ARM Yourself! Action trumps Motivation

Here’s what AI wrote when I entered a few key words and asked it to describe the newsletter I am starting this year.

My newsletter will focus on personal productivity, leadership, finding joy, and living a good life. It will share tips and advice on cultivating a positive attitude, and developing strong personal and leadership skills. In it, I will suggest strategies for peak productivity while maintaining a healthy work-life balance. I promise to keep it brief and practical.

Good stuff, eh?

And fast!

I was finding it hard to get started on the newsletter when I decided to give AI a go. It wrote a few lines really quickly, which I subsequently edited to come up with the para above. It helped me get started when I was unsure of how to begin.

So it was only fitting that in this first issue of my newsletter on living a limitless life and reaching your goals, I write about getting started on the hard stuff - things we have been wanting to do, goals that are important to us, and hence things we don’t want to begin because then we can’t mess them up.

Here are some quick tips on “How to get started on all the important shit I have been putting off”

• Don't start at the very beginning, it isn't a great place to start! AI helped me get started on writing this newsletter. You can get help too. All around us, other people have already done a load of the hard work. There are resources aplenty if we look around, whether it is to start a home-baking business (free recipes, and blogs by other home-bakers), to write that first chapter of the great novel (free ai powered as well as paid resources), to apply for the PhD (great SOP formats), or to lose weight (all kinds of free workouts on youtube). Resources are available online, or offline in the form of books or the wisdom of people around us. We just need to use them.
• And to continue with this thought, don’t wait for an original idea.

47% of first movers fail compared to 8% of improvers across 50 product categories.        

Adam Grant quotes a study in The Surprising Habits of Original Thinkers that 47% of first movers fail compared to 8% of improvers across 50 product categories. It’s better to take an idea or a product and then use your original thinking to make it better. Adam Grant gives wonderful TED talks. If I ever get invited to give a TED talk, I am going to watch a bunch of superlative speakers and then apply my own little twist to make sure I deliver a good speech. It's easier to start by taking something and improving on it, rather than wait for original inspiration.

• This also means that action trumps motivation. Refer the title image. You’re not feeling motivated, well, jump into action! Motivation may or may not inspire action, but action will inspire motivation every time.

You’ve been wanting to clean out the cabinet filled with junk? Don’t wait for when you will feel like it, just start with a small drawer. The sense of being productive from doing a small task, even an easy one, will create the motivation to continue. Can’t get up the energy to go to the gym? Go for a short walk. Your body gets moving, your willpower will follow.

• And on that topic of the junk cabinet, declutter! Declutter your mind and your life. Use the 3 goal principle today. Write down the 3 most important things for you now. And then continually think about them and visualise them. That’s it. In this way, you trigger the Reticular Activating System or the RAS. In simple terms, this is the bundle of nerves in your brain that helps you become aware of important things while disregarding unimportant noise. It’s what helps you hear your name in a crowded room, and why everyone suddenly seems to be driving the new car you bought.

RAS is a bit like a genie that can grant you wishes.

The genie only appears when you rub the lamp. In a similar way, writing down you what you want, and visualising them happening, jump starts your RAS. It's as if a fog lifts and you can see a path to making your goals a reality. Your mind starts to focus on your goals, distractions disappear, and your energy is directed to what you wanted to achieve. A powerful way to get started that can be a game changer for your life.

If you liked learning about your RAS, there are some great video on you tube that explain how to trigger your RAS to make it work for you.

• It’s still early enough in 2023 for this last tip. Stop fixating on dates. if you had a goal to start something in the ‘new year’, don’t feel guilty if you haven’t made a start on it yet. The 1st of January is meaningless, or the first of any month, or the Monday of a week, or the weekend. Start now: mid-week, mid-month, mid-day. It won’t affect the quality of what you do.

End Note: There’s a video doing the rounds in which a professor starts to write formulas on a blackboard in front of a class full of students. The students are bored and disengaged till the teacher makes an obvious mistake, such as 9 times 9 equals 91. Immediately one student points the mistake out and the others join in his laughter. The professor pauses, and makes a profound point, that there will always be people who will point out your mistakes, even as your good work goes un-noticed or unappreciated.

Starting something new is scary, in a bowel-melting, chest-fluttering kind of way. Because we know there are people who will point out all the things we did wrong. But that's no reason to not get started. Unless you start, you won’t know where you will arrive, and you certainly can't have the fun of the journey.?

I made a start on this first issue, using all of the tips above. And I promise in the coming months, to keep sharing ideas that make sense for each one of us to reach our personal best. Subscribe to have the newsletter delivered straight to your in-box.

Let me know in the comments what you are struggling with starting. Or if you recently started something, and your tip to make it easy for others to get started. Because we're all in this together.

Until next time, Shraboni.