My System For Beating Procrastination | Ep 225
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You're not lazy. You just don't have systems to get shit done. By the time I was 28, I had built a $100 million business and now I run a $500 million portfolio. I achieved this not because I'm special, not because I'm talented, not because I'm intelligent, but because I created a system to constantly beat procrastination. So today I want to reveal my three-step framework to get shit done no matter what. The first step to overcoming this is to understand the root of procrastination. So

So before we can overcome procrastination, we have to understand what's actually causing it. Because if we identify the cause incorrectly, then we probably identify the wrong solution. The reason that most people procrastinate is actually experiential avoidance. You avoid things in the short term that actually cause you more harm in the long term. So something might feel uncomfortable today, therefore you avoid it, but it actually sets you up for failure tomorrow because you avoided it today.

I will give you an example of when I did this recently. When I was building my first company, Gym Launch, kept saying, "I'm gonna make content one day. I'm gonna put videos out one day. I'm gonna make a podcast one day." I got so far as to like, I had my whole team name my podcast. We had a whole cover done. We had the site ready to go and I didn't hit publish. I had videos for YouTube scripted.

I never recorded them. I had tweets that I never hit publish. It wasn't until I went to a place called Bear Lake, Utah with Alex, and it's this beautiful place. It was just me and Alex alone with our work. And when I was there, I did a lot of self-reflection. I asked myself this question, which is like, what have I been avoiding lately?

because usually a lot of the growth I've found has been asking myself that question. The first thing that popped in my head was like, you've been saying that you wanted to make YouTube videos for three years and you haven't posted one. And because of that, you're a hypocrite. I was avoiding it because I was scared of what strangers on the internet would say.

I was scared of what my employees would say about me making content. I was scared of the judgment from my family and friends, just fear of judgment from other people. In that moment, I was like, fuck this. I'm just going to do it. I am waking up tomorrow morning and I'm going to record these three videos. I woke up that morning, 6am. I like did my makeup, did my hair the way I did back then. I woke up, I put like a camera on top of a stack of books and I just made my first three YouTube videos ever. And when I got done, I

I sent them to his YouTube editor who then told me that they were recorded the wrong way. But I was like, fuck it, I'm redoing them. And I did, I redid them the next day. I recorded them the right way. And I said, they look like shit, but I'm gonna do it. And that was the first time that I realized how much growth is on the other side of avoidance. Because imagine if I had not broken past that, you wouldn't be watching this video today. What I would ask you is if this resonates, ask yourself this question.

What feelings am I trying to avoid by avoiding this thing? Because it's usually that a circumstance isn't what you avoid. You avoid the feelings that a circumstance you think is going to cause you. And so I didn't avoid filming. I didn't avoid posting on social media. I was avoiding the possibility that people were going to judge me.

What would surprise you is the fact that it's not usually this one giant situation that you're trying to avoid. It's usually one small piece of it. If you look at most people who, for example, they're in a relationship that they shouldn't be in and they don't wanna be with that person anymore. They don't avoid wanting to be broken up with that person. What they usually avoid is the very uncomfortable 15 minute conversation they're going to have.

And so I just ask you to really reflect on that. Like what 15 minute conversations are controlling your entire life? Because a lot of people let one 15 minute or even five minute conversation dictate their entire life and they suffer every day rather than suffer for five minutes. If you procrastinate, this is what happens. You avoid pain right now, but it's pretty much all downhill from there.

The situation gets 10 times worse, not only because you've avoided doing the thing and so you just delay getting the skills, but also because of the fact that you teach your brain that this situation is a threat. And so your brain actually creates more fear around the situation that you avoid.

I had all this anxiety over filming. If you had asked me the first time that the idea of filming came into my head, "Oh, go film a video," I'd probably have felt nervous, but because I put it off for three years, I created that anxiety by avoiding it. And that is exactly what experiential avoidance does, is you actually create the very thing you wish to not experience. Now, when you don't procrastinate, here's what happens. You pay a price today. It's going to be uncomfortable in the short term.

