Wake Up and Take Massive Action! 1334 upvotes | April 25, 2018 | by 1dondraper ------------------------- Original post was taken down due to harsh title. Significantly edited and updated. ------------------------- PREFACE ------------------------- _Many of you need a wake-up-call. A slap in the face. A bucket of cold water. To snap out of this fucking phase of laziness and procrastination. To light a fucking fire under your asses._ TRP and the Internet offers _all_ the advice you could ever need on how to get your life together. You have the sidebar, you have books, you have the advice of other people, and you even know _yourself_ what the fuck you have to do. But _you don't know how the fuck to take action._ You know how to swim, but you're too fucking scared to dive in the deep end. So here I am to explain to you clearly _why the fuck you aren’t taking action towards your goals._ And how to fix it. ------------------------- INTRODUCTION ------------------------- You always know what you need to do. If you could only follow it, you’d start seeing results. There’s no debate there. If you take action and systematically work towards your goals, you’re going to see progress. That’s just how life works. Succeeding in most areas of life isn’t actually that difficult. 90% of success is showing up. If you can maintain a clear head and do what you need to do, work consistently towards your goals, and make steady progress, success isn't that hard to come by. But people just aren’t willing to put in the work. Why? We’re too ugly. We’re too tired. We’re too lazy. We fear failure. We’d rather sit back and click through Netflix to watch a show we don’t even enjoy. We’d rather play another game of Fortnite and waste away our precious time here on a meaningless game. We’d rather sleep another two hours. We’d rather watch that hot pornstar get fucked by a BBC and then jack off. Don’t lie. It’s what you do. But in reality, it’s what all of society does. But just because everyone else does it doesn’t mean that _you_ should. Stop living like the rest of the sheep out there and reclaim your independence. Start respecting yourself. Take responsibility for your own life. And don’t live your life like one of the many mindless drones out there indoctrinated into society, pawns to corporations and business, wasting your finite existence on a hodgepodge of meaningless and unfulfilling technological stimulation. ------------------------- THE VICE OF SELF-IMPROVEMENT ------------------------- Most guys here live in a perpetual state of over-analysis. You read a hundred posts on Reddit, you read a couple more articles with click-bait titles, you read a couple self-help books, you watch Youtube videos, and you keep _pretending_ like you’re taking massive action. Every once in a while, you feel like you have a fucking epiphany, and this makes you feel as if you’re learning and moving forward. When in reality, you’re stagnating and making zero progress. “SELF-IMPROVEMENT IS MASTURBATION.” You can thank our lord and savior Tyler Durden for this underrated piece of gold. You’re pretending to yourself that you're making progress without actually changing anything. Instead of being a pathetic, miserable fuck who does nothing, you're just a pathetic, miserable fuck who reads feel-good self-help bullshit, goes to the gym, and repeats affirmations to himself in the mirror. In other words, stop covering yourself in layer after layer of fake pretenses, motives, and qualities. Stop searching endlessly for that next epiphany, and for that next piece of meaningless, external motivation. _Look within._ Ask yourself what you truly want, what you truly desire out of life, and how the fuck you are truly going to change. Don’t “improve” your _current_ self. CHANGE WHO YOU ARE. ------------------------- THE PLAGUE OF INACTION ------------------------- I’ll take a wild guess and throw this out there—if you could list 10 things you could do _right now_ to move towards your goals, you could easily rattle them off. YOU ALL _KNOW_ WHAT THE FUCK YOU SHOULD BE DOING. You all know you should ask that girl out, study fucking harder, hit the gym, open that business… you know you need to fucking do it. You know you it’d be good for you and you know it’s the right thing—but YOU DON’T FUCKING DO IT! You just sit around in a haze of useless procrastination and perpetual laziness, telling yourself you’re going to do that fucking thing tomorrow. And then tomorrow comes. You’ve woke up late, you’re feeling like shit, and something else came up. And so you put it off until tomorrow. And so on. A few weeks or months later you look back and you realize that all that valuable fucking time has passed and is never coming back. And you’re no closer to your goals. And the more this happens, the more you rationalize to yourself that nothing good will ever come of actually taking action, the more you decide to devolve into escapism, the more you condition yourself to accept defeat, and the more you fall deeper and deeper into a bottomless pit of defeatism. You tell yourself that there’s no point in trying anyway. You never feel like doing _anything._ All you want to do is saturate your empty mind with a bunch of stimulating, pixelated nonsense and try to distract yourself away from your