Posted by john on September 13th, 2006 — Posted in Cures For Laziness
Basketball great Isiah Thomas was asked how a player could focus and get mentally tougher while going into a championship game, where he was surrounded by distractions.
“It’s possible,” Thomas said. “You have to sustain concentration on your opponents.”
He went on to add:
“I just stayed in my hotel room and watched tape. I never got involved in the atmosphere of the Finals. My first Finals we’d played the Lakers, and we went out there and won Game 1 and lost Game 2. But we wanted to make sure we didn’t get caught up in the whole Hollywood atmosphere of Los Angeles. The people there tried to suck us up into that; they sent limousines to our hotel to take us to the Playboy Club and to parties. But we didn’t go for it. Instead, 24 hours a day I was thinking about the opponent I was going to play against.”
Source: NBA.com: Handling the Pressure
So how does this translate to your life? The solution is to concentrate on your opponents or enemies, since success is the best revenge. (If you don’t have any enemies, invent some.)
When you’re doing work, imagine how you’re gaining an advantage over that person and leaving them in the dust.
A lot of successful entrepreneurs have got an axe to grind. A lot of successful people in business got really angry about something that happened in their life, and the passion for their work is a way to channel their energy.
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Posted by john on September 12th, 2006 — Posted in Cures For Laziness
I found a valuable article by software entrepreneur Dave Cheong called 18 Ways to Stay Focused at Work. Laziness is often a problem of lack of focus. You get involved with doing Task A, but then Task B catches your eye. Pretty soon, hours have gone by and you haven’t gotten a lot done.
My favorite of Dave’s recommendations — which I’ll be posting detailed step-by-step instructions about in the coming days — are these:
“1. Write out a daily task list and plan your day.”
This for me has been my #1 breakthrough in getting things done. Every morning, I write out a to-do list of three things (that’s it, just three measly things!) that I want to have done by the end of the day. It’s been miraculous for me. For one thing, it makes my day much clearer.
And at the end of the day, I feel like I’ve really accomplished something, so I can happily reward myself by doing something I enjoy such as reading or watching a favorite TV show. What you do to reward yourself doesn’t matter, but the key is to have something.
By the way, I’ll explain in an upcoming post why 3 is such a magic number for your to-do list.
“3. Apply time boxing.”
Dave has a good article about that called Time Boxing is an Effective Getting Things Done Strategy.
“5. Do not check personal email in the morning.”
I’ve also found it good to not check the news either. Any site that you can surf on for hours (e.g., an interesting discussion forum, Wikipedia, etc.) should be avoided like the plague!
“7. Listen to the right types of music.”
“8. Use the headphones but leave the music off.”
Silence is one of the best ways to clear the cobwebs in your mind, on a number of levels. For one thing, when you look at the brain, various things can snap us out of what I like to call that highly-productive Zone State — e.g., traffic noises, dogs barking, co-workers talking, the telephone ringing, etc.
“9. Fill up a water bottle.”
13. Clean up your desk.
I’ve discovered a super easy, super fast organizing system which I’ll be revealing shortly.
“17. Limit time on Digg, Delicious, news sites and blogs.”
Like I said in my comment to #5, aimless web surfing can be a time killer. As Dave says, “No, you don’t need to have your finger on the pulse every single minute of the day…”
18. Change your mindset and make work fun.”
I am going to be talking a LOT about this concept in the coming days. Your mindset is the magical key doing any task you want and not having to suffer through it.
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Posted by john on September 11th, 2006 — Posted in Cures For Laziness
Mark Joyner, in his free Simpleology self improvement course, says there’s no such thing laziness and procrastination, because they imply inaction.
You see, there’s no such thing as an inaction. Everything you do is an action. Sitting on your butt is an action.
And all actions have reactions. The reaction caused by sitting on your butt is that you don’t come any closer to your goal — and you probably even move away from it.
You may think you’re being lazy, but you’re really not, according to Joyner. You’re accomplishing sitting around, getting fat, and not advancing toward your goals.
I think this is a good way to look at motivation, because if you have goals you want to accomplish, you will then do the actions needed to create the reactions that get you on your path. So if you need to lose weight, you won’t watch TV (since that’s an action that causes a reaction of your body not burning calories).
“Action and reaction” is an inescapable law of the universe. You are always doing actions, which achieve reactions. “Laziness and procrastination are just the wrong actions masquerading as inactions,” says Joyner.
So now for you the only question is, what is your goal? Do you want to get fat? Flunk out of school? Go bankrupt?
Or do you want to make a million dollars? Find the woman or man of your dream? Train for a marathon?
All actions have an inevitable reaction. The key is deciding on what reaction you want.
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