The Overthinker’s Guide for Taking

Action: A Complete Guide

“Life is about execution rather than purpose.” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Preface: Talking About Action

If you read anything on StartupBros you will go away having the capability to do
something that you weren’t able to before. From validating your business idea to
perfecting your logo, from releasing your motivation to creating an importing business
this week, from freeing yourself from information overload to pinpointing the source of
your side business’ stagnation – it’s about taking action.

The trouble is, you can’t write guides for the hardest things in life. The reason is
simple: the hardest things are so hard because there is no guide.

Will once discussed the importance of taking action. It’s one of those painfully simple
ideas that can’t be repeated enough: without taking action you won’t get anywhere.
Most posts are about a taking a specific action. This post is different, it’s a complete
guide to becoming a man or woman of action. Taking the actions suggested in this post
will make it exponentially easier to take action in every other area of your life. You
will begin to automatically do what you had to fight to do before.
The tools here have been the most powerful in living a better life that I have come
across. Adopting an action-oriented life has made me simultaneously more productive
(without using silly productivity “hacks”), more bold, and given me a level of mental
wellness I haven’t had since I was a kid. Oh – and it’s been the most powerful part of
integrating antifrigility into my life.

On to the post…

Introduction
Your life would be better if you took the action you’ve been avoiding.

Showing your interest in that girl. Actually making a habit of getting exercise. Taking
the first step towards starting your business.

I hate writing about taking action. I feel like an idiot. We already know we need to
take action! Why talk about it!?

Because it helps.

I’ve spent huge portions of my life in frustrated rationalization and pussy-footing my

way around the thing that I know would be best for my life.

The only way I was able to escape this smart-seeming idiocy was to prove to myself
incontrovertibly that I was better off taking action than thinking something
through again.

It’s easy to give too much credit to the thinking mind. The thinking mind is “right”.
Action isn’t so obvious. Action forces us to risk being wrong.
The economist Tyler Cowen points to an important shift in our economy:

“The more information that’s out there, the greater the returns to just being
willing to sit down and apply yourself. Information isn’t what’s scarce; it’s the
willingness to do something with it.”

Everybody has access to pretty much all the information in the world. Google will give
you any information you need nearly instantly.

If you collect information without using it you’re only going to be frustrated. Trust me,
I have to fight this urge all the time.

Reading ten books about meditation isn’t as useful as ten minutes spent meditating.
You’ve got to do the thing!

Again, this seems so obvious! It is, but we still avoid the hard conversations, we still
stagnate in life until we get depressed, fat, poor, and stuck.

This post represents a whole lot of hours deconstructing my own inaction and building
systems and reminders to trick myself into taking action.

Let’s get down to it. Here is an overview of where we’ll go in this post:

Table of Contents:

1. Defining Action: Everything is an action, isn’t it? Here we will define exactly
what we’re talking about when we discuss “action”.
2. 2 Heuristics: If you follow just these two rules, you will have taken a massive
step toward creating a habit of taking action. You can think of this as a
“minimum effective dose” of action-taking theory.
1. Err on the side of action – or how to be right while being wrong.
2. Action as research – don’t read another book until you take the first step.

3. 10 Overlooked Truths About Action: A deep exploration of what happens

when you take action. When you understand the nature of action you’ll find
yourself more free to take it.
1. Action is Cheaper Than Planning
 2. Action Allows Emergence
3. Inaction is Scarier
4. Motivation Follows Action
5. Action is an Existential Answer
6. Action Creates Courage
7. Explanations Follow Actions
8. Action Beats the Odds
9. Action Makes You Humble
10. Action Isn’t Petty
11. Action Creates Antifragility

4. 20 Reasons for Inaction – And How to Short Circuit Them: I said “reasons”
but I could have just as easily used “excuses”. Here we will take a look at the
most dangerous and subtle rationalizations we use to avoid doing the things we
know we should in life.
1. “I’m waiting for help.”
2. “The conditions aren’t right.”
3. “This setback proved it’s not possible/not worth it.”
4. “I picked the wrong path… I should just try something else.”
5. “I don’t know where to begin.”
6. “Nothing I do will make a difference.”
7. “I’m overwhelmed.”
8. “I’m not making any progress.”
9. “I’m trapped.”
10. “It’s below me…” or “I’m too good for that.”
11. “I need to know more.”
12. “I’m a perfectionist.”
13. “They are already doing it better than I could.”
14. “I have no resources compared to them.”
15. “I’m so drained from my existing obligations.”
16. “I’m completely burned out.”
17. “I am taking action!”
18. “It won’t work.”
19. “I don’t have the right resources (money, equipment, connections.)”
20. “I’m not good enough.”

5. 5 Exercises for Building an Action-Taking Habit: Here we are going to

explore the most powerful exercises we can practice to create a habit of taking
action.
1. Meditation (What?! Hear me out…)
2. Internalizing Goals
3. Input Deprivation Week
4. Stream of Conscious Writing
5. Memento Mori

First thing’s first.

Let’s define what we’re talking about here.

Defining Action

How can we tell the difference between action and inaction? Everything is an action.
Breathing, eating, sitting, sleeping… everything we do.

We are talking about something different from the definition Google serves about when
asking about “action”:

When we’re talking about action we’re actually discussing right action. It’s probably
close to what you think about when you think “I’ve got to do something about this!” It’s
guided action. It’s purposeful and it’s conscious.

Ryan Holiday has done a great job defining it in his new book, The Obstacle is the Way:

“What is action? Action is commonplace, right action is not. As a discipline, it’s not
any kind of action that will do, but directed action. Everything must be done in the
service of the whole. Step by step, action by action, we’ll dismantle the obstacles in
front of us. With persistence and flexibility, we’ll act in the best interest of our goals.
Action requires courage, not brashness – creative application and not brute force. Our
movements and decisions define us: We must be sure to act with deliberation, boldness,
and persistence. Those are the attributes of right and effective action. Nothing else – not
thinking or evasion or aid from others. Action is the solution and the cure to our
predicaments.”
We are not talking about mindless flailing. That will waste your energy and leave you
where you started. If you don’t learn from the actions you take then you won’t be able
to become more effective. If you don’t guide your actions with principles, heuristics, or
aims then you won’t have much say at all about where you end up – and who you
become.

The idea is not to become a mindless machine that breaks everything in it’s path.
Instead, we need to rebalance our appreciation for the power of action with our
tendency to overthink, over-plan, and otherwise waste our energies in abstraction.

Creating a plan is taking action. Refining past the point of necessity is inaction.

“Never has there been a map, however carefully executed to detail and scale, which
carried its owner over even one inch of ground.” – Og Mandino

Right action is pushing toward the thing you normally avoid. Right action is moving
into what is uncomfortable or what scares you. Right action is mindful.