valueless existence through video games, porn, TV, and the endless stream of distractions at your fingertips. We have a psychological term for that—“LEARNED HELPLESSNESS.” In a famous experiment, scientists gave electrical shocks to two groups of dogs—one that could stop the shocks by pressing a lever and one that couldn’t. Later, when given the chance to escape by jumping over a small barrier, the ones who had been able to press the lever immediately escaped. The group of dogs who had no lever just lay down on the floor and whined as they were being shocked. The same effect is one of the major causes of depression. You repeatedly fail, learn that you’ll always be a failure, and struggle without escape. And when you’re actually presented with the chance to take action and change your life, you’d rather just stay defeated and mire in your own misery. You’re probably realizing right now that everything I’m saying applies to you. And I’m going to tell you how to break free from this self-imposed prison. ------------------------- FEAR OF FAILURE ------------------------- If you were 100% guaranteed to succeed if you asked that girl out, started your business, and started lifting regularly, would you hesitate to go ahead with your goals? Absolutely not. You’d immediately do it. _You’re afraid to commit._ You don’t want to tell yourself you’re going to quit porn and video games. You don’t want to commit to starting a new life. You don’t want to commit to breaking free from your endless cycle of procrastination. You don’t want to commit to anything. Why? Because you’re afraid of failure. You don’t want to try and fail. What’s the point of trying anyway if you’re probably going to fail? Right? Let me tell you something. You’re going to fucking die. You’ve only got one life. Every second you waste living below your potential is never coming back. Ever. You’re the youngest you ever will be right now. Think about that for a second. If you keep allowing this pathetic fear of failure to control you, you’re going to live out a sad, depressing, miserable existence for the rest of your days. And you’ll be buried six feet under and everybody will be glad you’re finally fucking gone. So, what do you do? MAKE A GODDAMN FUCKING DECISION. Silence the voices of self-doubt and avoidance rationalization, and just do it [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXsQAXx_ao0]. Commit to the decision. Write it in a journal. Tell a friend for accountability. Change your fucking environment. Stop rationalizing, stop watching motivational Youtube videos, stop reading Reddit posts, and stop passively wasting your time waiting for _that time_ to come when everything suddenly changes and you realize it’s time to start taking action. That time will never come. Ever. Tell all those inner voices to shut the fuck up [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQTT23BdABU] and just make the FUCKING DECISION! START SMALL AND SPIRAL UPWARDS. Turn the shower cold for 30 seconds. And then a minute. And then go full fucking Bond and don’t turn it warm. Talk to one stranger a day. And then two. And so on. Go in small incremental steps that will exponentially push you further forwards. The more you push yourself and actually see yourself making progress, the more you will want to continue. It’s a positive feedback loop, but this time it’s in the right direction! IF YOU DON’T TAKE ACTION, YOU’RE ALREADY A FAILURE. Let your fear of failure propel you forward. Recognize it and accept it. And proceed the fuck on regardless. ------------------------- COMFORT ZONE/FEARING DISCOMFORT ------------------------- Yeah, it’s fucking easy to wake up at noon each day, throw a pack of instant noodles on the stove, and sit back and binge ten episodes of Breaking Bad every day. Yeah, it’s fucking easy to just sit home, play Call of Duty, and avoid the gym. It’s all you’ve ever done. And will do, if you keep living this way. YOUR BRAIN LITERALLY REWIRES ITSELF TO CONTINUE YOUR HABITS, WAYS OF LIFE, AND NORMAL ROUTINES IF YOU REPEAT THEM OVER LONG PERIODS OF TIME. What you do, you become. And what you are, you do. It’s a POSITIVE FEEDBACK LOOP that spirals in whichever direction you choose. If you continue to act like a fucking buffoon, you will become one. Just like we say here that you shouldn’t look at what girls say, but at what they do—_you are what you do, not what you say._ You tell yourself you’re going to start a Fortune 500 company, but you can’t even get out of the bed in the morning. You tell yourself you’re going to be fucking Casanova but you can’t approach that pretty girl at Starbucks drinking her fucking vanilla Frappucino. Stop deluding yourself and face reality. So, what do you do? TRAIN YOURSELF TO APPRECIATE DISCOMFORT. “GET COMFORTABLE BEING UNCOMFORTABLE.” You’ll never get anywhere in life if you do whatever you feel like doing. Love the discomfort and embrace the thrill. The pain of regret is worse than the pain of discipline. And ironically, putting yourself through discomfort will make your life miles better than you could ever imagined it to be. How can you train yourself? Take cold showers every morning. Sleep on the floor with nothing but a blanket and a pillow. Dance in public. Intentionally force yourself to take risks. Facing