Below, Jon Acuff shares five key insights from his new book, Procrastination Proof: Never Get Stuck Again.
Acuff is a New York Times bestselling author of 12 books. He was named one of Inc.’s Top 100 Leadership Speakers, and has delivered keynotes to companies such as Microsoft, Walmart, and Comedy Central. On his podcast, All It Takes Is a Goal, Acuff inspires hundreds of thousands of people to finish what matters most.
What’s the big idea?
Most people fail to reach their full potential not because they lack ability, but because procrastination, fear, and the search for permission prevent them from turning their intentions into consistent action.
Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Acuff himself—in the Next Big Idea app, or buy the book.
1. No one is doing “the best they can.”
You see this expressed online sometimes. They post that, “Oh, everyone is doing the best they can.” And I always think, No, they’re not. They’re doing the best they think they can. No one is ever doing exactly what they can really do. I know this is true because I commissioned a research study with a PhD named Mike Peasley. He’s a professor here in Nashville.
We have two types of people in Nashville. Our population is 90% musicians and 10% bachelorette parties. Peasley and I asked 3,000 people if they feel like they are living up to their full potential. 96% of them said no. Everyone you know knows that they are capable of doing something more, but they don’t know what to do with that awareness.
The second statistic we collected was that 50% of people feel like 50% of their potential is untapped. That means half of us are walking around with half-lived lives. That would be like only opening half of your Christmas presents every morning. You come downstairs, and there’s a big pile in the room, but for some reason, you pull back and don’t open them all.
Why does this happen? One big reason is procrastination. We are waiting. We are delaying. We are someday-ing things that we should do today. Procrastination is the gap between your actions and your intentions. It’s the gap between who you are and who you say you want to be.
I saw a statistic in The New York Times that said 82% of Americans want to write a book. It’s one of our most popular goals. Do you know how many do, based on how many books are released every year? About 1%. Some 82% say they want to, but only 1% do and that’s because of procrastination. My hope for you is to close that gap. A remarkable life happens when your actions match your intentions—when the two overlap so much that the Venn diagram of your actions and intentions looks like an eclipse.
2. Discipline isn’t enough.
I’ve never met somebody who changed their life just because of discipline. I’ve helped more than a million people with their goals, and I’ve never met somebody who said, “Yeah, today, I just decided to have grit. Today I decided to have willpower. Today I woke up and decided to sacrifice.” That’s never how life changes work. People don’t willingly leave their comfort zones.
The reason people change is usually twofold: It’s either due to a desire or a disappointment. People need something that makes being uncomfortable worth it. Desire creates discipline. When you bump into a dream you want, then you’re willing to do the work.
That’s what happened to me. In my mid-thirties, I started a blog and discovered this whole world that I could write to and interact with. Suddenly, I had a desire. I started getting up early in the morning because that was the only time I could write my blog. I had two kids under the age of 4, and I couldn’t write at any other time of the day. I had a full-time job. I stopped watching so much TV because TV was giving me nothing, and blogging was giving me everything. I found this desire to write, and it felt like a small fire, and every hour of my day felt like a log I could throw into that flame. I wanted it to get bigger. I didn’t want to procrastinate any longer. I was in my mid-thirties, and I felt behind, so I wanted to catch up. That desire to write more created the discipline I needed, not the other way around.
The one caveat I’d add is that I talked to Shawn Johnson, the Olympic gold medalist, and she pointed out that it starts with desire, but eventually the discipline will keep you going even if your desire wanes. There will be moments when motivation dissipates, and on those days, your discipline will fill in. You’ll be glad you have a habit that keeps you going.
3. Making it through the montage.
Nobody likes the montage when they’re in it. What do I mean by a montage? Well, we’ve all seen those moments in movies, haven’t we? When we see the hero make tremendous progress—be that training, falling in love, building something—but the filmmakers use a montage to speed through that timeframe.
My favorite montage is in Rocky IV, when Rocky fights Drago, the gigantic Russian. There’s this massive montage where Rocky is in Siberia, running through knee-deep snow with a log on his back. He’s training, and at the end of the montage, he screams at the top of a mountain. They show Drago, the enemy, training in a lab and taking steroids. This montage covers a lot of time in the story, but the scene we get to watch is only eight minutes and 42 seconds. When a real fighter goes to training camp, it lasts eight to 12 weeks. The movie compressed eight to 12 weeks of training into under nine minutes.