But it actually gets better as you continue on. You earn respect from yourself, you gain confidence, and you create trust with yourself. You can trust yourself that even when things are uncomfortable, even when you don't want to do things, you know that you can show up for yourself. And so you can rely on yourself.

And the last piece to it is that the upsides compound. There's a book called "The Comfort Crisis" and there's a concept in there that I think is really fantastic, which is about comfort creep. The more that you do things that are comfortable, the more you want to do things that are comfortable. And the same is the opposite direction. The more that you do things that are uncomfortable, the more that you want to do things that are uncomfortable.

Basically, you can create momentum in either direction. You can either continue getting more and more comfortable and doing things that feel good today, but make your future tomorrow worse, or you can get really good at doing things that are uncomfortable, make today a little harder, but make tomorrow a little easier. If you've been avoiding this for a very long time, what I want you to understand is that the pivot to go from one to another is the hardest point.

And so if you've been continuing to do things that are more and more comfortable over time to where you've gotten to a point where you're like, I'm 50 pounds overweight, my business is in a bad place, I'm full of all these employees I don't want, I'm in a relationship I don't want, I want you to understand that it's gonna take more than like a tiny little tweak to go in the opposite direction. You're gonna need to like,

shift gears, it's gonna be really uncomfortable for like three days, and then you're gonna get through it. They assume that something is going to take a long time to get used to. Because you've avoided it for so long, you assume that it's gonna take that long to get used to the thing. That's actually not correct at all. Humans are built to habituate, meaning that we can get used to something very quickly. The more that you lean into the fear, the faster you habituate to it.

All humans were built this way. Our brains are wired this way. Though you're wired to avoid things that you perceive as threats, you're also wired to get used to things that your brain thinks are not going to go away. If it's really cold and your brain is like, it's never going to get warm again, you will acclimate to being cold. And so I promise you, if you step in the direction of conquering your fears and of doing the thing that you've been avoiding, you will habituate. And if you don't, you're not human. Procrastination is not the problem. Rather,

It's the solution you are using to solve a problem. Embracing discomfort leads to short-term pain, but it also leads to long-term success. So now that we've talked about what procrastination is, let's talk about what is causing that procrastination. Step two is identifying the emotions that fuel your procrastination. And I give this to you guys because if you're anything like me, I could tell you what you could do to overcome procrastination, but

but I always do a lot better understanding why what I'm going to do works. And so that's what I aim to explain now. A friend coined this term to me and he called it the three-headed monster of procrastination. And I will never forget it because every time that I have found myself procrastinating something, it has fallen into one of these three buckets. The first one is anxiety. That's the first head of the three-headed monster.

Most often, and I will say I am the queen of this, is that if I find myself procrastinating something, it's because it gives me anxiety. It represents

short-term experiencing a lot of discomfort. And so a lot of the times what I find is that for me, when I am avoiding something or I'm procrastinating something, it's actually because that thing triggers anxiety in me. So for example, the reason that I was avoiding making content, it wasn't because of any other reason other than it made me feel anxious. When I thought about posting content online, I thought about the comments that could come up. I felt a spike of cortisol in my body and I felt uncomfortable physically.

And because of that, I wanted to avoid doing it. I wanted to avoid thinking about it and I wanted to avoid talking about it. And so overall, I was just avoiding the feeling of anxiety. And so here's what you can do to deal with anxiety. And this is how I get myself constantly every day to do things that make me anxious. Okay, I asked myself a few questions.

First, if I do this today, will it make my life better or worse tomorrow? That helps me so much because a lot of the times what I recognize is that the thing that I don't wanna do, the thing that feels shitty today is gonna set me up for success tomorrow. The second question I ask myself is, what skill will I gain if I do this? I think this is a really key one because for me, when I was avoiding making content, I was like, oh wow, well there's a lot of skills that I don't have that I will gain if I just get past this fear.