your fears head-on and pushing through discomfort is the fastest and most effective way to self-mastery. REWIRE YOUR BRAIN TO BE EXCITED FOR NEW CHALLENGES. “THE BEAST THAT BEARS YOU FASTEST TO PERFECTION IS SUFFERING.” - MEISTER ECKHART Successful people _love_ discomfort. They embrace the challenges. Without it, they would have nothing to live for. It’s what keeps them going. YOUR “COMFORT” ZONE ISN’T REALLY “COMFORTABLE.” It’s just a place of stagnant procrastination and lack of progress where you just sit around, rotting internally and corrupting your potential. You only choose to stay in it because your fear of the unknown overwhelms your current discomfort. No progress in life ever comes without pain and suffering. None. ------------------------- PROCRASTINATION ------------------------- The average person wastes 8-10 hours a day. Video games, Netflix, mindless browsing, cheap dopamine hits, etc. It doesn’t really matter. All procrastination comes from the same root cause—thinking that you have more time. When you have a paper due in an hour, you’ll fucking finish it. If the bar is closing in ten minutes, you’re going to have ask the girl back to your place. If you have a terminal illness and have just days to live, you’re not going to be fucking watching TV or doing any of the other bullshit that we fill our lives up with. When there is a deadline, you’ll get it done. Apply Parkinson’s law to dramatically increase productivity in your life: “WORK EXPANDS SO AS TO FILL THE TIME AVAILABLE FOR ITS COMPLETION.” In other words, however much time you get to complete a task will be how much time you take to actually finish it. If you are given three weeks to finish a process paper, you’ll likely procrastinate the first two and half weeks and finish it on the last few days. If you are given two hours, you’ll fucking crank it out. It’s just how we work. You think you have tomorrow. You always do. And how often do you actually do what you told yourself you were going to do when the day comes? “The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what is in Fortune's control and abandoning what lies in yours.” - Seneca, the great Stoic philosopher You don’t have the future. So stop expecting to do things in the future and stop looking forward. You only have today. Don’t fall into the trap of telling yourself that you’ll have time later. When that time actually comes, you’ve likely forgotten all about that goal and you’re even busier. So what do you do? WRITE DOWN YOUR FUCKING GOALS. I can’t overemphasize this. Writing your goals down has been scientifically proven to dramatically increase the chances that you meet them. Articulate them, describe them in fine detail, and journal about them frequently. Every morning. CREATE POSITIVE FEEDBACK AND ACCOUNTABILITY. Write out a checklist. Nothing will feel better than taking your pen and drawing a line crossing out the goal you’ve just accomplished. Nothing will feel better than having a checklist completely crossed off at the end of the day. And then taking the paper, crumpling it into a ball, and tossing it in the trashcan like Kobe in his prime. SET A TIME LIMIT. You don’t have infinite time available to you. How you allocate the finite expanse allocated to you is significant beyond measure. Force yourself to meet the goal by a deadline. Set a date. Whether it’s a few days, weeks, or months from now, set a date. A specific date. Don’t make it unrealistic. But don’t be lenient on yourself either. If you’re not serious about meeting your goals, you never will. ------------------------- WAKE UP TO REALITY ------------------------- Consider this scenario for a second: “Imagine for a second that you have a senior thesis paper due at midnight tonight. It’s five o’clock in the afternoon, and you have thirty more pages to write. You’re sitting at your desk, exhausted, tired, and absolutely spent. You’re coming off an all-nighter and all you want to do is hop in bed. Bags of Doritos and chips are strewn across the floor around you. Seven more hours, you think! How the hell am I going to fucking get through this? But you do. Even though you’re feeling like absolute shit, you push forward. You only get one chance to finish this thesis paper, and if you don’t, you’re fucked, you’re going to fail, and your life will turn to shit. You won’t graduate college and everything will head downhill. So you finish it. For the next six months after you graduate, you have your own personal goals to wake up at five every morning, lift four times a week, start your own business, and lose thirty pounds. But of course, what the fuck happens? You fear failure. You fall back into your routines. You fall back into your comfort zone. Your behavioral addictions begin to control you. Six months pass, and instead of being closer to goals, you’re even farther away from achieving them then you were before. As a result of your failures, you’re set forth on a downward spiral in which you get a shitty career, marry someone you hate, stay overweight, have a financial crisis, become mired in existential anxiety, and fall into depression. Your life has turned upside down, and you consider suicide. Everything falls down around you, all your friends and family leave you, and you try to drug yourself senseless to