you're not lazy you just don't have systems to get [ __ ] done by the time I was 28 I had built a$1 million business and now I run a 500 million doll portfolio I achiev 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 [ __ ] done no matter what the first step to overcoming this is to understand the root of procrastination 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 going to make content one day
I'm going to put videos out one day I'm going to 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 published 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 3 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 [ __ ] 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 6:00 a.m. 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 sent
them to his YouTube editor who then told me that they were recorded the wrong way but I was like [ __ ] 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 [ __ ] but I'm going to 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 void 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 want to 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 15minute conversation they're going to have and so I just ask you to really reflect on that like what 15minute conversations are controlling your entire life cuz 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 5 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 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 going to take more than like a tiny little tweak to go in the opposite direction you're going to need to like shift gears it's going to be really uncomfortable for like 3 days and then you're going to 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 going to 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 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 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 qutis all 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 an anxiety and this is how I get myself constantly every day to do things that make me anxious okay I
ask 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 want to do the thing that feels shitty today is going to 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 you know 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 opens up which leads me to my third question
which is if I avoid this thing today does it make my life expand 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 going to 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 e the 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 often times 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 wellth thought put together case and then we're like hey you know like this is why we came in and you know finally he calms himself 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 2 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 six weeks go by finally I call up the guy and I'm like listen the [ __ ] 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 2 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 idea you feel like and you resist it ask yourself this does 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 I have to ask myself that question I have to say like is this going to get me further or closer to my goal and if it's going to get me closer [ __ ] my ego put it aside I'm going to 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 going to get me closer to my goals I don't care and it
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 is for me and I just can't imagine myself doing this every day and so I 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 cuz I literally the first thought I had to myself is I was like girl I was like you're 4 days in this is
not the job this is onboarding but her tolerance for boredom was so low that she couldn't even tolerate 4 days of not doing something that provided immediate reward because you know in the first week that somebody's on boarding 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 [ __ ] I've been doing this for a decade running companies how many 101s do I have every week how many team meetings have I led how many quarterlies have I run all the [ __ ] time in fact it's actually very [ __ ] 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 often times 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 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 [ __ ] 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 so to become successful you match your actions to your goals you don't match your actions to your feelings the goal go is not to build a life of comfort 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 levelheaded you seem like you 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 lb 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 [ __ ] you can't pull 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 they're not effective 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 proc proc rinting 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 cuz 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 want to use your consistency for something else we're going to get you to consistently try
to fail and so productive failure is you're going to do the hard stuff you're going to take risks and you're going to take bigger risks than you have before here's what that cycle looks like we're going to try that's it we're not going to say oh we're going to kill it oh we're going to win we're just going to [ __ ] try the first step is to try the second piece is that because you try you risk failing you risk R falling on your ass we're going to invite in the risk of failure because
we risk failure there's a 50-50 shot either we succeed or we fail either could to 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 then you will never trying at all and so the cycle that you create here is that you're going to try you're going to risk failure maybe you'll do
well maybe you won't either way you're going to learn you're going to learn what works you're going to learn what doesn't work and then you're going to take that and you're going to 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 going to 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 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 selfworth 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 I'm that yes I still have them too all the time the only difference between you watching this the 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 [ __ ] 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 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 going to unlearn I'm not going to unfail I'm not going to 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 want to 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 going to show up and all 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 feeling 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 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 oo that doesn't feel good that feels like a 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 should 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 [ __ ] 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 was like change my [ __ ] 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