And most of the time, I think that it is easier to get over a fear if you have something worthy of overcoming it for. So say that you're really scared of speaking on stage. What skill do you gain by confronting your stage fright? It's like, wow, well, I would learn to present. I would learn to influence. I would learn to persuade. Think about how much of your life it opens up, which leads me to my third question, which is if I avoid this thing today,

Does it make my life expand or contract tomorrow? Because what avoidance does and what anxiety does and what procrastination does is they make your life very small because they essentially take away options because the more feelings you seek to avoid, like anxiety, the smaller the amount of experiences you open yourself up to are.

And so I ask myself, will my life get bigger or smaller if I do this thing? And I want to live a big life. And so if it means I need to be uncomfortable today to live a big life, then I remind myself of that by asking myself that question. Remember this, action alleviates anxiety. More thinking isn't going to solve your thinking problem, but you can behave differently. Anxiety is not a bad thing. Most of the times when we avoid something out of anxiety,

we have an underlying anxiety on a daily basis because our brain is constantly trying to avoid this thing. And so it's watching out for it and monitoring for it. And so you have a baseline level of let's just say 40% anxiety on a daily basis. Whereas if you just confront that thing, you go down to zero anxiety on a daily basis. And then when you do that thing, maybe it's 60, but it's for a very short period of time. Either way, you're gonna feel anxious.

You feel anxious if you're avoiding it and you feel anxious if you're confronting it. The question is which one drives you forward? Only one of those paths is productive and is going to make your life better. You're going to have to feel anxious either way. You might as well make it useful. The second head of the three-headed monster is rebellion. This is when we procrastinate because we didn't decide something.

It's often like we feel like we need to go against some greater authority figure or assert our free will. Oftentimes, we procrastinate this thing because somebody else gave us the idea. But in avoiding that thing or in procrastinating that thing, it's not because it's the best decision to do so. It's because you have an aversion to authority. So I'll give you an example of how this played out not that long ago with one of my portfolio companies.

I had a CEO of one of the companies and when we went in, we essentially bought majority of the company. And then we said, what levers can we pull that would provide us with the highest ROI in this business? Everything indicated that the product was underpriced. And so we presented our case, which was basically we need to raise the price and here's why. And it was a very well thought process.

put together a case. And then we're like, "Hey, you know, like this is why we came in." And then, you know, finally he calms us down. He's like, "Okay, that does make the most logical sense." We're like, "Okay, when's the date that we can roll this out?" And we say it's in two weeks. And what do you know when two weeks comes around? Oh, there's something that he has to take care of. Oh, there's something that happens over here. Oh, six weeks go by. Finally, I call up the guy and I'm like, "Listen, the fuck?"

Like, we just need to raise the price. Like, what's going on? Why is this such a thing? As I'm talking to him, what I'm listening to is basically he did not like the fact it wasn't his idea. I brought up to him, I said, so it seems like you have an aversion to authority and you felt like we were telling you what to do. He was like,

"You know what, now that you really painted this picture for me, I think I actually do have an aversion to authority." And I was like, "Do you think raising the price is the best decision for the business?" So he said, "We can do it in two days." And then we did, and the business doubled. Here's the thing to ask yourself if you are the type of person when it's anybody else's idea, you feel like, "Ugh," and you resist it. Ask yourself this,

procrastinating this activity get me closer or farther from my goals? There are times when people insert their opinions into what they think that I should do with my life or my business, and I'm like, I don't want to hear it. And I will feel myself immediately go up into defense, and I have to remind myself, the moment that I feel that defensiveness, I'm like, oh, rebellion, there it is. I don't want to do it because somebody else told me to. And then I have to ask myself that question. I have to say, like, is this going

going to get me further or closer to my goals. And if it's gonna get me closer, fuck my ego, put it aside, I'm gonna do it anyways. Even if I don't like that somebody else said it, maybe I don't like the person who said it. Maybe I don't like the way they said it. But if it's gonna get me closer to my goals, I don't care. And that has been such a better stance for me to take because if everything,

that comes to you can be a learning opportunity. If you don't need to learn from just only people that you like, admire, and look up to and want approval from, but you can learn from anybody, then that opens up a whole new realm for you and you can grow so much faster. The third head of the three-headed monster is boredom. So sometimes we procrastinate something because

