How to Overcome Procrastination and Perfectionism, with Stephen Guise

Afford Anything | Make Smart Money Choices

Paula Pant | Cumulus Podcast Network

Investing, Entrepreneurship, Business

4.7 • 3.6K Ratings

🗓️ 24 October 2016

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

#48: Imagine that your goal is to build a flat stomach and stronger biceps. But deep down, subconsciously, you’re afraid you might fail. So you procrastinate. “I’ll work out tomorrow,” you tell yourself. “Or next week. Or next year.” As a result, you don’t make progress. But let’s flip the script. Instead of focusing on the result — your appearance — you focus on the smallest possible action. You create a new goal: Everyday, you’ll do a single push-up. You’ve designed a goal that cannot fail. The moment you commit to this goal, you drop to the ground and do a push-up. Congratulations. You’ve succeeded today. You repeat this everyday for a week. You build a new habit and new sense of self-identity. You’re the type of person who does daily push-ups. One day, while executing your single push-up, you figure, “Ah, what the heck,” and pump out a few more. One push-up grows into five, ten, fifteen, twenty. You focus on tiny actions, rather than their potential long-term payoff. Eventually, you get results. In today's episode, Stephen Guise, author of Mini-Habits, describes how the "one push-up" mentality accelerated his progress faster than a "100-pushup" mentality ever could. He explains why he decided to start focusing on actions, he shares the technique that he uses to conquer writer's block, and he talks about embracing "imperfectionism." Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	You can afford anything but not everything and how you spend your limited resources, your
0:13.8	money, time, energy, focus, attention, how you choose to spend all of that day by day
0:20.1	defines your life.
0:21.9	Sorry, not to get too heavy, but these are some important decisions that we have to make.
0:26.4	My name is Paula Pant, I'm the host of the Afford Anything Podcast in every episode.
0:30.3	We explore how you can optimize your money, energy, time, career, attention, all of those
0:37.0	things in your life in which you can do anything, but not everything.
0:42.0	We explore how to make better decisions and how to choose the path that's right for you.
0:47.0	Today we're going to talk about a problem that affects a lot of people, procrastination.
0:53.6	My guest on today's show is named Stephen Geys, he's the author of a book called Many Habits,
0:59.6	and I brought him onto the show to talk about some of his ideas on why we procrastinate
1:05.6	and what we can do about it.
1:08.5	Stephen and I talk about many ways to beat procrastination, which you're going to hear
1:12.8	about in this upcoming episode.
1:14.7	We also talk about perfectionism, which is closely related to procrastination.
1:21.2	We discuss how to beat perfectionism, how to become an imperfectionist so that you
1:26.8	can move closer to your goals.
1:29.4	So without delay, this is Stephen Geys talking about how to overcome procrastination and
1:35.1	perfectionism.
1:36.7	You've written about how to defeat procrastination, and I think that this is a problem that a lot
1:46.6	of people have to one degree or another.
1:50.0	And in particular, you wrote a post that lists five different procrastination triggers,
	...

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