This post is a resource — something that I really should have just made a book or
course and charged for but I just wanted to get it in front of more people – so it’s going
to be pretty long.

The next section offers two rules to adopt that will go a long way towards creating your
personal ethos of action.

2 Heuristics: The Minimum Effective

Dose of Action Theory

If you apply just these two rules you will short-circuit your overthinking tendencies and
prove to yourself the power of taking action.

The danger in offering these up-front is that it’s hard to stay dedicated to rules without
understanding the theory behind them. If you stop here you run the risk of repeating the
cycle of: read blog post, apply once (or not at all), read another blog post for a hit of
feeling productive while staying safely stagnant.
Of course I suggest you read the rest of the post but I know that you might not have
time now (or you don’t trust me yet to make good use of that much of your time).

So here I’m going to offer you the two simplest, most powerful rules I follow to force
myself into taking action.

Heuristic 1: Err on the side of action as long as the

pain isn’t irreversible.

We usually don’t know what the best option is. Maybe it’s best to wait, maybe it’s best
to act. We can’t know, but if we set our default to action we’ll win in the long run.

Some important clarifications:

 Action is normally against your impulse. Will and I are roommates and he
keeps the house stocked with Swiss Rolls. Delicious freaking Swiss Rolls. It’s
torture. For me, resisting the urge to stuff my face is taking action – not the
action of face-stuffing. (Remember that we’re creating a habit of right action,
any dingus can take any action.)
 Pain is good, just not irreversible pain. Up to a point, our lives actually get
better the more uncomfortable we get. I’m not suggesting putting your health in
danger. I am suggesting putting your ego, comfort, and routine in danger.

Some examples of how I (successfully) use this in my daily life:

 This morning I said, “I’m going to fast today.” Why? Maybe because I’m dumb,
I don’t know. But I’m committed. It’s 2:20 PM now and I’m f*cking starving. I
want more than anything to eat something (preferably a Swiss Roll) but I won’t.
That’s taking action. [Update: I went for 43 hours before feasting at BJ’s.]
 Earlier today I was running sprints. I did a series of 30 second sprints. I’m
asthmatic and overall suck at anything cardio-related. It’s my hell. I would give
out at 20 seconds every time. I noticed this, regrouped, and doubled my effort to
push into the 30 second mark. (There was a pretty girl there as well… if she
 wasn’t there I can pretty much guarantee you I would have just stopped and
cried. It’s amazing how much a pretty girl (or boy, whatever) can push you to
find strength you didn’t have before.)
 Just now I had the urge to stop writing. It’s hard to write this. It’s easier to go to
reddit. reddit=inaction, writing this=action…
 I take cold showers sometimes. Sometimes I don’t. As soon as I begin justifying
taking a warm shower I know I need to take a cold one.
 As soon as I think “I’ll do it later” about something that I never actually do later
I know I’m screwing up… usually I still screw this up but sometimes I actually
take action on the thing.

I’m feeling bad about talking about successes. Don’t believe people who only talk about
their successes. The biggest reason people get interested in something is because they
failed so bad at it before, I swear. That’s why psychologists are crazy, happiness
researchers are often miserable, and rich people often started off poor. We react against
our weaknesses. It’s good, they shape us and end up creating our greatest strengths.

What I’m saying is I avoid action at all costs. Here are some examples of my failures to
take action:

 There are 3 emails that I need to send. I’ve needed to send them for 2 weeks or
more. Why haven’t I? I’m being an idiot.
 I don’t have to get out of bed in the morning because I have an awesome way of
making a living (you’re reading it)… so I don’t. Most mornings I lay and read.
Which is good, even an action, for a while. But then I keep doing it and avoid
getting out of bed. Stupid. Luxury, when we overindulge, becomes poison.
 I want to build stronger relationships. I tell myself I’ll make more phone calls
and be more social. But I don’t. I avoid these things all the time.
 Meditation. I know my life is significantly better when I do it yet I continue to
fail making a habit of it.
 Things I don’t even know about. The most insidious forms of inaction are the
ones we haven’t even identified. I know they’re there. That’s why I have to dig
every day to expose these things so I can do something about them.

Actually writing down those failures just made me way more likely to sort them out. I
bet you I send out those emails after I finish this.

Again: Err on the side of action as long as the consequences aren’t irreversibly
terrible.

Heuristic 2: Act before researching.

This has been the most powerful rule for me. If you only try one thing from this post,
make it this.

This is not a rule against research. Benefitting from the knowledge of others is one of
the powerful things we can do as a human being. The problem is no longer that we lack
knowledge, it’s that we don’t have an effective frame for knowledge.

We all have massive amounts of wasted information stored. We were told to learn and
so we learned… what we forgot to do was apply the information.

Paradoxically, taking ignorant action will make your research much more
effective.

I’m not suggesting you write a whole book before doing research. What I’m suggesting
is that you create a habit of writing before doing research. This habit of taking action
will give more purpose and direction to your research. You’ll know what information
actually matters and what is fluff. You’ll immediately put new knowledge into practice
instead of forgetting it.

Here are examples rules I’ve set for myself using this idea:

 I can’t read anything about fitness unless I have already exercised that day.
 I can’t read anything about meditation unless I’ve meditated that day.
 I can’t read anything advanced about business unless I’ve made sure the
fundamentals are in place.

Why is this trick so powerful?

There are so many findings out there that are focused on perfecting things. Giving us
the edge. Well, it turns out, all these people are focused on tiny changes with tiny
results. It’s just too much.

You will be amazed at the information you already have if you just force yourself to
apply it.

It’s too tempting to try to sound smart instead of being effective… and it’s embarrassing
how simple things actually are. (People are paid well to make simple things complex.)
The richest man in the world avoids complexity like the plague. Here’s a quote from
Warren Buffett:

“Easy does it. After 25 years of buying and supervising a great variety of businesses,
Charlie and I have not learned how to solve difficult business problems. What we have
learned is to avoid them. To the extent we have been successful, it is because we
concentrated on identifying one-foot hurdles that we could step over rather than
because we acquired any ability to clear seven-footers. The finding may seem
unfair, but in both business and investments it is usually far more profitable to
simply stick with the easy and obvious than it is to resolve the difficult.”

“Easy and obvious” isn’t sexy, but it’s effective.

Again: Act before researching.

Those two heuristics will take you a long way.

For me this wouldn’t be enough. My faith in action over overthinking only came after I
overthought overthinking and action into dust. I have a feeling you might need the same
treatment.

Next we are going to look at 11 powerful and mostly ignored truths about taking action
that will be inspiring if nothing else.