The task is not new, it's not exciting, it doesn't provide us with immediate reward. I'll give you an example of where this just happened. So I had somebody join my team. On their fourth day, I got a message from this person and they said, "Hey, I don't really think this job's for me. And I just can't imagine myself doing this every day." And so I reached out and I was like, "What do you mean repetitive? Like, are you bored?" And that person said, "Yes."

It's so funny because I literally, the first thought I had to myself was I was like, girl, I was like, you're four days in. This is not the job. This is onboarding. But her tolerance for boredom was so low that she couldn't even tolerate four days of not doing something that provided immediate reward. Because, you know, in the first week that somebody's onboarding, we've got to teach them the company systems, who's who, where to go for what. All the

basic stuff. It's boring. And I just remember in that moment, I was like, wow, that's tough. Because when she told me her goals, I was like, well, this is the way to get there.

And she said, "No, I really don't think so. "I think it's just too boring for me." Discipline is boring. Delaying gratification is boring. But boredom is also the birthplace of success. And so if I think about everything I've done in my life where I have achieved something great, it has been from doing boring shit. I've been doing this for a decade, running companies. How many one-on-ones do I have every week? How many team meetings have I led? How many quarterlies have I run? All the fucking time. In fact, it's actually very fucking boring most of the time.

I have to find ways to make it fun by learning to love things like running meetings. And here's how I do that. I ask myself this question, which really helps me hone in on this. Is this thing beneficial for me to work on in both the short term and the long term? Will this benefit me in 10 days and in 10 years? Because oftentimes people who seek out a lot of immediate reward and they don't know how to endure boredom, they only make decisions that help them in the next 10 days.

and they don't think about things that are going to help them in the next 10 years. I like to anchor at, if I worked on this every day, what does my life look like in 10 years? If I mastered the skill day in and day out, boring as it may be, you know, I think about somebody like Michael Jordan and I'm like, was he like, oh, you know what? It's getting kind of boring bouncing the ball every day and like shooting hoops. Like, can we do something else? No. Excellence comes from doing that boring stuff.

You don't give yourself the opportunity to ever become excellent if you constantly procrastinate because it's too boring for you. The work that's really exciting in the moment is not the work that is going to get us to our goals in 10 years. It's actually the work that doesn't feel great, feels pretty boring, feels mundane. That's the shit that actually unlocks growth for us.

So what you want to do is you want to align your actions with your goals, not with your feelings and not with the things you want to do in the moment, but with who you want to be in the future. The goal is not to build a life of comfort, but

but it's to become a person of character that can withstand any discomfort that comes your way. And that can look like anxiety, that can look like boredom, that can look like rebellion. Here's a frame shift for you. Instead of trying to feel good, try to get good at feeling bad.

Something that I say all the time is I'm very good at not feeling good. People come to me and they say like, oh, well, you seem very level-headed. You seem like you've got it all together. I'm like, I have all the same emotions as you. If you tell yourself otherwise, you are using cognitive bias to avoid the work because you don't want to accept the fact that we could have the same emotions and that you actually just have more excuses.

And listen, I've done it to myself too. I did it when I was 100 pounds overweight. I've done it before when I've avoided hard conversations with people making very tough decisions for my company. I've done all that shit. You can't fool me, okay? And so the frame shift is to stop trying to feel good and it's to get good at feeling bad.

