Chapters: 0:00 the rabbit · 2:52 the 9pm plan · 3:43 the ant and the elephant · 5:49 willpower is a battery · 7:30 your environment · 10:45 five moves · 14:16 the useful question
I guess that I am behind.
I always have that feeling in the back of my mind. Have you seen Alice in Wonderland? The rabbit is late. He is late for an important date. I feel like that rabbit sometimes. Every time I am not phenomenally successful, I feel a little bit behind.
And it is not because I am not near the top of my peer group, because I pretty much am. It is because I listen to the people around me talk about their goals. One of them wants to be a mayor. One wants a store. All of them want a new job, by the way, and they are all pretty miserable inside of the job market.
But I always feel like all of them are one campaign away. And if I could run the right campaign for myself, then I could run the right campaign for the Little League team, for the bowling team, for the family, for the volunteers. I could uplift the entire world around me. That motivates me a lot.
And that feeling gets worse at night.
Nine at night
You have a plan. The plan was to write, or train, or finally start the thing you have been talking about for six months. You were serious about it at seven in the morning. You were still serious about it at lunch. Then the day happened. Now you are on the couch with a phone in your hand, and the plan feels like something that was made by a different person.
You might call that a problem with your willpower. Maybe your friends and family call you lazy. They say it is a willpower problem.
They are wrong.
I have been thinking about this problem for years, and the cleanest way I have found to describe it is this: you are an ant riding an elephant.
Your conscious mind is the ant. It is the part of you that can make plans, that knows winter is coming, that thinks about what is going on. The elephant is everything else. Your gut, your mood, your hunger, your thirst, the thousand small cues that tell you what to do next. Your habits. Your environment. The way your day actually goes.
Most advice about change is addressed to the ant. Make a list. Set a goal. Be disciplined. Wake up at this or that time. That advice is not wrong. It just will not compound.
The ant and the elephant
There is a folk tale about the ant and the grasshopper. The ant is hardworking and industrious. The grasshopper has the audacity to rub his hands together, make noise, and have a good old time. That bastard. Summertime. Wait until it gets cold. He will regret all that dancing.
But your mind is not really an ant versus a grasshopper. In terms of your daily habits, you are riding with an elephant.
The elephant is not trying to ruin your life. It is trying to keep you safe. It knows the couch. It knows the routine. It knows what happens when you stay in the same lane. New things are unknown, and the future can be scary and intimidating. That is why self-sabotage feels like self-preservation. Because in the moment, it is.
The part of you that reaches for the phone instead of the notebook is not an evil part of you. It is trying to regulate your body, and it has learned what works. You are not going to change that by hating it. You are going to make a new path. You are going to make new settings for yourself that are easier than what you did in the past.
Willpower is a battery
Your willpower is a battery. It works for a little while.
That is the trap. You can tough it out for a day. You can tough it out for a week. Maybe you decide you are going to wake up at five, run, eat clean, and not look at your phone. Those are hard decisions for me too. For a few days, the ant drives. And that feels great. You start to believe that you have changed.
Then you have a bad night of sleep. Then you have a hard conversation with somebody in your family. Then you have a hard deadline, so you stay up a little later. Now your sleep cycle is messed up. You are waking up at nine, which is still earlier than most people, but you do not have to be Iron Man about it.
Then the elephant takes the wheel. Because you are tired. And when you get tired, your body throws off ten degrees, and what happens? You go back to the habits you have had for a long time.
Does that not make sense? Is that not logical?
This is why your willpower slips at night. The day has spent your decisions. By nine o’clock, you are not making the choices anymore. You are running on your gut. This is why bars have a whole different crowd at night.
Your environment is the engine
So what changes your behavior?
If your phone is on the nightstand, you will pick it up. If your phone is in another room, you will have to get up. That sounds trivial until you notice how many of your days are made of exactly that kind of tiny friction. Shoes by the door. Snacks on the counter. Laptop on the couch. Friends who text at midnight.
You are not weak for responding to your environment. You are a person. Everyone responds to their environment. The question is whether you are arranging it on purpose.
And the biggest part of your environment is other people.
We have been conquering the environment individually for generations, and groups of people are very good at conquering the natural environment. You can call that peer pressure if you want, but that makes it sound like a high school problem. This is the most adult problem there is. It is the water you swim in.
If everybody around you works out, showing up at the gym is not a decision. If everybody around you drinks on Thursday, I bet you are drinking too. If everybody is eating fries in the back of the gym, you are going to be eating those fries too. If the people you talk to every day are building things and you are not building anything, you might feel some sort of gap or misplacement.
I think people rise to their crowd. I think sometimes people sink to their crowd. Either way, a crowd of people can do more work than a motivational video.
Five things that work better than motivation
Move the cue. Whatever you want to do, put it in the path. Whatever you want to stop, take it out of the path. Guitar by your chair. Phone across the room. Water on the desk. You have to edit your situation. It is like when your mom put the chips in the back of the cabinet. Maybe it did not stop you from getting one or two chips. But be realistic, she made it a little bit harder to get to.
Shrink the first step. Take five minutes and put yourself in the right direction. Give yourself permission to be mid. Try to get your subconscious moving before there is any kind of negotiation. Open the document instead of writing a chapter. Walk around your block instead of jogging. Get some momentum. Momentum is easier than discipline.
Change the place. Go get coffee. Go to the library. Go to the gym. Sometimes you are in an environment that is designed in a way that asks less of you and gives you less in return.
Talk to yourself. If you find yourself procrastinating, really ask yourself if you want it. If you want it, do it. But really ask yourself if you do not want it. And if you do not want it, say, I do not want it. Identity is a shortcut for behavior. I do not think affirmations are magic. It is just that when you have a sentence, the next choice gets easier.
Make the other way harder. Log out. Delete the app. Move the snacks. Put the thing you are avoiding behind one extra step. I know that is not glamorous. It is closer to stagecraft than self-improvement. But that is how you do it.
You know, this is your movie in life. You want to arrange the set. You do not want to be an improv actor. You do not want to be a one person show. Make the production yours. You are the actor of your movie, but you are also the producer. You are the director. You are the writer. You are the editor.
It is all your motion.
The question that actually helps
I have had really dark, tough moments, man. I feel like I am stuck. I hate the word stuck. I feel like I am in a rut, like nothing ever changes. In those moments, I say, what is wrong with me?
Hold on.
That is not a useful answer. It is not a useful question.
Instead, really ask yourself: how can I make this easier? What would need to be different about my situation? What would need to be different about the people I surround myself with? What would make my first step easier? How can I use what I already have? How can I make a reset? How can I make a real day, a new day?
You have that capacity. I know you do. Your conscious mind is not weak. It just is not who you are.
I talked to a friend about this and they were scandalized when I said it. Your inner monologue, the part of you that thinks, is not you. That is your ego. That is not your soul.
So do not let your ego be the only voice inside of you that talks. Be quiet for a minute. Listen to your soul. Let your soul speak and give the rest of your body the room and the space to listen.
Thank you.