11 Overlooked Truths About Action

This section is based on a post I wrote for Art of Manliness (although there’s a ton of

original stuff too ). The popularity of that post is what convinced me that a
more comprehensive post was worthwhile. University of Chicago Booth School of
Business professors shared it with their MBA students, it was highlighted on the
economist Tyler Cowen’s blog, and I received a torrent of emails from people telling
me how they had changed their lives because of it. Okay no more horn tooting.

Here are the 11 truths:

1. Action is Cheaper Than Planning

2. Action Allows Emergence

3. Inaction is Scarier
4. Motivation Follows Action
5. Action is an Existential Answer
6. Action Creates Courage
7. Explanations Follow Actions
8. Action Beats the Odds
9. Action Makes You Humble
10. Action Isn’t Petty
11. Action Creates Antifragility

I’ve consolidated the information from that post below:

1. Action is Cheaper Than Planning

We think we’re not giving anything up while we mull over our plan for the 50th time.
We’re “playing it safe” by not doing anything until we know exactly what to do.

We’re so, so wrong.

Planning is expensive.

The Wright brothers were able to beat out corporations in the race to build a working
plane because they emphasized action over planning.
After a failed flight, the Wright brothers would go back to their workshop and make a
small, cheap, quick tweak and test the plane again. The corporations would spend
months of planning and massive sums of money before trying another flight.

The Wright brothers won because they learned from taking action. Their well-financed
competitors lost because they tried to predict everything by creating a more perfect plan.

This philosophy of failing fast has spread through Silicon Valley and beyond thanks to
Eric Ries’ work The Lean Startup. We can imagine the Wright Bros. writing this
passage from Ries’ book:

“I’ve come to believe that learning is the essential unit of progress for startups. The
effort that is not absolutely necessary for learning what customers want can be
eliminated. I call this validated learning because it is always demonstrated by positive
improvements in the startup’s core metrics.”

This calls to mind Heuristic 2 from above: Act before researching.

I can almost guarantee you that you are exaggerating the pain of potential “failure” and
underrating the amount of progress you’ll make by just trying.

2. Action Allows Emergence

Five years ago, did you know your life would be as it is now?

I doubt it. I can’t imagine having spent this much time writing five years ago. I couldn’t
have imagined been interested in the things I’m interested.

How many times have you been exposed to a new possibility that didn’t exist
before? Maybe you thought you would be fat forever. Then after a couple months of
working out and eating well you realized that you had the potential to get ripped.

Imagine walking alone in the desert. It’s endless and it sucks. Nobody has ever had fun
walking in the desert. You’re going to die. There is absolutely no chance at being saved.
You climb one last dune and you see an oasis. It’s not an illusion.

You’re persistent walking created a possibility that had zero percent chance of
happening if you stood still. Each step was an action providing a new viewpoint.

If you stood still and thought about your predicament you would have died. It was only
by taking step after step that saved your life. That final step that revealed the oasis
might get all the credit, but all those hopeless (“useless”) steps before made the
final one possible.

You got to keep moving.

Our ability to predict the future is pretty much zero. No matter how many times
scientists prove this to us, we refuse to believe them. Nassim Taleb explains:

“So let us call here the teleological fallacy the illusion that you know exactly where you
are going, and that you knew exactly where you were going in the past, and that others
have succeeded in the past by knowing where they were going.

The rational flaneur is someone who, unlike a tourist, makes a decision at every
step to revise his schedule, so he can imbibe things based on new information, what
Nero was trying to practice in his travels, often guided by his sense of smell. The
flaneur is not a prisoner of a plan. Tourism, actual or figurative, is imbued with
the teleological illusion; it assumes completeness of cision and gets one locked into
a hard-to-revise program, while the flaneur continuously – and, what is crucial,
rationally – modifies his targets as he acquires information.”

It’s hard to see the possibility of success if you’ve only experienced failure. Yet it’s
often only after a number of failures that we have a chance at success.

Don’t assume that the possibilities you can see are the only possibilities available.
You’re actions literally create new potentialities that didn’t exist before.

3. Inaction is Scarier
Sometimes the best way to be strong is to consider the pain of being weak.

How much will you regret eating that donut? How much will you regret settling for that
shit job your entire life? How much pain will you suffer later to avoid it now?

Action hurts now. We’ll get scarred. We’ll be uncomfortable. We’ll take losses. But
we’ll grow.

Inaction doesn’t hurt now, but it hurts for the rest of our lives. We’ll be comfortable
now and be unable to do the uncomfortable thing later. We’ll be made soft by our
stagnation. We’ll decay.

Every day we choose inaction over action it makes it harder to take action. We weaken
ourselves. Every time we take action we become stronger.

4. Motivation Follows Action

Waiting is the least motivating thing you can do. Writers who wait around for
motivation aren’t actually writers.

Imagine an entrepreneur who only got shit done when he was motivated.

What?!

Motivation is not the cause of action – it’s a consequence.

Motivation (and passion) will follow you if you have the balls to go without them.

5. Action is an Existential Answer

I have spent most of my life in an existential crisis. Maybe not most, but an annoyingly
long time.

I’ve read all sorts of philosophical and spiritual texts talking about it. They’ve all given
answers that worked for a while. Then didn’t.

The only existential answer that has ever consistently worked? Action.

It doesn’t satisfy our rationalizing brain – it shuts it up for a minute so we can actually
do something.

There is no abstract mission, purpose, or paradox that will satisfy your existential
needs. There is no labor, when focused on, that won’t.

6. Action Creates Courage

“Courage is not something that you already have that makes you brave when the tough
times start. Courage is what you earn when you’ve been through the tough times and
you discover they aren’t so tough after all.” -Malcolm Gladwell, David and Goliath

Seneca put it this way:

“It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare
that things are difficult.”
We’re all scared. Whether or not you’re courageous depends on what you do with that
fear.

Do you lean into it? Do you cower from it?

What we see as courageousness is really just a habit of taking action. Of doing

things even though we’re scared to do them.

Motivation, passion, inspiration, courage, opportunities, possibilities, strength … these

things only come with taking action. It’s amazing that we still have such a hard time
doing!

7. Explanations Follow Actions

As someone who overthinks everything I am desperate to justify my actions. Without a

reason to do something… well, why even do it? I need a cohesive narrative.

Neuroscientist David Eagleman has done a study that shows what happens when a good
explanation or narrative isn’t available. He reports on the behavior of people who he put
through a gambling game:

“The interesting part came when I interviewed the players afterward. I asked them
what they’d done in the gambling game and why they’d done it. I was surprised to
hear all types of baroque explanations, such as ‘The computer liked it when I switched
back and forth’ and ‘The computer was trying to punish me, so I switched my game
plan.’ In reality, the players’ descriptions of their own strategies did not match what
they had actually done, which turned out to be highly predictable. Nor did their
descriptions match the computer’s behavior, which was purely formulaic. Instead, their
conscious minds, unable to assign the task to a well-oiled zombie system,
desperately sought a narrative.”

