If you’re ambitious but keep procrastinating, please watch this.

What if procrastination wasn't laziness?

It's fear in disguise.

What are you delaying because you're scared of the outcome?

What are you putting off because you're actually scared of achieving?

Not failing.

Welcome to the Martel Method.

I went from rehab at 17 to building a $100 million empire and being a Wall Street Journal best-selling author.

In this podcast, I'll show you exactly how to build a life and business you don't grow to hate.

My best-selling book, Buy Back Your Time, is out now.

Grab a copy at buybackyourtime.com or at any of your preferred online retailers.

Think about it.

I want you to do a few things.

Number one, I want you to identify the real fear behind it today.

Whatever that decision you're looking to make,

whatever scares you about it, I need you to give it a name.

Give it a label.

Be clear about it.

Again, most people think, well, no, I'll get to it.

I'm just, you know, I'm trying to get it better.

No, no, there's something about it that scares you.

Use this thing called the two-minute rule.

My philosophy is that if I get an email, a text message, something that gives me anxiety around like, should I say yes?

I just want to use the two-minute rule to move it forward.

What's the smallest possible action I could do to move it forward?

Okay.

Sometimes I call it the mins, most important next step.

That two-minute rule gets me to default to action, not slow down, not overthink it, move it forward.

And then for me, it's the whole reframe that action is less painful than anticipation.

This one's crazy.

Have you ever seen people, maybe you've done it, I know I have, where the anticipation of failure is the pain.

and is bigger than actually what happens from deciding to do

wild,

but true.

The second big idea when it comes to procrastination is that motivation isn't required.

Motivation follows action, not the other way around.

Hear me say this again.

Motivation follows action, not the other way around.

When I was a teenager, I found myself in a sticky situation.

I ended up in prison, an adult prison, due to the severity of the crimes I'd committed.

I grew up in addiction.

I grew up in really trouble.

To say that it was colorful would be an understatement.

But here's the gift that that gave me is that I realized anytime I had negativity in my mind, I could drop down and do push-ups.

I could do tricep extensions off my bed.

I could do air squats.

Essentially, the fastest way for me to change my mental state was to move my body.

What a crazy concept.

Or even just like sit down and write a letter.

Like,

get out of my head.

Not sit there and think about it and think about it and think about it.

See, the action created the momentum.

Momentum created motivation.

Most people get it wrong.

They're like, I don't feel motivated.

Don't do that to yourself.

If you got to be motivated to take action, you're in trouble.

Default, go, move, action.

That's my question to you is what's the simplest, smallest action you could take in the next five minutes to push that thing forward?

You know that thing you've been putting off?

That one?

What is the action that you could take right now in the next five minutes that would do anything at all

to move it forward?

It could be by a domain.

It could be create that Instagram account.

It could be published that video.

You know, do that.

Here's a few things that help you really crystallize this concept.

First off, is don't wait for the perfect headspace.

Create it.

Don't wait for it.

Don't wait for you.

I got to be inspired.

Don't do that.

Create it.

How?

Take action.

That leads to motivation.

The other thing is to think about it like

stacking microwins, right?

Like stacking them early in the day.

Like when I wake up, I want to use my morning when I am most in tuned to what I want to create, most in tune to the motivation, the inspiration, and use that to take action

to win.

There's this guy, Charlie.

He has this idea called winning streaks.

He celebrates the microwins.

Because he celebrates the microwins, he creates the momentum.

Every time, no matter how small of a win he has, he goes, winning streak, winning streak.

I love that concept.

Winning streak to move it forward.

And then here is the big one.

And this is what I do every day.

is always set a deadline 20% shorter, 30% shorter than what you think it needs to be to create a forcing function for you to focus.

Oftentimes, it's just because we give ourselves too much time to get something done that we could get done sooner, and then we delay and procrastinate and almost like creates a snowball on itself.

So the big, the second big principle is motivation follows action, not the other way around.

The third

that is the most important is procrastination compounds regret.

Procrastination is like a, you know, negative spiral.

I either think we're spiraling up up or spiraling down.

And every time you delay, you procrastinate, you just make it worse.

You get inside your head.

See, I remember one time I had this idea for a software company and I was super passionate about it.

I even drew it in my notebook and how it could work.

And I probably spent like six months thinking about it, designing it.

It could do this.

It could do that.

And then one day I see online that a company had launched and raised millions of dollars on the exact same idea.

Waiting did not make that idea better.

It procrastinated the regret.

It delayed the outcome and it was harmful and very expensive.

It costs a lot of money.

Like think about it.

At any point, I could have launched this.

I know you think, oh, but Dan, Maybe they've been working on it for a while and you're not them and all these.

And I get it because by saying that, you make it okay for you but i'm telling you procrastination compounds regret here's the lesson i want you to take around that philosophy first off is that you have to treat inaction as a massive cost see most of us myself included will do more to avoid pain than we will to get a gain so it's not a neutral choice if you want to force yourself to take action, then you have to consider it a massive cost.

See, when you start treating your hour as an example, like it's worth $500,

maybe you got to go to $1,000, but like make it really substantial because then you would go, oh, that inaction, that delaying it, that waste of that time costs me.

And that is what you want to internalize to push you forward to stop procrastinating.

The other one is that big projects need to be broken down into like 48 hour sprints.

Like I just break them down and just go, okay, I got two days to get this part done, two days to get this part done, two days to get this part done.

Even within those bigger projects, I like to use Pomodoro, which is 25 minutes of work, five minutes of reset.

25 minutes of work, five minutes of reset.

I put my AirPods on, listen to some EDM music, some beats.

I don't even like words.

And I have my timer on my laptop and it's just going off every 25 minutes, counting down.

And I have a focused outcome for that period of work.

And it keeps me locked in.

You just got to figure out what is it that gets you focused to take action.

And then for me, it's finishing up my day when I'm done.

Okay.

I have a note file, I open up and I put in everything that I didn't finish that day that I'm committing to starting my next day with.

That's how I'm able to like disconnect, go home and be with my kids.

Because I don't have open loops because the open loops are written down.

And that's what I'm deciding at the end of my day to start with the following day to make sure that when I wake up, boom, we attack it.

We hit it.

Again, we're creating momentum.

That is the process.

So think about it.

Procrastination is a protection mechanism.

It's there to keep you from pain.

That's the fear.

The other one is that the motivation follows action, not the other way around.

And then what I just shared, which is that procrastination compounds regret.

If we don't get ahead of it, it will just make you feel worse.

So my question below in the comments, I wanna hear from you.

What's the one thing you've been putting off?

What is the one thing that you know on your heart?

you wanna do and because you're listening to this you take action on thanks for listening to the martel Method.

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