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Hi! I'm new to the forum so for my introduction I wanted to impart some personal advice as I think this is the topic I see most soloprenuers people struggle with.
Distraction.
You know those days when you wake up ready to conquer the day? Your plan is set, maybe you've even taken the time to fill out some objectives on your shiny to-do app that you'll almost certainly forget about in a week.those days roll into weeks your months slip by and before you know it you're re-imagining your new years resolutions 'next year will be my year' you resolutely tell yourself.
January 1st rolls around and you sit down at your computer ready to conquer the world. You load up your word processor to create your next big vision plan, but first you'd better check the first news of the year. OK, that's done now back to work, oh but we'd better check our social media's - there may be opportunities! six hours fly by and you've forgotten all about that to-do list. You've accomplished little of anything and now you're tired, slightly annoyed at yourself and halfheartedly claiming that tomorrow will be the day you build your empire.
This phenomenon (being a lazy person) is the interest of many authors, self help coaches and life hack gurus. Everyone want's to tell you WHY this happens and sell you the HOW to fix it. The truth I believe is that the best place to begin is understanding the root cause for yourself.
A lot of coaches try to sell you a solution based on these camps;
1) Remove everything meaningful!: Smash your video games console! Throw your TV out of the window and your family? Friends? they are just going to slow you down dude! bin 'em. No more distractions now!
2) Hustle harder! What do you mean you're tired? Get to work you lazy wretch! You're not where you want to be because you simply don't work hard enough! You sleep 8 hours a night? you're bound to be a loser! it's 6 am starts and cold showers for you from now on!
To be fair, both camps do have some sense to them, but neither go far enough in diagnosing the issue that lies underneath distraction - suffering.
Why we seek escape
I'm sure many of you are familiar with the work of Timothy Wilson, a Harvard professor that famously conducted a study in which he asked students to sit in a room from 6 to 15 minutes and do nothing but think. They found the students preferred to do even the most mundane of tasks rather than be alone with their thoughts and many students actually preferred to administer electric shocks to themselves rather than be alone with their thoughts, in fact 67% of the men and 25% of the women preferred to shock themselves.
If you couple this with the fast paced atomised life that we encourage in today's world then the suffering people feel inside can be so great that they have engineered their life to never be alone. We all know at least one person that needs to take their phone everywhere, needs the TV on to sleep and music in when walking. The driver of almost all human behaviour is to escape discomfort. This can be great for completing mundane to-do items but this type of person will never be able to take the time to step back and plan, or decipher value adding areas of their field.
Time management is essentially pain management. You have to learn how to become comfortable with the uncomfortable.
We live in a world where we are taught that feeling bad is bad. Any negative feelings either need to be killed immediately or we must have some kind of serious mental illness that needs pharmaceutical intervention. Rarely is this the case, you're just feeling normal emotions that everyone has but you aren't dealing with them from a healthy perspective.
What most people reflexively do when faced with a painful emotion is seek comfort, which has its roots in pornography addiction as well as video games and the other 'evil' devices that the first camp will advise that you remove.
You need to learn how to harness this discomfort and use it to your advantage and one way you can do this this is to step back and understand that 'my' thoughts are not 'me' and that they are a product of the monkey mind that is always seeking to grasp onto a neural pathway and extract a file for me to look at.
This doesn't sound very life changing- I give you that. But it changed my life which is why I took the time to write this for anyone who is struggling with similar issues.
I figured all of this out one day when I became homeless. Suddenly I was alone sleeping from my car with nothing but thoughts. You know the typical ruminating nonsense that fills your head from day to day. I was't overly bothered but I was now out of work and had no plans as to how I was going to take (because you never truly make) money and time felt like it was ticking away faster than normal.
But I remember every morning watching the zombie crowds head to work and I'd see the same similar faces heading back from work, their eyes sullen and their souls drained from presumably stressful office jobs. Sometimes they'd come into my central office ( Costa Coffee!) on their lunch break and i'd see them order sweet treats and ponder if they'd even be able to taste them given the speed they ate as they frantically rushed to ensure they could finish their meal before needing to call their manager about some trivial paperwork.
I remember thinking to myself - how did the people that wanted to grow up to be astronauts, police officers and doctors end up here, justifying their mandatory coffee break to their boss? So I began asking some of the people (charm will get you everywhere!) what they do and if they're happy and the same issue kept coming up; almost everyone begin actively choosing not to think, and then consequentially not to act.
Why is it that we have all of the tools we need to be successful but never do it? We know from the fantastic writings of MJ that we should look to create value and fit our model to the CENTS system - but how many of us sit down to seriously spend time thinking deeply about doing this for any period of time? How many of us can spend time stratergising all of this and then create a process of execution to get where we want to be?
How many times a year do we seriously sit down to ask ourselves, are we happy with where we are at? Is our path in line with who we want to be? What can we change immediately?
Most people simply end up preferring to block out that kind of noise and ultimately find themselves in unfulfilling jobs with unfulfilling partners and unfulfilling futures as they walk ever further from the dreams they'd once had for themselves fuelled by modern forms of escapism that allow us to temporarily ignore the problem.
Distraction isn't some new epidemic that's occurred because of social media or mobile phones. Religions have talked about this for thousands of years. Buddhsim titles it the monkey mind, Plato called it Akrasia which in Greek is described as a lack of self-control or the state of acting against one's better judgement.
So if I have one piece of advice for anyone suffering from this it would be to learn how to think again. Understand that it's OK not take a step back and get in touch with who you are, what you want and learn that feeling bad doesn't mean you're broken or something should be fixed - it's fuel to go further and achieve more.
Begin adding in blocks on time where you do nothing but reflectively think and work rather than reactively think and work.
Hope it helps some people!
