“green cactus in pot” by Chinh Le Duc on Unsplash

2019, what are your plans for this year?

Lose weight, keep fit, study, and grow yourself to make yourself better and make progress mentally or physically?

I have no such plan because I know I can’t do it.

Like many people, I used to be a person who liked to make plans, because when making plans, you can predict your future self:

If I follow this plan for three years, then after three years I will definitely become... (please fill in various beautiful adjectives...)!

But as time goes by, you will find that the time you originally planned to use for studying has turned into chatting with friends, using TikTok, watching movies, etc. Watch Korean dramas, or would rather stare at the rainy sky outside the window in a daze than open the php course that you bought for half a year but never clicked on.

However, every once in a while, you will realize that you can’t do this. What about the plan you promised? What about the promised growth?

So start from a certain day (assuming today is Wednesday, you may say to yourself: "Okay, then I will start serious next Monday" instead of starting from tomorrow ), you slowly become what you imagined. When you get home from work, you open the online course and study. During the holidays, you study and exercise when you have nothing to do, and follow your own plan. Want to be a better person, have a better life, make more money.

After living like this for a week, you begin to feel tired. Originally, you would start classes at eight o'clock when you get home from work. Now you will say to yourself: "Let's take a rest first." , come back and watch at 8:30." When 8:30 arrived, you opened the course and watched for half an hour. You said to yourself: "I'm very tired from work today, let me rest for another half an hour." However, one episode of Korean dramas lasts almost an hour. After resting, you looked at the time and saw that it was already ten o'clock.

"Let's take a bath first." After taking a bath, half an hour passed, and then I took a break and checked TikTok. Another half hour passed, and then I chatted with my friends. The next day, it was almost twelve o'clock. "Go to bed early and get up early to be healthy. Go to bed."

So the day passed like this, and I only watched a 30-minute course in one night. I was like two different creatures from my serious self last week.

What's the difference?

Power is a consumable that needs to be replenished and needs to be added

If you compare learning to driving, motivation is your gasoline. You must be motivated to learn, otherwise you will only do things that are easier and require less deliberate practice.

Then where does this motivation come from?

The motivation for the example at the beginning comes from the guilt that gradually accumulates every once in a while, "What's wrong? I'm tired. What about studying as I promised?" When it accumulates to a certain level, you will say to yourself: "I don't think this will work." Turn these feelings of guilt and uneasiness into motivation for learning. But after the conversion, it will take about a week or two to burn it.

After burning, I fall into an endless loop: work seriously => be tired and idle => feel guilty and uneasy => work seriously, fish one day and sunbathe five days I keep putting off the Internet, and I have to do all the other things before I can think of doing the real thing.

At this time, you will wonder if it is your own problem. Didn’t you mean what you promised to do seriously? Why do you keep procrastinating? You are so bad and you haven’t done what you promised. Okay, really bad...

Then you will think of the glamorous Xiaohua on social networking sites, sharing his recent learning experience every once in a while, Two or three days a week, he would go to reading clubs or study-related gatherings. On holidays, he would be in the library while others were having brunch. Even though he was no longer working in society, he continued to improve himself. He continued to receive salary increases and promotions, which was very smooth.

You remember that Xiaohua and you are obviously not much different. Weren’t we still studying the same book in the same class in the same school more than ten years ago? My ranking is still higher than him, why have I lost so much now? So you blame this on yourself because you don't make progress and don't study hard. It's because I don't have enough perseverance and perseverance. I must become a perseverant person!

In the end, you are still in an endless loop. The motivation generated by guilt will disappear in a week or two, and after that, you will resume your previous life. .

If you feel that my description above is not good enough, it may be that my procrastination is not that serious. If you feel that the description above is good, that is what you are experiencing. thing, then you are very suitable to read this article.

I believe there is only one thing you want to know: How to get out of this cycle?

Step 1: Admit that you are a procrastinator

Yes, the first step is to recognize it You have to be honest with yourself in order to overcome that inner insecurity. You have to admit it:

#Yes, I am that kind of person. I just get distracted when doing things. I just can’t study when I get home from get off work every day. I am someone who can only set goals but never achieve them.

The next thing I want to tell you is that this is not your problem.

You see, every reader who feels sad when reading this is the same kind of person as us, and we are not alone. It's not our fault that we procrastinate, maybe we're just born that way. If someone is born with poor learning ability, no teacher will blame him, because it is innate. If we are just born to procrastinate, then why is it our fault?

Some people will say: "Isn't it your fault that you have no perseverance and motivation? Then whose fault is it?" No, no one is at fault.

In the process of constantly fighting procrastination, I found that there is only one source of negative anxiety, and that is: "I think it is my fault. "I should be able to do it, but I can't." If you keep thinking like this, you will only remain anxious.

My way to get out of this cycle is: "Admit that it's not "I should do it", but "I just can't do it"." But admit that you just can't do it, that you just can't generate motivation, and you will break out of this cycle.

For me, motivation is something that cannot be generated out of thin air. It is too much to ask you to generate motivation out of thin air. Motivation needs to be "deliberately created". Or it needs to be converted.

Some people will say: "Listen to what you are saying, then why can't you, that OOO, can keep studying every day? That, XXX, can read English every day, but you can't?" "

Because they have motivation and I don't, or in other words, they have inadvertently generated motivation, but they don't know it.

How to generate motivation?

