Voice

You wake up every day, determined, all pumped up to kick some butt. Today is the day you are going to go crazy and chase your dreams. You look at your to-do list and you are ready to get to work but then you remember you have to do your breakfast. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day and skipping it will be stupid right? You open the fridge but no eggs. Darn it, no biggy. You rush to the nearby store and get those eggs, get in the kitchen and make them. Eating these eggs here at the table will be boring so you turn the TV and Yay, a really good movie is on. You finish your breakfast but decide to watch the movie. You tell yourself “It’s still early, I can just get to work after this”. Commercial break, time for a snack.

You get yourself a Coca-Cola and drink the entire 1.5L drink on your own. Finally, the movie’s over and now you lie down and stretch a little and then you hear a ‘buzz’. It’s your phone, you just got a notification on Facebook and now you start doing Facebook. After about 30 minutes of facebooking, it’s time for lunch. You go down and have your lunch with the family, spend some time chit-chatting and then go back up.

You look at the time and it’s already 2:30pm, you get this hit of crazy depression and anxiety, you notice you wasted all your time. This time the voice in your head tells you “you wasted your day today but don’t let this happen again. Rest today so you have enough energy to work like hell tomorrow”. All the anxiety goes away and you kick back and continue procrastinating.

The next day you wake up and repeat the cycle again, just in a different pattern. 
 Through all my years of procrastination, the most valuable lesson I have learned is that no matter how determined and excited we are to work on our dreams, we will still procrastinate. So we need to educate ourselves and learn ways to fight procrastination.

Do you know what philosophy means? It means the way of life, how you view things. You have to make now your philosophy. The time will never be right so remember, when the “I’ll start tomorrow” moment comes. You just do it. Even if its 1am and you have to get up at 6am, just do your work for at least an hour and then go to bed. Less sleep won’t kill you. Make ‘NOW’ your philosophy. If your philosophy is “I’ll start tomorrow”, you’ll be saying the same thing tomorrow.

I used to ask myself why Nike emphasized the ‘just do it’ so much, it used to sound stupid to me. But now I understand, it has become one of my favorite slogans of all time, no matter how tired or exhausted you are, you have to make no excuses and ‘just do it’.

You have to plan your day before it starts, which means you have to plan it before you sleep. Make a to-do list for the next day. Now before you do, I want to tell you a mistake that I have made which made this to-do list useless. My to-do list used to have all kinds of things, I used to say “I just have to work hard and complete all these tasks” but it just doesn’t work like this. Remember simplicity is the best sophistication and your list needs to be simple and organized. First you need to identify your ‘3 most important tasks of the day’ which for me are usually, reading, writing and college work. These have to be your main focus. Other than this, you should give yourself other mini-tasks. But remember, they must not be too many or you will end up doing nothing. It’s better to do little then nothing.

The tasks you do have to be focused, which means they should complement each other and help you achieve success. I’ll give you an example of myself. The main things that I do are, reading and writing. Reading gives me the knowledge I need to write. These two are helping me to achieve a goal in my life which is to write my own book one day. Now if my three most important tasks of the day were to exercise, learn coding and writing. I would’ve been on my way to become the jack of all trade, master of none. I would’ve become great at all three things but never excellent. So you need to be very specific. So remember, you must simplify, organize and be focused on a few things which complement each other.

Now in the beginning of this article, I talked about the voice in our head. Whose voice is this? Who is assisting us in procrastination? The answer is the “Amygdala” also known as the lizard brain. The lizard brain is responsible for emotions like negativity and fear. Without this, we wouldn’t be afraid to jump off a building or put our heads in a crocodile’s mouth but it’s still harming us. The Lizard brain forces people to give up on life and not chase their dreams. The lizard brain stops us from trying something new.

If you get a bright idea to start a business, the lizard brain will tell you “don’t do it, if you fail, you’ll be a million dollars in debt”. So the voice that tells you to “start tomorrow, hit that snooze button, stay loyal to your desk job, don’t do it or you’ll fail miserably” is the lizard brain. You will inevitably keep procrastinating until you learn to fight it back.

My teachers have always taught me to do what you’re afraid to do. This way you’ll weaken the lizard brain. If you want to go talk to a pretty girl, excuses like, she’s too good for me or I don’t really wanna talk to her will pop up. Now the problem is, most of the time, the Lizard brain will give you rational reasons to stay back and do nothing. You have to become irrational and fight it back.

Now that you know that the lizard brain is the voice that telling you to hit the snooze button, watch that movie, start tomorrow and eat that cookie. You can just fight that voice. Get mad at the Lizard brain for telling you to procrastinate. Get furious, get to work. The Lizard brain won’t stop doing its job, it’ll keep telling you to take that break, that’s enough for today. Remember, you have to get furious and fight that Lizard in your head! Do what you’re afraid to do daily.

Now that you know about the existence of the Lizard brain. You will be able to see its influence whenever it approaches you in your thoughts. Knowing that the thoughts came from the Lizard brain, will make it easier to fight it.

Now there’s another very powerful way to fight the Lizard brain but for this one you need to find it first. If you find something that is more interesting than watching TV, sleeping and chatting online with friends, you will automatically fight the Lizard brain. If you have something that automatically pulls you toward it, you will find success. When you find your something, you will find pleasure in pain while doing that specific thing and that’s what will make you invincible. Find your purpose in life, find your why. Your purpose or your passion might be in bodybuilding, writing, painting or maybe coding. No one can tell you what it is but it’ll be a very magical moment indeed when you find it. In order to find it, keep hustling and at one point, you will find it. A purpose driven life is what will give you happiness.

“What you do today determines who you will be tomorrow”
 -John Spence