The mind that tells you about your life is probably wrong. Scientists tell us we make up
memories all the time.

Whatever reason you give yourself for doing something came after the decision to
do the thing.
So what can we do? We can treat our actions as experiments and measure the results.

When we know our stories are probably wrong we can give them less power. Don’t let
your scary stories paralyze you. Act and let the narrative follow (just as courage and
motivation do).

8. Action Beats The Odds

“Startup CEOs should not play the odds. When you are building a company,you must
believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You
just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a
thousand; your task is the same.” – Ben Horrowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard
Things

Statistics can tell us a lot of things. Most of them don’t matter.

Cortes had 500 men to take on 500,000 Aztecs. What was his grand plan? He sunk his
ships to eliminate any possibility of retreat.

Why was this effective? Yes, it created the force of necessity, but how? Because it
focused the army’s attention on action instead of abstraction.

Cortes noticed that his men were being weakened by thoughts of retreat and seeing their
wives. Once the ships were sunk, there was only one thing they could focus on: fighting
as hard as possible.

Stopping to consider whether or not you’ll be able to do something never helps and
often hurts. It’s also inaccurate. Actually doing the thing is the only accurate test of
possibility.
We stack the odds against ourselves. We make up obstacles that don’t exist. Or we
become delusional about the greatness we will achieve in some undefined future. Either
way, we’re hurting ourselves. Test your mettle the only way that matters: by taking
action.

9. Action Makes You Humble

“My wish for you, Kalistos, is that you survive as many battles in the flesh as you
already have fought in your imagination. Perhaps then you will acquire the humility of a
man and bear yourself no longer as the demigod you presume yourself to be.” –
Dienekes, in Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire

Teenage boys are comically arrogant. Why? Because they are told they can do anything
– yet they haven’t had to try to do anything yet. They’ve learned just enough to see
infinite possibilities but have no awareness of their limits.

This overconfidence can be useful, especially for entrepreneurs, yet it can quickly
become delusional. Unless grand plans are executed they rot the schemer’s soul.

We must be willing to test the validity of our vision.

At the same time, we have to be careful not take failure too much to heart.

Most adults are scared to have any vision because they know failure – they were burned.

Instead of growing from their failures they cowered from them. They were made timid
because they were afraid to get back into the ring.

Why? Because they thought the abstract ideal was more important than reality. We
rarely can bring our exact vision into existence – we are not gods creating worlds! We
are humans, like the Wright brothers. We go out onto the field with one design, crash,
and go again.

A dedication to action makes you humble while allowing you to do more than you ever
thought possible.
10. Action Isn’t Petty
Action doesn’t care what you think, just what you do.

Action doesn’t care about what should of happened, just what is.

Gossip is impossible in action.

Smallness is impossible in action.

11. Action Creates Antifragility

“The general principle of antifragility, it is much better to do things you cannot explain
than explain things you cannot do.” – Nassim Taleb

Antifragile is one of the most important (practical) philosophical ideas to emerge in our
recent history and, for me, putting action ahead of abstraction is the most important step
toward becoming antifragile.

Essentially, taking action makes us more able to take advantage of a volatile future.

__

In the next section we are going to look at 20 common reasons for in action and how we
can take action anyway.

20 Antidotes to Perfectly Good Reasons

for Inaction

The following are some of the most powerful rationalizations that stop me from taking
action. They usually seem logical. It’s almost impossible to see them at work unless you
become aware of them. Even once you know about them it takes a ton of practice to
learn to lean into them. For each excuse (“reason”, whatever) I’ve included the antidote
I use to overcome it. These work for me. Not always, but enough to matter, a lot.

Maybe you have the same reasons for not doing things. You probably have at least
some that I don’t have. Find the most similar reason I have listed and I’d be willing to
bet the antidote will work for you.

Here is the list again:

1. “I’m waiting for help.”

2. “The conditions aren’t right.”
3. “This setback proved it’s not possible/not worth it.”
4. “I picked the wrong path… I should just try something else.”
5. “I don’t know where to begin.”
6. “Nothing I do will make a difference.”
7. “I’m overwhelmed.”
8. “I’m not making any progress.”
9. “I’m trapped.”
10. “It’s below me…” or “I’m too good for that.”
11. “I need to know more.”
12. “I’m a perfectionist.”
13. “They are already doing it better than I could.”
14. “I have no resources compared to them.”
15. “I’m so drained from my existing obligations.”
16. “I’m completely burned out.”
17. “I am taking action!”
18. “It won’t work.”
19. “I don’t have the right resources (money, equipment, connections.)”
20. “I’m not good enough.”

1. “I’m waiting for help.”

Are you really? Did you call for help? Did someone say help is on the way? If not,
nobody is coming.

Nothing is going to come and give you motivation to get off your ass. Nobody is going
to come and give your life purpose. Nobody is going to offer to start a business for you.
Nobody is going to offer to fund your movie. Nobody is going to come and force you to
have good habits. Nobody is going to come and ask to be your significant other.

Nobody is coming to the rescue. (Either is inspiration.)

Okay, maybe they are, but that’s a lousy bet.

The person who tries is the person who gets help. The person who loves is the person
gets loved – and has a better chance at a significant other. The person who makes shitty
cheap movies is more likely to raise money to make a less shitty less cheap ones (and
eventually really good ones).

You’re at StartupBros, it’s a good chance you want to start your own business.

Do you actually want that?

If you haven’t started, why the f*ck not? Are you waiting for a blog post? A book that
will finally convince you to sack up? Somebody to come and tell you exactly what to
do? I’m just guessing, those have been some of the things I waited around for, you
might have your own.

Antidote: Assume that no help is on it’s way. Remember that help can only come to
those who help themselves. Take action.

2. “The conditions aren’t right.”

You’re probably right. Most of the time conditions suck for most things. I don’t
want to list all the major corporations that were created in depressions (okay, a couple:
Walt Disney Company, Costco, Standard Oil, LinkedIn, Microsoft), you can Google
that if you want.
Warren Buffett and his partner Charlie Munger ignore the macroeconomic environment
when they make decisions. Instead, they look for businesses that will be doing well in
20 years – through recessions, depressions, and booms.

Charlie Munger has given some fantastic lectures to college students. When asked
whether he thought it was as difficult now (this was in 2010 I believe, the pits) as during
the Great Depression he said (1) it’s easier to get hired now – people were having to
combine households during the Great Depression and (2) it doesn’t matter, just put
your head down and work.

You are going to live through good times and bad times. You are going to live in
periods of excess opportunity and times when it looks like there is zero opportunity.

The strategy? Focus on doing the best work you can today.

If there is no opportunity currently then you better be getting as good as you can for
when opportunity comes. And when it does come? Jump on it like it’ll never be back
again. Again put your head down and seize the moment.

