Yeah, so for me, I like to do what I call audition a goal. I think a lot of goals fail because people try to commit to something for a year they've never done for a day. That's like marrying somebody you just met at speed dating. But if you had a goal that was at least a month worth of time, I would say, hey, let's do a one

month audition. Like, what have we just tried this thing for 15 minutes a day for 25 of the next 30

days?

That's John Acuff. He's been named one of Inc's top 100 leadership speakers and has inspired hundreds of thousands of people to overcome overthinking and finish what matters most.

His new book, Procrastination Proof, Never Get Suck Again, shares what it really takes to beat procrastination so you can achieve the goals that you've been stalling on.

So you'll learn one, why discipline and willpower are not enough to solve procrastination. Two, how to make tomorrow easy today with simple preparation. And three, how to go from stuck to unstuck in four steps. And you want a quick summary write-up of the actual wisdom that John shared, you can mosey on over to Awesome at your job.com to get the free gold nugget email

newsletter.

I'm Pete McItis.

This is How to Be Awesome at your job.

And now, here's John.

John, welcome back.

Good to see you again, Pete.

Well, I'm excited to talk about procrastination.

You got a whole book about this. Tell us,

what do you know or have discovered about procrastination that's new and fresh and surprising and

interesting that we should know? Well, I think the really interesting thing to me is that it's not

necessarily a problem. People use it as a solution. It's just not a good solution. Meaning,

if they don't want to tell their mom, they're coming home for Thanksgiving, procrastination goes, no problem. We don't have to do that for like seven months. We can wait until the last second. Or I'm afraid of getting negative reviews of my book. Procrastination says, no problem. I'll solve that. You'll never get a negative review. I mean, you won't get to write a book, but you'll never get that. So it's not a laziness problem, which is why so many of the willpower

discipline things we do don't ultimately work. It's really more of a figuring out how to give

yourself permission to do those things that you really want to do or really need to do.

Mm-hmm. Permission to do the things you really want to do or need to do. I'm also curious about the things we don't want to do. I guess we need to do them, but we don't want to do them. I think that's where it gets me. It's not so much. Like what? What do you procrastinate on? Oh, let's, boy, I'm thinking, well, I think there's tax things. But it's a joke every year my accountant's like, yeah, we're deferring, right? Yeah, didn't you ask. Yeah, that's funny. So, yeah, there's plenty of things in terms of, oh, it would be good to have, I think that's for me, it'd be nice to have the result of that thing, but oh, doing the work seems exhausting and overwhelming, and I just don't want it right now. Yeah, I think that's 100% fair. I love that you admitted having the result would be great. I think a lot of people won't admit, you know, I'd really just like to have done the thing,

but I don't want to do all this stuff. Like, for me, entitlement is when I go, I wish my LinkedIn

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