So to become unstoppable, move forward and follow your plan regardless of how you feel. So now that we've identified the three emotions that fuel procrastination and how to combat them, you're ready to take action. But at this point, there's a trap that a lot of people

fall into. And so I want you to pay attention to this next part because this is what changed everything for me. The last step of the framework is trading productive procrastination for productive failure. People don't procrastinate by doing nothing. They do something. It's just not the thing that they should do. The worst procrastinators are actually always busy. They are busy doing everything except the one thing that they procrastinate. Productive procrastinators stick with all the safe activities.

Basically any activities that they're doing that don't cause discomfort, that don't stress them out, that they feel proficient at doing, they keep doing those things and they actually just try and do more of those things. And so it looks like they're really freaking busy, but those activities provide a very low ROI because they're not

because the things that are the most effective are often the ones that we procrastinate because they require an emotional effort to be put forth. So here's what it looks like. They never try doing anything. Because of that, they never take a risk or facing one of those three feelings that we just talked about.

because they never risk it, they also never fail. And so because they never fail, they never have to let down themselves or let down anyone else or suffer the consequences of what it means to be a failure. And so we stay in this cycle of productively procrastinating, moving every day, all day, doing all the things, but never moving the ball forward.

it's almost like if you imagine you're on a basketball court you're just passing it back and forth to each other but nobody's ever getting it into the hoop you're just passing it back and forth and you're like wow they're really playing the game they're sweating they're breaking a sweat over here we never win because we don't risk failing if you never try to shoot the ball in the hoop you can never win you also can never fail people who stay stuck in the cycle would prefer to never fail than they would prefer to win so productive failure is the exact

opposite of this. 'Cause if you relate to this and you stay in this cycle, what I want you to understand is you're consistent. You're consistently procrastinating. We just wanna use your consistency for something else. We're gonna get you to consistently try to fail. And so productive failure is you're gonna do the hard stuff. You're going to take risks and you're gonna take bigger risks than you have before. Here's what that cycle looks like. We're gonna try. That's it. We're not gonna say, oh, we're gonna kill it. Oh, we're gonna win. We're just gonna fucking try. The first step is to try.

The second piece is that because you try, you risk failing. You risk falling on your ask. We're gonna invite in the risk of failure. Because we risk failure, there's a 50/50 shot. Either we succeed or we fail. Either could happen. Because we risk failure, the next step is we tweak.

We get to learn. You learn more by trying than you do by avoiding the thing. And so most people stay stuck in the cycle of productive procrastination and don't understand that you're going to learn so much more by trying and even failing than you will never trying at all. And so the cycle that you create here is that you're going to try,

You're gonna risk failure. Maybe you'll do well, maybe you won't. Either way, you're gonna learn. You're gonna learn what works, you're gonna learn what doesn't work, and then you're gonna take that and you're gonna try again with more skills than you did the first time. The most effective people are not productive procrastinators. They're not the ones you see that are busy, busy, busy all the time. They are productively failing. They're okay with the fact that they're gonna

attempt to do something and that they could fall on their ass and look like an idiot and possibly experience feelings that they really don't want to feel. Failure is normal, and we actually learn more from failing than we do from winning. If we win, we say, "Ah, I should just do that again." We don't even think about it. It could be luck, it could be timing, it could be this. We just say, "Oh, more of that." If we fail, we say, "What skills am I missing?

What skills would make this easier next time? What could I do differently? And then we get to take that to become better and stronger for moving forward. This is really tough.

If you identify failing with being a failure, failure has nothing to do with your identity or your self-worth. Failure is an outside event that is occurring. You can experience failure without being a failure. Is it normal to have thoughts? I'm a failure. I'm this and that. Yes, I still have them too all the time. The only difference between you watching this and resonating with what I'm saying and me is that I don't believe those thoughts. I don't need to think they're true. I don't take them as fact.

