When it comes to tasks that will net you a definite reward, we have a tendency to prioritize small short term rewards over larger rewards later. And our brains are much more responsive to the reward of watching stupid youtube videos right now. That is given a scary little name called ‘temporal discounting’. This may also be partially due to the tendency to procrastinate. Many people develop procrastination as a strategy to exert some measure of control into their lives. In other words “I’m in control here, I’ll do this later.”
Alright let us look at the 10 Things You know are true but haven’t quite Learned yet but surely you’ll do it soon enough:
1. The sooner you do something, the more of your life you get to spend with that thing done — even though it takes less effort (or at least no more) than it will later. It’s the ultimate sure-thing investment and people pass it up all the time.
2. You never regret working out. You can’t count the number of times you’ve negotiated with you to work out the next day instead of today because you’re worried it will be a “bad workout.” You seldom have a bad day on a day that you work out.
3. Minute-for-minute, nothing you do is more rewarding than meditation. Even after just a very short session, it reliably makes you better at everything, especially making decisions. It lets you do your best. Staying calm, focus, decluttering, better-breathing, philosophical etc all sometimes linked to meditation.
4. Creative work is something that can be done at any time. It’s no different than any other kind of work. Inspiration is nice but completely optional. You’ve almost completely come around on this one in 2016.
5. Acting the way you want to feel usually works. When you feel crappy just before you have to go do something, if you decide to act as if you are happy for a while (even though you’re not) You usually end up feeling happy after not too long, or at least much less crappy.
6. Ninety-five percent of many people’s happiness comes from having a home, a functioning body and something to eat. Most live in utter luxury, by any sensible standard of what “luxury” is. If you are unhappy it’s because you’ve lost perspective about the other five percent.
7. Our minds are geared to manage much less than we typically end up managing. Modern people have so many options they conflict with each other in almost every area. The fewer things you have, the more you enjoy your things. The fewer goals you have, the better you do them. The smaller the portion size, the better food tastes.
8. The quickest and most reliable path to personal improvement is to do the things on your list that you resist most. Internal resistance should be taken as a big red sign guaranteeing rapid growth and new capabilities. The experience with the ecstasy that comes with overcoming resistance, logically you should be attracted to it by now.
9. All you need to do to finish things is keep starting them until they’re done. The idea of doing something in its entirety always seems hard. But it’s easy to commit to simply starting on something, and then you’re past most of the resistance. Continuing is just as easy.
10. Whenever you think you’re mad at a person, you’re really just mad at a situation. You’re mad because suddenly life requires something new of you, and it’s easy to implicate a person who contributed to that situation. You want the situation to be responsible for fixing itself, so you attribute it to someone else’s moral failing, and then you don’t have to feel responsible for this new problem of your’s.
Source: raptitude.com