Munger said that Berkshire Hathaway, one of the most successful companies in the
world, has been made by about 20 great moves. Without those 20 their track record is
miserable. They were able to make those career-defining moves because they were
ready. They were ready because they were always focused on doing the best work
they could in the present moment.

Antidote: Focus on doing your best today and you’re guaranteed to have huge
opportunities – and you’ll be ready for them. This applies no matter the surrounding
conditions.

3. “This setback proved it’s not possible/not worth it.”

Why is it not worth it? Did you learn anything from this set back? Could you make it
happen if you really wanted to? I think you could.

Persistence makes a lot of things possible.

Maybe you don’t think it’s worth it.

Do you have something better to do than try to make this work though? Or are
you just being soft?

Probably 95% of the times I say something isn’t worth it I’m just being a baby. I don’t
want to try hard. I don’t want to take action. I pretend I don’t care about the outcome
and I pretend the setback is way bigger than it actually is.

Chances are you are just avoiding pain when you should be leaning into it.

Antidote: Double your efforts and lean into the setback. You set your aim from a
rational place and now your pain-avoidance tendency is overvaluing the setback and
undervaluing your aim. You should train yourself to react into setbacks, not flinch away
from them. You can always quit tomorrow or next week.

4. “I picked the wrong path… I should try something

else.”
Again, is this your pain-avoidance tendency talking or is this actually the wrong path for
you?

It’s important to be able to quit or fail quickly – to abandon paths that no longer make
sense for us. Many people get stuck in a cycle of jumping ship as soon as things get
hard though. If you quit now, will you regret it when you’re older?

Are you frustrated by a plateau that you can work through? Do you have an idea of what
to do next?

There’s no way to tell when the best time to jump ship. Sometimes I’ve had to have a
nagging feeling for more than a year to even notice I should do something. Sometimes I
quit as soon as it gets hard and I think it’s just all bad.

We can’t know for sure. But if we’re paying attention we can make pretty great guesses.

Antidote: Treat yourself like a startup. Try a bunch of things – actually try them don’t
just research them. Figure out what you like and (maybe more importantly) what you
don’t like. If you have a history of quitting as soon as things get hard then force yourself
to stay in it a while longer and push through. Ask yourself what taking action would
like… that question will probably point you to the thing you know you want to do.

5. “I don’t know where to begin.”

Yes you do.

You begin from Step 1.

Clever plans and abstractions will have you believe that you can start at step 3. Stop
expecting to see a clear path to the end. You don’t need to know where you’ll end to
know where to start. Coca-Cola started as a pharmaceutical company. Twitter was the
side project of some guys working on a podcasting company.

You start by ignorantly trying. Through failing you figure out what you need to learn
about and get better at.

Antidote: Act before you research (or think anymore) about the thing. For more check
out Heuristic 2 from earlier in this post.

6. “Nothing I do will make a difference.”

Of course it will. Of course it won’t.

You can’t help but make a difference in people’s lives. Whether you smile or scowl at
the person walking down the hallway can completely change their day. What if that
person was going to commit suicide but you made him feel noticed? It sounds
ridiculous but, as a recovered depressive with suicidal thoughts, I can tell you it matters
in a huge way.

That smile doesn’t stop there. It ripples through people. If you smile at one person they
are more likely to be nice to the next person they meet and on and on.

I call this the Invisible Legacy. I think that every one of us has a silent, invisible legacy
that we can never measure and that nobody will ever applaud us for. This is the thing
that will change the world the most. Even more than the people we think as great figures
in history.

Everything you do matters.

It might not change the world in the ways that are easy to measure. It might now
solidify your place in a history textbook… but really, how much has a person in a
history textbook changed your life? I guarantee you that a hug at the right time from
somebody you love changed your life more. Or one lesson taught to you by your
grandpa.

Why do we have to aim at being remembered by people we’ll never meet? I think we
ought to focus on the people we can right here right now.

The other thing, aiming at making a difference usually alters the difference you make,
for the worse. You don’t have a choice, you’re guaranteed to change the world.
Consider Nassim Taleb’s Silver Rule:

“Some clarity.
The Golden Rule (do to others what you want them to do to you) is an invitation to
interventionism, utopianism, and meddling into other people’s affairs, particularly
poor nations, as represented by the the NGO clowns at TED conferences trying to “save
the world”, and causing more harm with unseen side effects. Remember that Mao,
Stalin, Lenin, and were following the positive Golden rule. At the personal level, I may
feel good trying to nudge a vegetarian to eat raw kebbeh (Lebanese steak tartare)
because I like it myself.
—
The Silver rule (do NOT do to others what you don’t want them to do to you) leads to a
systematic way to live “doing no harm” and gives rise to a liberating type of ethics:
your obligation is to pursue your personal interests provided you do not hurt
others probabilistically unless you are yourself exposed, & not transfer risks to
others (skin-in-the-game at all times). But, and here is the key, should there be a
spillover, it will necessarily be positive. It is therefore convex.(Typical via negativa
rules are convex). It separates the “self-interest” in Adam Smith from the “selfish”
version. And if you want to help society, just try to benefit WHILE at least
harming no one.
—
This distinction puts a lot of clarity behind the idea of free markets and morality. You
should never have to prove that what you do is GOOD for society (hard to express
in words and rationalistic framework), but you can certainly show you are NOT
hurting others more than yourself via skin-in-the-game.”

Antidote: Remember that you can’t help but make a difference. Then do whatever you
can.

7. “I’m overwhelmed.”
 Overwhelm, one of the 7
Motivation Murderers, is one of my biggest enemies. I always think from Step 1 to Step
97. It’s stupid. I kill any success I have by thinking so big it’s drowned out.

Or I think of eight things I have to do and then I freak out because I can’t do them
all simultaneously.

Obviously, if you take action you will stop being overwhelmed. You immediately shift
your focus from staring at the impossible path in front of you to taking the first step.

I used to live on a small ranch. (Will always made fun of me for having “horse chores”
and not being able to hang out with the other kids.) My parents would make me move
truck loads of sand. Where? To places that needed sand, apparently. I still don’t
understand it. The point is, when I started shoveling the sand, it got easy. I would stick
my headphones in, listen to a chapter of some success book, and look up and see the
pile halfway gone. It got easy as soon as it was begun.

Antidote 1: Break it down into small goals that fit on a single sheet of paper. Things
overwhelm us because they feel undoable. Obviously “start a business” isn’t helpful if
we don’t know the first step. “Verify business idea A.” Is something you can take action
on now.

Antidote 2: Internalize your goals. We get overwhelmed because we think that

everything should be under our control. It’s not, though, not even close. The goal
“Make a profitable business” might not be able to be accomplished. You might die
before you become profitable. The goal “Do everything I can to make my business
profitable today” focuses on what you can control. You can force yourself to try really
hard. You can force yourself to put the odds in your favor – you just can’t define the
odds.

