If you’re an entrepreneur looking to start or grow your business, you’re going to have to take massive action.
If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent months on end reading success stories, watching motivational videos, and checked out all the inspirational quotes.
I did that for 13 months straight, I felt motivated, but then a really scary thought popped into my mind.
I accomplished absolutely nothing.
Then, one day, I discovered the simple solution to curing procrastination forever.
My mastermind group and I met a man who just sold his company for $50 Million, and we asked him what it takes to get motivated.
“Write me a check for $1,000.” he replied, with a serious face.
We thought he was joking with us, but
Step 1 – Tap into Your Existing Biological Drivers
As our deepest drivers of human behavior, all humans are programmed to:
- Run away from immediate pain
- Run towards immediate pleasure
When a caveman bit into an apple, it felt good, and it kept him alive. When he put his hand over a hot fire, he immediately pulled it away. Since we have evolved over millions of years to follow these principles, we are still biologically programmed to move away from immediate pain and towards immediate pleasure.
When you watch motivational video, it releases a chemical called dopamine in our brain, and it does nothing more than give us an artificial sense of accomplishment.
Our unconscious mind can’t process time, and only thinks in the present moment, so this is why we eat fast food, despite knowing how unhealthy it is. We watch YouTube videos instead of putting the hard work on our business, because it feels good in the present moment, despite logically knowing we aren’t making progress on our business.
The Solution:
- Hand a trusted friend a check for $100
- Tell them if you don’t accomplish a specific task by the end of the day, they get to cash the check (immediate pain)
- When you accomplish the task, they hand the check back to you (immediate pleasure)
This is why my first mentor told me to write him a check for $1,000.
All of a sudden, the things that were immediately comfortable (watching videos, playing video games, going out with friends) would be more immediately painful than the boring task of doing hard work on my business.
Are the things you’ve been doing more immediately pleasureful than putting in the work that will actually grow your business? Do you see how this simple technique can solve this problem for you?
It’s painful to lose $100!
The important thing to remember here is to give the other person the check, so it is outside your control. You can’t back out of it if you slack.
When my mastermind group and I finally decided to take our business seriously, after years of procrastinating, one of the members made $45,000 selling pet products using Facebook ads within the first three months.
The other member made $20,000 in the first week of his product launch.
I built a digital magazine publishing company, which now has 923,000 readers.
Looking back on my journey in entrepreneurship, I wish I could have told myself that all those motivational videos, and inspirational quotes are nothing more than an artificial sense of accomplishment.
Step 2 – Chunk Down to Avoiding Overwhelm
The second cause for procrastination is because we feel overwhelmed by all the things we have to do.
When I think of the book I have to write, a list of 100 different tasks come to mind. I have to create a cover, hire a designer for the cover, write the book description, write the introduction, 20 chapters, think of my marketing plan, etc. The list goes on and on.
Each thought of what I have to do triggers an emotion.
When I think of having to do a hundred different things, all the emotions pile up at once, and I have no clue where to begin. I feel overwhelmed, so I go do something else.
The solution for this is to think of the bigger picture task you have to complete, and break it down into smaller steps, and then decide on one step to take right now.
When you chunk things down to one task, you’ll have the clarity and focus to move forward with the only thing that matters: making progress with your business.
Step 3 – Use Linguistics to Rapidly Release Negative Qualities
Below, I recorded a YouTube video teaching you how to use simple linguistic techniques to turn bad qualities into a non-existing thing of the past.