Hi! I'm new to the forum so for my introduction I wanted to impart some personal advice as I think this is the topic I see most soloprenuers people struggle with.
Distraction.
You know those days when you wake up ready to conquer the day? Your plan is set, maybe you've even taken the time to fill out some objectives on your shiny to-do app that you'll almost certainly forget about in a week.those days roll into weeks your months slip by and before you know it you're re-imagining your new years resolutions 'next year will be my year' you resolutely tell yourself.
January 1st rolls around and you sit down at your computer ready to conquer the world. You load up your word processor to create your next big vision plan, but first you'd better check the first news of the year. OK, that's done now back to work, oh but we'd better check our social media's - there may be opportunities! six hours fly by and you've forgotten all about that to-do list. You've accomplished little of anything and now you're tired, slightly annoyed at yourself and halfheartedly claiming that tomorrow will be the day you build your empire.
This phenomenon (being a lazy person) is the interest of many authors, self help coaches and life hack gurus. Everyone want's to tell you WHY this happens and sell you the HOW to fix it. The truth I believe is that the best place to begin is understanding the root cause for yourself.
A lot of coaches try to sell you a solution based on these camps;
1) Remove everything meaningful!: Smash your video games console! Throw your TV out of the window and your family? Friends? they are just going to slow you down dude! bin 'em. No more distractions now!
2) Hustle harder! What do you mean you're tired? Get to work you lazy wretch! You're not where you want to be because you simply don't work hard enough! You sleep 8 hours a night? you're bound to be a loser! it's 6 am starts and cold showers for you from now on!
To be fair, both camps do have some sense to them, but neither go far enough in diagnosing the issue that lies underneath distraction - suffering.
Why we seek escape
I'm sure many of you are familiar with the work of Timothy Wilson, a Harvard professor that famously conducted a study in which he asked students to sit in a room from 6 to 15 minutes and do nothing but think. They found the students preferred to do even the most mundane of tasks rather than be alone with their thoughts and many students actually preferred to administer electric shocks to themselves rather than be alone with their thoughts, in fact 67% of the men and 25% of the women preferred to shock themselves.
If you couple this with the fast paced atomised life that we encourage in today's world then the suffering people feel inside can be so great that they have engineered their life to never be alone. We all know at least one person that needs to take their phone everywhere, needs the TV on to sleep and music in when walking. The driver of almost all human behaviour is to escape discomfort. This can be great for completing mundane to-do items but this type of person will never be able to take the time to step back and plan, or decipher value adding areas of their field.
Time management is essentially pain management. You have to learn how to become comfortable with the uncomfortable.
We live in a world where we are taught that feeling bad is bad. Any negative feelings either need to be killed immediately or we must have some kind of serious mental illness that needs pharmaceutical intervention. Rarely is this the case, you're just feeling normal emotions that everyone has but you aren't dealing with them from a healthy perspective.
What most people reflexively do when faced with a painful emotion is seek comfort, which has its roots in pornography addiction as well as video games and the other 'evil' devices that the first camp will advise that you remove.
You need to learn how to harness this discomfort and use it to your advantage and one way you can do this this is to step back and understand that 'my' thoughts are not 'me' and that they are a product of the monkey mind that is always seeking to grasp onto a neural pathway and extract a file for me to look at.
This doesn't sound very life changing- I give you that. But it changed my life which is why I took the time to write this for anyone who is struggling with similar issues.
I figured all of this out one day when I became homeless. Suddenly I was alone sleeping from my car with nothing but thoughts. You know the typical ruminating nonsense that fills your head from day to day. I was't overly bothered but I was now out of work and had no plans as to how I was going to take (because you never truly make) money and time felt like it was ticking away faster than normal.
But I remember every morning watching the zombie crowds head to work and I'd see the same similar faces heading back from work, their eyes sullen and their souls drained from presumably stressful office jobs. Sometimes they'd come into my central office ( Costa Coffee!) on their lunch break and i'd see them order sweet treats and ponder if they'd even be able to taste them given the speed they ate as they frantically rushed to ensure they could finish their meal before needing to call their manager about some trivial paperwork.
I remember thinking to myself - how did the people that wanted to grow up to be astronauts, police officers and doctors end up here, justifying their mandatory coffee break to their boss? So I began asking some of the people (charm will get you everywhere!) what they do and if they're happy and the same issue kept coming up; almost everyone begin actively choosing not to think, and then consequentially not to act.
Why is it that we have all of the tools we need to be successful but never do it? We know from the fantastic writings of MJ that we should look to create value and fit our model to the CENTS system - but how many of us sit down to seriously spend time thinking deeply about doing this for any period of time? How many of us can spend time stratergising all of this and then create a process of execution to get where we want to be?
How many times a year do we seriously sit down to ask ourselves, are we happy with where we are at? Is our path in line with who we want to be? What can we change immediately?
Most people simply end up preferring to block out that kind of noise and ultimately find themselves in unfulfilling jobs with unfulfilling partners and unfulfilling futures as they walk ever further from the dreams they'd once had for themselves fuelled by modern forms of escapism that allow us to temporarily ignore the problem.
Distraction isn't some new epidemic that's occurred because of social media or mobile phones. Religions have talked about this for thousands of years. Buddhsim titles it the monkey mind, Plato called it Akrasia which in Greek is described as a lack of self-control or the state of acting against one's better judgement.
So if I have one piece of advice for anyone suffering from this it would be to learn how to think again. Understand that it's OK not take a step back and get in touch with who you are, what you want and learn that feeling bad doesn't mean you're broken or something should be fixed - it's fuel to go further and achieve more.
Begin adding in blocks on time where you do nothing but reflectively think and work rather than reactively think and work.
Hope it helps some people!
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