The Guide is currently off the market. I highly recommend Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project as an alternative resource.
Do you procrastinate? Do you have a list of things that you plan to do and yet never actually get them done?
You put pressure on yourself to get them done. You’ve tried deadlines, making yourself accountable to someone else, and even read all the blogs and books you can find on motivation and action.
And yet your Somedays stay Somedays without a single action taken.
Do you want to know why?
It’s not what you think. It’s not because you’re a lazy person. It’s not because it’s someone else’s fault. And it’s not because you honestly will get to it later.
Procrastination comes from one of three things:
Those are the only reasons why people say “I’ll get around to it someday” and if you can overcome those three blocks, you’ll never say that again.
And just how do you overcome these blocks? With passion and a clear idea of what you want, then making a commitment and following through.
Simple, no?
No. Not simple. If it were so easy to do, the word procrastination wouldn’t exist in our language.
Here’s the truth:
It’s hard to get started and it’s hard to stay focused long enough to see things through to the end.
“Don’t fool yourself that important things can be put off till tomorrow; they can be put off forever, or not at all.”
– Mignon McLaughlin, Author & Journalist (1913-1983
The problem is life is full of options. It’s easy to come up with a few things you want to do. The real desires, however, often hide under the surface, so we need to push ourselves to discover them.
There are many things we could, and want to, be doing… but so many things that we aren’t doing. A friend told me about an exercise he did: he wrote down a hundred dreams and is now working on all of them. I laughed, thinking there was no way I could come up with a hundred things I’d like to do someday.
Then I started. And guess what? I got to one hundred without a problem. Some were steps within larger dreams and some were a bit out there (like buying a two-million Euro villa that I love), but they are still my ‘Somedays.’
Of course I can’t do all of them at once. Oprah Winfrey is credited with saying, “You can have it all, you just can’t have it all at once.”
But, you know what? That doesn’t matter. Without knowing what you want, you have nothing (or if you do have things, it’s either stuff you don’t want or stuff you’ve achieved accidentally). That’s why I’m a big advocate of writing down what you want. I’ve always done it, but never quite as ambitiously as brainstorming one hundred dreams.
In a list of a hundred dreams, you need to be self-centered. Too often, especially when there are others in our lives, we want things for them. That’s not a ‘Someday.’ Doing something with someone is a ‘Someday.’ Deciding things for them is also not a ‘Someday;’ it’s an expectation and no one has the right to decide someone else’s ‘Somedays’ for them.
Many of us feel that we have no options, that we’re stuck in a life of ’should’ and ‘need.’ This list opens up the options: Once we know what we want, we can then figure out how to achieve them.
So, what Somedays are you not getting around to?
Do you know what you want out of life? Are you pursuing it? Or do you reach the end of each day frustrated by the lack of progress on your dreams?
Your days are full and you’re exhausted by the time you fall into bed and yet your dreams stay exactly where there were, not moving even a half-step forward.
You tell yourself that tomorrow you’ll get started (or finish up) your dream projects, but deep down you know that’s not going to happen. Instead you’ll continue doing what you do every day and nothing will change.
It’s not easy breaking habits and patterns of behavior and thought. It takes strength, commitment and a plan to break away and do what you need to do.
But if you want to achieve your dreams, you have to get started. You have to stop saying someday and start taking action – even the tiniest of actions!
And with that comes the next problem: What action? On which dream? Do you even really want what you think is your dream or is it the dream of someone else?
Much better to just sweep it all under the carpet and pretend your dreams don’t exist.
But dreams do not go away that easily. They keep nagging at you, demanding attention and the frustration builds until you feel like snapping.
Go ahead. You don’t need to procrastinate any longer. The way through the forest of choices is clear. All it takes its one small step that will lead you to major changes and so much more happiness in your life.
You deserve to be happy, don’t you? (Of course you do!)
So go check out Gretchen fabulous book: The Happiness Project