8. “I’m trapped.”
Sometimes it looks like there’s nothing we can do. Even if there was something we
could do, it wouldn’t help. We can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel.

We’re stuck.

Sometimes I’ll get stuck like this for a full day. I forget that progress is a possibility. I
forget how far I’ve come in the last year. I forget that I have any power in the world.

There are two ways to escape

Antidote 1: Lower the bar. You’re not going to reinvent your whole life today. There are
no transformations waiting to happen. You can’t independently make a living today.
You know what you can do? Go to the gym. Eat an apple. Write. Meditate. Reject the
next donut. These tiny acts will snowball into massive changes. This technique is what
got me out of a suicidal depression where I felt completely trapped for more than a
year.

Antidote 2: Be fatalistic toward the past and present. There’s nothing you can do to
change the past or where you are the instant. No amount of analysis is going to change
anything. There are no magical answers waiting for you in your past. There’s not even
anything you can do to change this moment. As soon as you think of this moment it’s
gone. So aim slightly forward. Put your mind in a future possibility. Not a five year
plan, maybe a five minute one, maybe even a tomorrow plan.

9. “I’m not making any progress.”

Remember that your brain is messing with you. That success does not look like a graph
going up and to the right – it’s not near that clean.

“Our brain is not cut out for nonlinearities. People think that if, say, two variables
are causally linked, then a steady input in one variable should always yield a result in
the other one. Our emotional apparatus is designed for linear causality. For instance,
you study every day and learn something in proportion to your studies. If you do not
feel that you are going anywhere, your emotions will cause you to become demoralized.
But reality rarely gives us the privilege of a satisfying linear positive progression: You
may study for a year and learn nothing, then, unless you are disheartened by the
empty results and give up, something will come to you in a flash. . . This
summarizes why there are routes to success that are nonrandom, but few, very
few, people have the mental stamina to follow them. . . Most people give up before
the rewards.” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

You’ve got to remember that progress doesn’t always look clean. It’s not always
obvious, and that the breakthrough could happen in the next minute of work. The
creator of Dilbert, Scott Adams, suggests using a system-based orientation instead of a
goal-based one. Adams explains:

“Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous pre-success failure at best, and

permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every
time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to
do. The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The
systems people are feeling good every time they apply their system. That’s a big
difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction.”

Antidote: Turn your goals into systems. For instance, I had a goal of getting to 210 lbs.
and 10% body fat. I immediately stopped going to the gym – I didn’t even know how to
reach a goal like that! I turned the goal into a system: go to the gym 5 times a week. As
soon as I did that I started making real progress. (Note that this is very close to
Internalize Goals –Antidote 1 from Reason 8.)

10. “It’s below me…”

When I was trading I knew a guy who was trying to trade as well but couldn’t make any
money. He was broke but refused to get another job. He scoffed at bagging groceries or
anything else. He basically thought he was the millionaire who didn’t make his money
yet. Instead of getting a job “below” him, he started “teaching” (read: scamming) people
to pay the bills, dipping into outright theft. Now, a lot of years later, he’s still
“trading”…

On the other hand, John D. Rockefellar spent an amazing amount of time checking and
double-checking his bills to make sure they were accurate. He went so far as to sue
doctors he thought overcharged him. This is the richest man in the world worrying over
a couple of dollars. It’s because, for him, it wasn’t just a couple of dollars, it was
principle! He didn’t see just a couple of dollars. He saw the potential of those
dollars invested, he saw the money he was saving other from being screwed by this
doctor.

If you think certain types of work are below you then you will block possible paths for
yourself. Your arrogance will show and others will see it.

Antidote: Remind yourself that it’s temporary, that the biggest entrepreneurs have done
manual labor in the process of creating their empire.

11. “I need to know more.”

No you don’t. At least not now.

This is the most “rational” of the rationalizations… and it’s the hardest to shut down.

It just feels so productive to learn one more thing.

Shut up and go to work as best you can. Then do research once you understand what
information you actually need to know.

More knowledge isn’t going to going to save you – only action.

Antidote: Input Deprivation Week. Basically Heuristic 2: Act before researching. For
more on Input Deprivation Week, see the final section.

12. “I’m a perfectionist.”

There’s no such thing as a perfectionist. There is literally nothing you have ever done
that is perfect or will ever do that is perfect.

You’ve just found a delusional, yet proud way to hide your cowardice. You’re afraid to
show that you, too, are a human who makes things with errors.

Again, shut up and do your work.

It’s great to aim for an unobtainable ideal to guide your work. Just don’t stop when you
inevitably fall short.

Antidote: Share something that you’ve done before it’s ready.

13. “Someone is already doing it.”

Don’t let competition scare you away. Instead, let it prove to you that there is a
market for what you wanted to make.

Unless you’re in a monopoly situation (you aren’t) then this is an opportunity to stand
on the shoulders of giants:

 How could you do it better than them?

  How could you simplify what they’re doing?
 How could you make something more comprehensive?
 Who could you serve that they are not?

Antidote: Put a twist on what they did and begin building.

14. “I have no resources compared to them.”

Malcolm Gladwell’s most recent book, David and Goliath, is all about how people
regularly win who “shouldn’t”. Having less resources can actually be an advantage.

Consider the Wright Bros. They had a few thousand dollars and beat out corporations
with millions of dollars in funding. The size of these companies actually worked against
them. The Wright Bros. won because of their limited resources.

Instagram had a team of 13 people when they sold for $1 billion.

Technology has given us an opportunity to leverage our resources like crazy.

Antidote: Instead of looking at what you can’t do because of budget restraints, look at
what you can do that well-funded people can’t.

15. “I’m so drained from everything else (work, other

responsibilities.)”
People with this reason often take pride in their busyness. Their exhaustion proves that
they’ve been working hard.

It doesn’t, though. You might gain energy from going to the gym. Or forcing yourself to
start working on your side project.

Antidote: Refocus your energies. Cut out the 5 most energy-sucking activities in your
day (watching TV, drinking alcohol, engaging with shitty people, discussing politics…).
Then select ONE thing that you can do today that would make things matter much more.
16. “I am taking action!”
No, you’re talking about it.

Antidote: Do something.

17. “I’m completely burned out.”

You’ve probably been confusing busyness for action; flailing violently without learning
anything. Maybe you’ve spent all your energy doing what you thought you were
supposed to do and it’s not working. Maybe you just haven’t taken a break.

Whatever it is, the most important action is non-action.

You’ve got to create some clarity so you can see up from down.

Antidote: Meditation and/or Stream-of-Conscious writing (more info in the next secion).
And reducing your workload. Maybe pick up a fiction book.

