It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Theodore Roosevelt
Has this ever happened to you, you want to do something, know you should but can’t bring yourself to get up and do it? At that moment you have two choices, you either do, or you don’t. The reasons why we fail on our goals is because we continually make the wrong choice, and over time, those choices compound on each other. Instead of getting up and getting the work done, we fall back to our old habits. Coincidentally, the same moment we need to get to work is when we realize we need to “check something” on Instagram, or that we need to go to YouTube to “bookmark” a video so we can “watch it later”, but end up watching it at the moment (I’m absolutely guilty of this). The story is always the same; what was supposed to be a brief detour turns into several hours of needlessly scrolling through comments, pictures, and catching up on the latest cat videos. There’s an easy fix that will help you get back on track and something I’ve found to help me in the past. The next time you need to get to work, but you feel hesitant and find yourself procrastinating, I want you to stop and ask yourself several questions.
Have you ever wondered why sometimes the actions you take are often misaligned with what you want to do? Why do we procrastinate, waste time or sleep in, when we can be doing something much more productive? Especially if it’s something we’ve told ourselves we wanted to do. It all comes down to how we prioritize every action we want to take.