Laziness Defined part - 2

pls. note that some information in this blog have been taken from anonymous site like pictures and some points and rest is the cooked up story of the author`s mind.

ENJOY

Laziness is not a word that a student is unware of and I`m specially talking about students here coz I`m one of them and my story is same here and i hope most of the students can relate to it.

Oddly enough, it's not the fear of failure that pushes us to laziness but the fear of achievement. Achievements scare us more than failing. And so we romanticize the idea of achieving great success, accumulating tons of skills and rocking it as badass kings and queens of our own rich and vast kingdoms of awesome. But before we even get started we are screwed up by our own subjectivity. We put up these blind spots around us, like some annoying mirrors that bring out all our imperfections and insecurities.

Then our very best friend "the brain" signals us that:

• "we are not ready" 
• "we don't know how to start"
• "this will fail so bad"
• "ah I can already hear the voices laughing at us"
• "we must regroup and think it over"

So we go in something I like to call preservation mode. 

We strike a deal with our future self that we are not ready to tackle that huge goal yet. We need to get ready for the future.

So future-self strikes a deal with present-self that when the time comes for future-self to tackle that big audacious goal, we will all be so much more prepared because present-self will be putting in the daily work to make sure that past-self will not disappoint future-self. 

Makes sense and not complicated at all, am I right? Everyone is happy and the pressure is slightly lifted.

Now present-self goes into planning mode to make sure that everything is taken into consideration, all the steps are mapped and planned, all possible scenarios are taken into consideration and just for precaution he watches 5-10 Youtube videos to make sure he didn't forget anything and that we are"ready".

• Tomorrow it begins!

The next day, present-self feels like he made past-self look so good and that he has done so much work planning and preparing everything that he deserves to take it down a gear.

Life moves on. In our imagination our goals are seen as in a queue, the more we add the more output we have. In reality, our goals are like a stack. It's a one entrance box in which we have introduced one goal and to make sure we achieve it we must not add too many goals on top of it at once.

Time passes and suddenly we see that our stack got filled up with other goals in the meantime.

• "Oh-oh! It seems that all that planning wasn't really rock-solid. We need to do it the right way, perfect from the start." 

So present-self goes back to reading all the manuals and watching some more videos to make sure this doesn't happen again, ever! In the meantime, the stack goes out of control, and all of sudden you have a huge pile of stuff that you need to take care of.

• "OK! Past-self has been messing around with getting ready for long enough! I'm going to start taking action now".

You start tackling the stack. Digging through all those objectives that just added up. With some superhuman force, you managed to go through half of the pile. You are exhausted and decide to call it a night.

The next day you wake up in distress to realize that you actually didn't achieve anything meaningful even though you didn't stay put for a single minute. You cleaned the house, you did the weekly shopping, you walked your cat, you rearranged your sock drawer by color and patterns, watched all the seasons of How-It's-Made on the Discovery Channel and even learned how to cut tomatoes into rose shapes. But the only thing that you didn't do is tackle the goals that mattered, the initial ones that were supposed to bring you the success you craved. Instead, you focused on the 80% of rubbish that doesn't amount to anything useful on the long term instead of focusing on the 20% of goals that would bring 80% of achievement in the long term.

You start the cycle all over again and as you lay all over the floor overwhelmed, the only repetitive thought process that goes through your head is:

So how can we fix this? In the end, it all boils down to one guy, present self. And this is what he must do in order to stop sabotaging himself and actually finish the stuff that matters in due time.

• Mindset: Everything you do is a choice taken now.

• You will never know 100% what the right way is. And you shouldn't. The beauty of life hides in uncertainty and in the great perhapsthat lies hidden after the first horizon. You will never be ready and the most prepared you will ever be will be today. Learning never stops, do it on the move. Start even though you feel like you are not ready yet. But don't get discouraged and half ass it either. "Sucking at something is the first step to becoming sorta good at something" - Jake the Dog (Adventure Time)
• Stop with the mental excitation. A lot of people practice proactive procrastination by watching videos, doing tutorials, reading books. They seem like they know so much and they feel like they are almost "experts" and so much more enlightened than everyone else. But the only thing that they actually miss is taking action and falling flat on their faces on the first try. If you want to be good, you need to increase your input. But if you really want to be excellent and get some great results you need to maximize your output. “The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried.”
• Shift your mind from potential to results. Have you ever thought:"Once I achieve this and that, I will do this step next, and then you fantasize about how all of these dots will connect in the end". Life usually has other plans for you. In software development one of the most used frameworks is the scrum method because it allows you to ship fast a minimum viable product that basically is just the bones of the application and you instantly get feedback from a pool of users and you know what you should focus on next to increases your chances of success instead of guessing and relying on potential.
• Start acting like an essentialist. What is the essential work you need to get done to get closer to the life you picture for yourself? Sometimes we get lost in our overly ambitious plans and forget to focus on the only thing that matters: doing the job. We fantasize about the books we will write, the apps we will build, the love of our life that we will eventually meet. By failing to put out there the bad writing, the buggy apps, and our open hearts because we want to hog it all from the beginning effortlessly we get nothing instead.
• Make it about others. In his book "Originals", Adam Grant mentions how together with his colleagues he managed to encourage doctors to wash their hands more often after appealing to their empathetic side. They set up two signs one month apart: "Hand hygiene prevents you from catching diseases" and "Hand hygiene prevents patients from catching diseases". The final results concluded that after the second experiment the medical staff washed their hands 15% more and used up to 40% more soap. We might not be motivated to do a good thing for ourselves but we might be motivated to take action if others depend on our success. Too lazy to start that business you always wanted? Think of how many people are missing out the value you could create for them and how you are not improving their lives at all.

And this blog is specially written for the students of BIRLA SCHOOL PILANI.
coz they are the epitome of laziness and no one can challenge them in that.

But In some cases it is good to be lazy like if  NEWTON would`nt haves at that day under the tree.
he would never have derived his law and would have never carried his name all around the world.
and also make the lifes of students harder.