18. “It won’t work.”

You’re probably right, but maybe you’re wrong.

This post probably won’t work, but it might.

Most things worth doing probably won’t work. Most businesses fail, most books don’t
sell any copies, most bands break up.

Does that mean it’s a bad idea to try? Not at all.

Elon Musk is trying to populate Mars. Will this work? Probably not. I would never tell
him to stop trying though.

Antidote: Shift your focus from the probability of things working to the magnitude of
awesomeness that would happen if they did work. Your life could be totally transformed
if your startup worked, if it fails then you still have your job. Even if the thing fails, you
got better because you tried – so you’re more likely to win next time.

19. “I don’t have enough resources (money,

equipment…)

Start doing what you can with what you have.

Taking action gives you the chance to attract the resources you need. Even if you’re the
only one working, your conviction will make other more likely to help.

You might not have what it takes to create the business you want to create. You can
start laying the groundwork though.

Antidote: Again lower the bar. Begin with what you have and identify exactly what
resources you will need to take certain steps.

20. “I’m not good enough.”

Maybe you’re not. You can become good enough though.

If you see yourself as stagnant then you will be less likely to learn.

I didn’t know anything about blogging as a business a year ago. Since then I have begun
to understood exactly how to create sales funnels, content that works, and everything
else. If I knew how much I needed to learn I may have not gotten into it… but I did, and
I’ve learned what I needed to know.

Every day I’m learning more and more. My skills are expanding. My understanding is
simultaneously deepening and broadening.

I’m not good enough to do what I will be doing in three months from now. I’ll get good
enough, though, or I’ll try.

Antidote: Shift yourself into a growth mindset. Realize that you know more than you did
a year ago. Your skill are better than they were a year ago. Just take the first step and
have faith that everything you need will follow.

____

In the next section we’re going to look at specific exercises that will undermine many of
the excuses we’ve just gone through.

5 Exercises for Becoming an Action-

Taker
Up until now, what action have you been taking? Reading. Taking in information and
reorganizing the way you consider the world, your goals, and your behavior.

That’s important. Understanding a way of being makes it easier to stick with it when
things aren’t working exactly as we want them to.
However, it will be mostly wasted unless you do something with it. You need to take
the framework that we’ve been discussing and make it palpable. It needs to become
a part of your daily life.

In this section I will suggest five tools you can use to begin changing your default
response to “action” (right action.)

Here are the tools:

1. Meditation
2. Internalizing Goals
3. Input Deprivation Week
4. Stream of Conscious Writing
5. Memento Mori

Putting these tools into action will help. Adopting all of them simultaneously will
probably be unsustainably difficult, though. If would suggest adopting one or two,
practicing them for a week, then maybe adding another or switching one out.

Anyway, here are the tools:

1. Meditation

It doesn’t make any sense, right? Just sitting there doing nothing is far from taking
action…

Actually, meditation is an amazingly powerful tool for taking action. Why?

Because it makes you aware of not taking action. Our inaction usually comes from
our hyperactive mind rationalizing our way out of doing things that matter.
Meditation makes it easier for you to call yourself our on your own BS.

It has all sorts of health benefits as well that have been written about all over the place.

How to Start Meditating

I’m going to recommend anapana meditation because it’s the easiest to start with. It’s
the type of meditation I always go to when rebooting my own practice.

I’ve listed basic instructions. They are purposefully non-specific in some areas because
the whole point here is to not overthink it. Practice like this for a week before you read
anything else about practicing meditation.

1. Sit down. You can use a chair, a pillow, or the floor. I just sit cross-legged on
the floor. Sit up straight and keep your belly soft.
2. Set a timer for 5 minutes. (Work your way up to 20+ one minute at a time each
day.
3. Close your eyes.
4. Focus your attention on the sensations you feel on your outer nostrils and upper
lip.
5. Relax your face. You may want to look towards where you’re paying attention
to, try not to.
6. Relax your body.
7. Breathe through your nose into your belly. (Remember to keep it soft.)
8. Each time your mind wanders to a thought bring your attention back to the
sensations on your upper lip and outer nostrils.
9. Be nice to yourself. The goal isn’t to not think about anything, it’s just to
increase your awareness when you do think about things. If you’re sitting and
meditating then you’re not failing.

That’s it. It’s simple. Just sit, breathe, and observe.

This, out of all of the exercises, is the hardest for me to do consistently because it
doesn’t feel productive. I can’t measure progress or see anything getting done.

Inevitably I stop meditating. Then a couple weeks later I notice my brain feels
disorganized. And I realize I haven’t been meditating. Then I go back and meditate and
the brain gets clean again and I repeat this over and over.

2. Internalizing Goals
We all know the serenity prayer:
“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

The courage to change the things I can,

And wisdom to know the difference.”

Another way to say this:

“Some things are up to us and some things are not up to us.” – Epictetus, Stoic
philosopher

Another way:

Internalize your goals.

This means shifting all your goals to things that you can control. If you want
something you have no control over, you may be paralyzed and not take action.
However, if you set goals that you have control over, then you will always have the
ability to take action.

William Irvine explains how this concept might work for an aspiring novelist in his
excellent book A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Are of Stoic Joy:

“How can the aspiring novelist reduce the psychological rejection and thereby increase
her chances of success? By internalizing her goals with respect to novel writing. She
should have as he goal not something external over which she has little control,
such as getting her novel published, but something internal over which she has
considerable control, such as how hard she works on the manuscript or how many
time she submits it in a given period of time. I don’t claim that by internalizing her
goals in this manner she can eliminate altogether the sting when she gets a rejection
letter (or, as often happens, when she fails to get any response at all to the work she has
submitted). It can, however, substantially reduce this sting. Instead of moping for a
year before resubmitting her manuscript, she might get her moping period down
to a week or even a day, and this change will dramatically increase her chance of
getting the manuscript published.”

Irvine also gives an example of how a tennis player might internalize his goals:

“[H]is goal in playing tennis will not be to win a match (something external, over which
he has only partial control) but to play to the best of his ability in the match (something
internal, over which he has complete control).”

We talked earlier (Reason 9) about how this is similar to creating systems instead of
goals. Here is the quote from earlier:

“Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous pre-success failure at best, and

permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time
they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The goals
people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people
are feeling good every time they apply their system. That’s a big difference in terms
of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction.” – Scott Adams, creator of
Dilbert

Warren Buffett uses a similar strategy called the “internal scorecard”. If he does as best
he can according to what he knows, then he doesn’t let temporarily bad results (and the
public criticism that comes with them) bother him. He acted as well as he knew how.
Internalizing your goals can be a powerful way to keep the motivation through tough
times, plateaus, and haters.

Here’s how:

1. List all your goals.

2. Internalize them.

That’s it.