Most of life is the middle part of the montage. But we only see the quick version. We only see the after-the-montage on Instagram. We definitely don’t see the before or the middle. I encourage everyone to make it through the montage. Whenever I’m in the middle of writing a book, I remind myself that this is the montage moment. I wish I could fast-forward through the years it takes me to complete a book, from start to finish, and run the dozens of events I’ll host to speak about the book. It’s a long process. Anytime I get discouraged, I remind myself that this is the montage.
If you’re a parent, you’ll have some montage scenes. You’re going to go through adolescence with your kid. If you’re married, you’re going to have some montage scenes where you’re working on things like discovering how to talk about finances with each other, or discovering how to dream together. If you’re a business leader, there are going to be montage seasons where the supply chain gets out of whack and you have no control over that. Most of life is the montage, and the key is learning how to thrive in the montage.
4. Hook up your future self.
My favorite definition of discipline is to make tomorrow easy today. That’s all discipline is: What can I do today that makes tomorrow a little bit easier?
I first learned that lesson when I got Morning Me and Night Me on the same page. Morning Me would wake up be excited about getting going. He wanted to jump into the day. He wanted to accomplish a lot, but he’d wake up tired and feeling kind of behind from the get-go because he’d wake up without a plan. He’d wake up a little overwhelmed and he’d ask Night Me, “Hey, what did we do last night?” And Night Me would say, “Oh, I stayed up till midnight on Instagram and I ate lasagna at 1 a.m.” Morning Me was then convinced that Night Me screwed me over.
It’s important to keep in mind that the person who has to do it later is still me. There is no magical person later. It’s still me. What could Night Me do to help Morning Me? Because Morning Me is a fantastic doer. Morning me will run through a wall if you point out the right wall first, but if I wake up on a Monday morning without a plan, I struggle. If it’s 8 a.m. and I don’t know what I’m doing that day or that week and the phone’s already ringing and emails are already coming in and clients are already calling me—it’s overwhelming.
Night Me, on the other hand, is a fantastic planner. At 7 p.m., no one is bothering him. He can come up with a plan for Monday so that Morning Me can wake up and run through the wall. So, I started thinking, what can Night Me do to hook up Morning Me? What can Monday Me do to hook up Friday Me? What can 50-Year-Old Me do to hook up 70-Year-Old Me? That’s all discipline is. Make tomorrow easy today.
5. Procrastination can be solved by one word.
A one-word solution exists to procrastination. It’s probably not a word you’ve thought about in a long time, but when you were a kid, this word mattered a lot. The word is permission. Permission is what everybody is waiting for. They’re waiting for permission to do the thing they know they’re capable of.
When you were a kid, permission slips mattered most. That piece of paper meant you could go on the field trip, join the soccer team, or get past that attendance ogre that every elementary school had in the 1980s. A permission slip was everything. And when you study great stories, you notice there’s an element of permission in every single one.
Think about The Lord of the Rings. Gandalf gave Frodo permission. Gandolph said, “You have permission to be more than a hobbit. You have permission to save the whole Shire. You have permission to go on an adventure.” Think about The Matrix. Morpheus gave Neo permission when he held out the two pills. Fairy Godmother gave Cinderella permission to be more than a servant. Everybody is waiting for permission.
There are four permissions that will help you succeed:
- To dream. What do I want to do? What’s my vision? What’s my hope?
- To plan. How will I do it? What will it take? What sort of resources and time?
- To do. Are you doing it? Have you rolled up your sleeves? Are you engaged?
- To review. Did it work? Am I headed in the direction I want to go?
If you want to accomplish anything, you need to give yourself those permissions. Most people give themselves some of those permissions, but get stuck on one of them. Four different types of people get stuck:
- Dreamers get stuck dreaming.
- Perfectionists get stuck planning.
- Hustlers get stuck doing.
- Analysts get stuck reviewing.
If you can get past those four blockades, then you can do anything you want. You can truly become procrastination-proof.
This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
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