And if I fail at something, I just look at that as I need to gain more skills. I don't look at it as I'm a failure. That's it. And that's taken years of me learning how to get out of the productive procrastination into the productive failure cycle. And the biggest reframe of all is to reframe failing as learning. The more you fail, the more you learn, the better you get. And so you really do have to fail your way to success.

You know, the first two years when I started my first business, I just ate shit for two years. Wasn't making money, lost more money than I made, lost all my friends, lost employees, lost business, lost customers, like everything was a loss. But I learned from every single loss that I had

And I was like, well, I can't be worse than I was that time. You cannot unlearn things. You can only learn new things. That's how the brain works. Every time I failed, I was like, well, I guess I just need to learn one more new thing. And it doesn't mean I'm gonna unlearn. I'm not gonna unfail. I'm not gonna undo what I just did, but I can get better. Nobody and nothing can take away the fact that you can build skills. They can call you a failure. They can make fun of you. You can be judged by people, but you can still get better.

So what we wanna do is we want to take imperfect action every day. Repetition improves competence, and then competence improves your confidence, but you won't get there if you don't repeat imperfect actions daily.

Stop trying to be perfect. Try to take imperfect action instead. This is a great reframe, which is like, how could I do this imperfectly? And I think if you're somebody who you're worried about the feelings and how you're gonna show up and all that stuff, great. Take that presentation, sign up for that speech and do it imperfectly. Don't be perfect when you show up.

See what happens. The world will not melt, I promise you. If you're not failing productively, you're also not learning. And if you're not learning, then you're not growing. In all of my time in business and in life is that the greatest predictor of success is not

avoiding failure. It's your ability to take advantage of the situation when you do inevitably fail. In every challenge, there is opportunity. There's opportunity to improve. There's opportunity to reflect. There's opportunity to build relationships.

And so ask yourself this when you are failing or when you have failed, what's good about this situation? What's good about the fact that I just failed? You know, when I first put out content, going back to what I told you in the first place of this video, people were just very rude online. I remember sitting in there and saying like, this doesn't feel fair. And then I was like, ooh, that doesn't feel good. That feels like a victim.

victim. It's actually funny. I was on the phone with one of my friends and I was talking to her and she was like, well, have you, I can't believe she asked me this. She said, have you considered getting surgery to make your voice less deep so that people will stop making fun of you? And I was like, um, what the fuck? She's like, well, if you can just get rid of it and like change it, then why wouldn't you do that? And I

And I was like, change my fucking voice because of what strangers on the internet said? And I was like, no. And in that moment, I was like, I will not allow this to dictate my life. And so I said, what's good about this situation? What's good about people on the internet making fun of me? Well, if I learn how to deal with it, there's probably nothing that anybody could say that would offend me if I can deal with these things and really not take it personally. I can teach others and confidently tell them that

they can post online, they can get mean comments, and they can still keep doing it. I can show up better for my team because if I'm less fearful of the judgment of strangers on the internet, I might also have that translate to other areas of my life where I stop fearing judgment of others. What I realized was if I overcame that situation, I actually gained more skills than not. And so by facing that discomfort and by leaning into it and not procrastinating and not stopping posting content and not never doing the thing that did help me accomplish my dreams,

I actually gained more skills along the way than I would have if I just didn't do it. So here's what I want you to do. You've watched this video. There's probably something, and I want you to pull out from your head, that you are avoiding. What are you avoiding right now? What's the thing that while you're watching this video has been going through your mind? And I want you to write it down.

And then I want you to write down, I want you to get really specific. What feeling are you scared of? It's not a circumstance. Circumstances are neutral. You're scared of a feeling. And then what I want you to write down, if you were not avoiding that feeling, what would you do? I want you to write that down last.

And then what I want you to do is whether it's today or it's tomorrow, as soon as possible, create the opportunity to do the thing that the person who isn't scared of it would do. Because if you take the action like somebody who doesn't have the fear, eventually you won't have the fear either.