Put everything that matters within your control. Focus on that and the rest will follow
(eventually).

3. Input Deprivation Week

I’ve written about this on StartupBros before. Recently I restated it for an Art of
Manliness piece (the one we looked at earlier). For our purposes I’m going to reuse the
directions from that article:

“Go an entire week with zero information consumption.

I first tried this last year and it was wildly successful. I got more done in one week than
I had in the month prior. I also ate the best I had all year and solidified my meditation
practice. It was so effective I offered it up to the readers of my blog, StartupBros.
Most of the people mocked me or called me naive. A few actually tried it, though. And
many of them are still practicing it to this day. It’s the most effective way I’ve found to
boost output.

It’s also the most painful.

You are going to, for an entire week, live without information input.

Stay with me on this.

For one week:

 No reading books.
 No reading blogs.
 No reading newspapers.
 No going on Facebook (even just to post).
 No watching TV (shows, sports, news, anything).
 No watching movies.
 No listening to talk radio.
 No going on Reddit.
 No going on Twitter.
 No information input – only output!

You must force yourself to spend an entire week with yourself and the people
immediately surrounding you.

This will, first and foremost, force you into action by stripping away every activity you
run to in order to avoid actually doing the work you know you should be doing.

Besides that, it will increase mindfulness, increase the respect you have for your own
ideas, you’ll have more ideas, unsolvable life problems may begin to make sense, you’ll
have an increased appreciation for the news that actually matters, you’ll become more
social, you’ll gain perspective, and you’ll become more original.

It sounds too good to be true but it’s not. It’s what happens. The only way for you to
appreciate this is to do it.

When I first suggested Input Deprivation Week I provided the following 5 steps to start
strong, and they still work just as well:

o Install StayFocusd or its equivalent and put all your time-sucking websites on there.
ALL of them! Facebook, Twitter, MySpace (??), reddit, Digg (??), Chive,
EVERYTHING!

o Delete your consumption apps. I deleted Facebook, Pulse, and Twitter off my
phone. Delete the apps that you reflexively go to when you have a minute of free time.

o Move your books and magazines. They will just taunt you if they’re sitting on your
bedstand or at your desk. Make a stack and put it out of sight.
o Carry a notebook with you. You’re going to begin having ideas pop up in your
head; make notes of them. I like notepads more than phones because we associate them
with creating instead of consuming. It’s risky to take notes on a smartphone if you’re
trying to avoid inputs.

o Take the batteries out of your remote. When you have the urge to flick on the TV
you’ll have to go get batteries for the remote. This is a barrier to TV that will save your
willpower pool from draining as you stare down the remote thinking about all the Game
of Thrones and Mad Men you’re missing.

This may be the hardest thing you do all year. The benefits may not be obvious on Day
2. By Day 6 they’ll be undeniable.

Your focus will turn to production instead of consumption. You will become a giver
instead of a taker. You will see your addiction to novelty and useless information
plainly.

Remember that this is only a week and not a suggestion for a lifestyle. I love books. I
love learning new things. I consume information like crazy. And it’s valuable! Input
Deprivation Week is about creating a better relationship with information, not denying
its importance.

Like a girlfriend that you didn’t fully appreciate until she was gone, your
relationship to information will be forever changed. You will appreciate quality
information and be more able to ignore the rest. You won’t be an addict to useless
information.

If you need any support or have any questions, comment below or even email me (info
below).”

4. Stream-of-Consciousness Writing

Every morning I roll over and write two pages. What do I write? Gibberish. Sometimes
about a dream I woke up from, sometimes about my plan for the day, sometimes about
an idea I’ve been thinking through, sometimes about ideas for my business.
I got this idea from the author of The Artist’s Way, Julien Cameron forever ago and it’s
proved to be the single best habit for self-awareness that I know.

If there’s a problem that I’ve been avoiding, it’ll become obvious in the pages.

It’s the best place for creative ideas and discovering things that were bugging me that I
wasn’t even aware of.

The process is simple:

1. Write two pages. (I like pen and paper.)

2. Don’t stop.
3. Write fast.
4. Don’t stop.
5. Don’t stop.

The idea is to keep your pen moving no matter what.

Notice that this is another awareness exercise. If you’re hiding from taking
uncomfortable action, the pages will force you face that every day. If you’re staying
super-busy to avoid doing the real, important work you know you should be doing, the
pages will find you out.

Because you can’t stop writing you will begin to unearth stuff from your subconscious.
Sometime you will find yourself writing down thoughts that have been swirling around
your head tormenting you. When you see them on paper they are reduced to absurdity.

When I’ve fallen out of the habit, it takes one to two weeks to really start getting into
the good stuff with this practice.

By forcing awareness to ideas that usually stay unnoticed you will be much more likely
to take action on them.

5. Memento Mori
Memento mori is Latin for something like “Remember death.” It’s a reminder that this
whole life thing we’re doing isn’t going to be forever, in fact, it’s quickly coming to an
end.

So hop to it!

It’s easier to take action if you feel the sensation of death on your heels.

It’ll be much easier to make that phone call you’ve been avoiding if you remember that
you will die.

There’s a second, more important part: when you meditate on your death, it’s not just
WHAT you do that changes, the WAY you do things changes as well.

It’s not all about #YOLO’ing all over the place. You don’t need to buy a ticket to
Africa or Paris or whatever. You might not need to quit your job and go hike across the
country (although that would be cool).

Maybe the shift is more in the type of attention you have with what you’re doing right
now. Reading this could be the last thing you do. The shower you take today could be
the last thing you do. Everything you do could be the last thing.

When you remember this, your experience shifts. You become more present.

Decisions stop being so hard.

There are a lot of ways to keep death on the mind. Here are a couple:

 Remembering that you might die in the next minute. This is the most basic,
and the one I practice daily. If you take a few seconds to appreciate the fact that
you might not have tomorrow… things gain some serious weight.
  Eternal Recurrence. What if you had to live this life over and over again for
eternity?

“The greatest weight.– What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into
your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it,
you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be
nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and
everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in
the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the
trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned
upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!”
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who
spoke thus?… Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to
life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and
seal?” – Friedrich Nietzche, The Gay Science

 ReSpawn. Imagine that you died and were just reborn into the world. How
would you act differently?

If you want a more in-depth look at death, check out 5 Ancient Secrets of Death and
Motivation.

Just Do It
If you’ve made it this far, you’ve invested a significant chunk of your life to these ideas.
You’ve also proved to yourself a certain commitment to taking action.

Don’t let this theory go to waste. Use it!

Pick one or two of the exercises today and practice them every day this week. Apply the
two heuristics.

If you have any questions, let me know in the comments.

If you have any ideas that others could benefit from, let us know in the comments!

Godspeed!