numb yourself to the pain. Eventually, you die of an overdose.” Failure was not an option with the fucking thesis paper, was it? Failure is never an option when you have a job, is it? If your boss tells you to whip up a two-page report on the company’s financial status by tomorrow, you’re going to do it. If you have an opportunity to get a promotion, are you going to waste it? SO WHY THE HELL IS FAILURE AN OPTION WITH REGARDS TO YOUR OWN GOALS? Why are the goals society imposes upon you more important than your own?! Why does getting to class on time matter more to you than heading to the gym? Why does sitting in your little office cubicle in your 9-to-5 job matter more than getting your fucking life together? Why is an essay due date more important to you than living up to your own life potential? So get off your ass and start moving! ------------------------- THE FINAL FRONTIER ------------------------- This [https://i.imgur.com/QkDUgw5.jpg] is how many weeks you get in your life. And that’s if you’re lucky enough to live to the ripe old age of one hundred. Not many dots, is it? You might be an eight, a fourth, a third, or maybe even half of the way through that. But it doesn’t matter. This is all you get. You don’t get to live another life. All you will ever see and think in this world is happening right before your eyes. And you’re just wasting it away. Billions of years of random atomic collisions and lucky mutations have led to your very fucking existence, and you’re wasting it on critically-acclaimed TV shows and video games. It doesn’t matter if you believe in an afterlife or not—you know that this is all you will ever get, here. “A MAN WHO DARES TO WASTE ONE HOUR OF TIME HAS NOT DISCOVERED THE VALUE OF LIFE.” - CHARLES DARWIN You’ll never be twenty years, five months, and three days, six hours, and two minutes old ever again. Every moment in our lifetimes is a once-in-a-lifetime moment. We’re the only organisms capable of understanding our own mortality and the value of our existence, and we do nothing about it. None of you truly understand how fucking short your life is. How this is the only chance you’ll ever get to exist here. You only have one childhood. You only have one youth. You only have one chance to live your twenties. And your thirties. And so on. You only get to choose a career once. There are no second chances, no rewinds, and no redos. You’re on a train hurtling in only one direction—towards the end of your life. You think you “understand” that we’re all going to die, that you only get one life, and blah blah so on. Right? Fuck no. You don’t understand it one bit. If you truly understood the fucking value of your own existence, the shortness of life, and have internalized and accepted your own mortality, you’d be living a completely different life than you are now. Let your fear of death and your understanding of your ephemeral, finite existence here push you to greater heights than you could have ever fathomed. After all, it is the only chance you will get. What do you have to lose? ------------------------- CLOSING THOUGHTS ------------------------- Hopefully I sparked a fucking fire within your minds. That's what you need. You need to absolutely _obsessed_ with success. Or you will get _nowhere._ If you think motivation doesn't last, is bullshit, and doesn't work, you're not motivating yourself properly. Stop buying into other people's opinions and think for yourself. Of course you’re not going to feel like working all the time. But that’s what motivation is for. People understand motivation wrong. Motivation isn’t always something that makes energy and vitality course through your veins. Motivation doesn't mean waking up in the morning, feeling on top of the world, and ready to crush anything in your path. Motivation doesn’t always make you want to fucking fight gorillas. It doesn’t make you want to climb fucking skyscrapers. In fact, it doesn’t even mean that you feel great. Motivation is _knowing_ that you have to do something no matter what the fucking cost, and then going ahead and doing it. Even if you're tired, cold, and depressed, you’ll do it. Nothing _ever_ happens without motivation. ”DISCIPLINE” IS JUST MOTIVATION WHEN YOU’RE FEELING LIKE SHIT. Motivation isn’t just a fickle emotion. It’s the knowledge, and drive, with the full force and strength of your being, that regardless of consequences, you _must_ achieve something. And life's fucking hard. Nobody is disagreeing with you. But it's time for you to stop letting life passively control you, and for you to become the master of yourself and fucking destroy life once-and-for-all. You can complain all you want, play victim, and cry about how unlucky you are. About how shit the cards you were given in life are. Go ahead. But nothing will change, and you’ll go on living a pathetic life you are. Man the fuck up, I say. It’s all on you. Nobody will change your life except you. No book, no Internet article, no quote, no video, and no philosophy will help you change your life, unless you _choose_ to. You’re dying right now. Stop sleepwalking through life and wake the fuck up. How long are you going to wait before you start living the life you’ve dreamt of? ------------------------- Archived from https://theredarchive.com/post/49882