Let me tell you a story before I start advising you on how to revamp your lifestyle and stop procrastinating. Back in 2008, my life was completely in chaos.
You think this is that same old story, don’t you? Where a guy turns around his life-like a hero and then sells you how he did it. Nope.
I had no relationships, my career was in complete breakdown, and my mind was completely taken over by confusion.
All my efforts to improve went in vain because I procrastinated upon every plan I created for myself. Eventually, the reason was that there was no one to force me to stick to important day-to-day chores and I had little or no self-discipline to keep myself on track.
I spent most of my daily time, which should have been used to study for my upcoming professional certification exam, reading books I bought from a nearby library. Clearly, I wasn’t motivated enough to spend time doing things that were important.
I knew what my goal was. I wanted to change myself from inside. I knew that everything I saw outside was because of how I was inside. I wanted to study regularly, stop procrastinating and give my best effort. I wasn’t even giving my best effort.
Around summer 2010, I came across a few good books I should credit to for the blessed life I live now. One of them was Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill.
Here are some of the most important lessons I learned from Nap Hill. Over the next one month of my practice of these principles, I found tremendous inflow of inspiration and concentration.
- Don’t wait for the perfect plan to appear before you. Just take the first step. If you find an obstacle and it looks so big you feel lazy and under motivated to tackle it, you seriously need to rethink your desires. If you desire is like a burning fire, obstacles look like opportunities.
- Keep reminding yourself and your subconscious about your goals. We live in a world where thousands of things happen around us everyday. It’s so easy to get distracted. We need to constantly stay focused and absolutely clear about what we want. Keep a diary and write down exactly what you want every night. Let your subconscious absorb your affirmations. Read what you wrote last night every morning right after you get up, and keep reading until your mind totally absorbs and gives you the feelings of why you should pursue that goal today.
- Visualization and Affirmations can become a great combination for meditation. I used to visualize the same story again and again in my mind after writing the diary, until I fell asleep. I’d sit cross-legged, ready to go to bed instantly after my visualization and visualize and affirm to myself and feel the gratitude for following a disciplined routine, getting up and ready on time, doing my daily activities regularly.
- If you can can, find yourself a mentor who speaks his heart out. – This is hard. Really. People these days seem to have forgotten their manhood. In fact, if you want some real critics to keep nagging you to stay motivated, move in with your parents if you can. They’re were your first teachers. They somehow know what’s best for you.
- Stop over indulging in sexual activities – If you read Think and Grow Rich, you’ll find that there’s a complete chapter on the power of sex transmutation. The sexual energy resides below your navel. When one indulges too much into sexual activities, the energy gets depleted. A scientific research goes on to explain that mind literally freezes for a few seconds after ejaculation. The energy moves downwards. Try and reduce that.
In a way, I would meditate for around 10-15 minutes. Side effects were that I could sleep pretty well and get up early regularly.
It’s all about practicing again and again and staying persistent. I created a personal development plan to organize my routine activities, I tried to not procrastinate and keep in as much discipline with the routine as possible but I kept bouncing in between order and chaos. I made sure that even if I procrastinated, I completed enough to convince myself of having done something at least so that the motivation kept flowing.
These are just 5 interesting and noticeable things I practiced to begin with. But, a huge part of my order went to understanding the relative benefit. Over the upcoming months I figured more things out of the book, I practiced more.
If there is something that benefits you and you find a task that favours that benefit, you’ll want to do it more. What I wanted was to stop being lazy and adapt to an active routine and regularly work towards my goals. But I guess following rules can’t be ignored if one wants to get his life on track.
If I’ve done it, you can too. It isn’t rocket science.
And I used a time management activity one of my teachers used to advice. I’d forgotten it long ago but during one of my meditations, it appeared before me out of nowhere. Here is what you can do.
Take a paper and list down your daily activities one by one. Now, the next step is to divide you current daily activities in three categories. Category 1 – Activities that will improve my life in the future. Category 2 – activities that aren’t really necessary but I like doing them. Category 3 – Activities that get my time wasted and should not be on this list.
Now, make as much effort to perform the category 1 activities as possible. Don’t worry if you can’t ignore the unimportant but make sure you try your best and along with these, you’ll have take up some great activities in your life and you’ll add more over time.
And as you get appreciated for what you’re doing and what you’ll become for improving yourself, you’ll want to do it all more.
I didn’t have much certainty in the beginning and I also found this stuff absurd and pretty boring. But, around 10-15 days later, I actually began to notice some difference in how my mind perceived those things. My habit of procrastination was suddenly taking a reverse turn. I had a sudden inspiration when I wanted to finally lift my course guides and peek inside. The rest is what happened over the course of next two months, and over the next two years.
To conclude, make sure your intentions are utterly clear, you create a personal development plan and stay persistent. The rest follows…almost automatically.
by Jaky Astik
