our dreams.

Pause.

How many times has this situation occurred in your life? Go ahead and count. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

Tragic, huh?

Sparks of motivation speeding through your body like a laxative — then nothing. How many things have we put off? How many days will we wait? What will our future self think about us this time?

Motivation is garbage

Yes I said it. Well, I didn’t say it first. This is an excellent quote I grabbed while watching an interview with Mel Robbins speaking about the downsides of motivation. When will we realize that we have to stop waiting for our internal motivational light bulb to turn on? Why do all of the lights need to be green before we go? The moment to begin is never going to be perfect. Motivation is never there when we need it. It is unreliable. But whenever it does decide to show up, you should use every drop of it — immediately.

Rely on discipline instead. Develop the mindset that you will do what you need to do, rather you feel like it to or not. Create a checklist. Once you’re done with what you need to do, check it off. Trust me, the simple act of scratching that task off will give you a nice shot of dopamine.

Be Slow to Believe Your Overprotective Brain

We are survival machines. Our mind does everything within its power to keep us safe from harm — or at least what it perceives as harmful. Our mind isn’t in complete harmony though.

Your brain instructs your heart to pump, regulates your body temperature, stores, and deletes memories, etc. Even though it is your brain that is performing these actions, these are not processes that you can consciously explain. You are simply unaware of them. The same goes for our feelings. The fact that we “feel” a certain way shouldn’t increase the validity of said feeling. The source of this emotion is not always obvious and thus should not be immediately trusted. These feelings can sometimes create hesitation to perform goal oriented actions, even though that feeling might not be warranted.

Prehistorically, isolation from the group was pretty much a death sentence. This led to less access to resources, food, and increased our vulnerability to danger. Our minds became sensitive to group membership since it increased our chances of survival. People of that time who did not pay attention to this feeling died.

This has led us to hold this sensitivity in high regard. We sometimes hesitate to act because we fear that failure could mean social embarrassment. Protecting our social image and staying apart of the group is a priority of the mind. Our overprotective brains will not dare let us risk social isolation.

Our brain has not upgraded to realize that just because people criticize our ideas or don’t like our social media posts, that it is not a sentence to a permanent destitution. View feelings of doubt and hesitation as just that, a feeling, no more no less. Don’t be quick to attribute a shred of validity to it. We are not fully rational.

Let’s begin to use this to our advantage. The next time we are feeling uncomfortable in a situation, associate that feeling with growth, not a reason to quit. When you are comfortable, you are not changing. No change equals no growth. Being courageous isn’t acting without fear. It is acting despite it.

Manipulate Your Surroundings

We are creatures of habit and habits are mostly triggered by things in our environment. For example, merely having your phone in view increases distraction. The cue is the phone, the reward is fun. Who doesn’t love fun?

There was an interesting experiment that became to be known as The Marshmallow Test. Scientists placed marshmallows in front of several children. In one version of the experiment, the goal was to see if the children would eat the marshmallow, within the allotted time, or wait several minutes and receive double the marshmallows. The children who stared at the marshmallow usually gave in and ate the snack. The children who resisted the temptation did so with a simple strategy. They avoided looking at the marshmallow.

Instead of draining their will power to resist temptation, they simply avoided temptation altogether. Design your environment to avoid temptation. Without anything else distracting you, procrastination might look a little less sexy.

Think About your Future-Self

We are very optimistic about our future mental states. We shouldn’t be. We always think we are going to have more time and motivation in the future, that magical place where all our dreams come true. This seldom happens. To be wise, we must put mechanisms in place to protect our future-selves from the temptations they are sure to encounter.

Make a plan for your future self. If you want to stop eating fast food, remove the cards and cash from your wallet. When you show up to that drive-thru window to pay, you will be presented with a pleasant surprise…your wallet has no money. At that moment, you will thank your past-self for being so considerate. This has personally happened to me…more than once.

And Then We Die

I don’t mean to sound gloomy but death is an ever-present reality that always seems to put things into perspective. Imagine the time in our lives as a grid, like the one shown above. Every box represents a week of our lives. A chance for us to move towards our goals. Even if we are fortunate enough to make it to the ripe old age of 90, this graph doesn’t make it look like that much time. Especially once we account for the fact that a lot of those boxes are already filled in.

There are two things that we are guaranteed in this world — to be born and to die. If you’re reading this, congratulations, you’ve successfully received the first guarantee and thus far avoided the last. But when you’re taking your last breaths while your family is walking in and out of that hospital room, what will you be thinking about? It won’t be about the results you failed to achieve but the actions you failed to take.

Don’t live a life full of regrets. Decide now that you will no longer put off doing the things that you are capable of doing. Act despite fear.

Stop saying “one day”.

Start saying “DAY ONE!”