Step 2: Find out what’s important to you

In talking about how to produce results Before you gain motivation, you should first think about why you don’t have motivation. I thought about it and guessed and guessed again. I think the fundamental reason is:

This matter is not important enough to you. .

Your goal may be to earn one million a year. You think this is an important thing, but in fact, after thinking about it carefully, you may find that maintaining your current living standard is not enough. Yes, life can still go on, but it will be difficult to get married in the future, or it may not be possible to travel abroad too many times.

But the point is that if you don’t achieve this goal, you can still live on, but of course it would be better to earn a million a year, so I say this goal is important but “not so important".

Suppose that an elf with a knife suddenly appears in front of you today and says to you: "An'an, if you don't get 950 points on the TOEIC exam in three months Above, I will cut off your hand!", and then immediately cut off your hand and then put it back again after three seconds, proving that this elf really has this ability, and it took you three seconds to experience having your hand cut off. The feeling of disconnection.

What will you do next?

By cup, of course I keep reading English! Although I still mess up occasionally, the frequency is definitely not as high as before. Why? Because reading English has become super important to you. If you don’t read it well, your hand will be cut off. Who dares not to read it?

After understanding the importance of "importance", you can look at other common examples.

After being broken up by my girlfriend, I went around the island begging for forgiveness, confessed to the person I liked but was rejected and worked hard to lose weight, and worked hard to make money for my future wife.

Why are these cases successful? Because there is one thing that they care about very much. How much you care about will generate as much motivation as possible. How sad and sad you were after your confession was rejected, how motivated you were to transform yourself.

Finally, go back to the example at the beginning and see php Chinese website courseIs it important? It doesn’t seem to be important, and it won’t matter if I don’t look at it. I know that life can get better after I grow up, but the problem is that “my current life is not particularly bad” and I can still live with it, so “improve” "This matter is not particularly important. It would be better to have it, but it's okay not to have it."

Since the point is: "It's not important enough", if you want to solve the problem, just make things important.

Step Three: Create Motivation

Is there something that is really important to you? important?

For example, it could be money.

I have a friend who went to a certain place to learn programming and spent tens of thousands of dollars to change his career to an engineer, but in the middle he told me where His teaching was not very good. I couldn’t understand many places and it was difficult to ask questions. So I asked him: What should I do?

He said: "What else can I do? It cost tens of thousands of yuan. I must find a job after graduation, so I can only study hard on my own."

That’s when I realized that motivation can be created, and it can be created by another important thing. So you have to find what is really important to you.

What is important to me? The first is responsibility.

#I am an engineer, an engineer who really likes to write programs. I know some engineers who delve into technology even during off-duty hours because they love it. For me, although I also like it very much, I rarely write code during off work time because I am lazy. My laziness is greater than my love for programming (my laziness is greater than many things), so laziness wins.

But as an engineer, especially a front-end engineer, it means that you have a lot of new things to learn. What should you do?

I solve this problem by going to work.

I don’t write programs after get off work because there is no difference if I don’t write. But once I go to work and get paid, I must deliver results of a certain quality, and I must improve myself. His skills are worthy of this salary. So going to work is what created the motivation for me to learn the program, and I had to be responsible for that paycheck.

Another thing that is very important to me is commitment, which is actually a bit like responsibility. Once your words are spoken, you must be held accountable.

I have posted some free teaching articles on the Internet before. In fact, when the articles were posted, I only had a preliminary idea of ​​what to teach, and I hadn’t even planned the teaching materials.

# But why should I post a post first to tell everyone that I am going to teach? Because if there is no PO, I may never produce the teaching materials, but if there is a PO, I have to teach, because if you say it out loud, people will sign up. If you have nothing to teach, you are ready to open the skylight.

Once you open the skylight, people will know you from now on: "Oh, you are the one who said you were going to teach and then canceled it." I don't want to be like this. , so once you say something, you must do it.

You can see from the above examples that when you tie something that is really important to you to your goal, you can create momentum. . And this kind of motivation is much more useful than the motivation you rely on guilt.

The most common and most practical motivation is money. For example, say: "I saw me online at 12 o'clock this week, and everyone who left the message below has a cup of Starbucks." , it’s a similar reason, forcing yourself to go to bed early in order not to spend a lot of money on a lot of Starbucks.

I used to think that motivation could appear out of thin air and that it was my own laziness and my own procrastination that led to failure. But then I changed my mind. The sea and the sky are vast, and motivation is actually created, not something you can just have if you want it.

Some people seem to be very motivated and relaxed. That may just be because they are supported by motivation that you don’t know about. There is one thing behind their efforts. The things that must be accomplished are what keep them going.

But I don’t have it, so I have to find out that thing to create my motivation.

Summary

I have read a lot of books about perseverance and willpower , but none of them are of any use to me. The one that impressed me the most was the method mentioned in "Don't Rely on Willpower for Reading - Logical K Calligraphy Popular in Germany". Just do a little bit of it every day, but it didn't work for me because I couldn't even Not too lazy to do it at all...it's awesome.

In addition, there is no scientific evidence to support the things I mentioned above. It is purely personal conjecture, but it is applicable to me. If there is any book written It was recommended to me when I encountered similar problems. I always felt that there should be relevant explanations in fields such as psychology, but I just didn’t know where to start.

In short, this article is mainly to share with friends who are similar to me and are also troubled by procrastination. I have found a way out in the process of constant struggle. I hope This outlet can be useful to some people.

This article comes from the Internet, I hope it can help everyone!