Alarm ring, you snooze it off and continue to sleep until the very last minute. You have no choice but to wake up, barely walk like a vampire to the bathroom. Your heart sink when all the soon to deadline tasks that you been dragging occupied your mind. You gobble up breakfast within ten minutes and rush off to work. After an eight hours work, home is where you look forward to. After dinner and a relaxing hot shower, nothing could get you away from the couch to catch up your favourite drama. It indeed the best hours in the day before you get on the bed.
Day after day, week after week, month after month and year after year. This process repeat itself.
You aware that there is such a random person named John who live without alarm. He wakes up vitality and the world is await him to join. After freshen up, he meet his friends up for breakfast for as long as he loves. Then, he might spend a ten minutes time to shoot an email to his virtual assistant who lives in India to assign tasks. Job of the day, done! He now could live the rest of his day like there is no tomorrow.
I believe I’m not the first one that tell you about this. These are some natural defensive reactions from most people.
"He has a rich dad!", " He is just lucky," " He has a degree from Harvard!" What's working for him doesn't mean will work for me too!" It must involve some dirty tricks in order to achieve that!" Well, he earns more than me but so what? Money couldn't buy happiness!"
Follow by some invisible scripts that you generate subconsciously.
" I’ll do that when I have …….(extra money/time/resources) as now I just don’t have what it takes.”, “ I just don’t know how to get start!”, “ I tried before and this is just not for me.” You come out with dozen excuses, trying to rationalize your current situation to make yourself feel better. Faults are all blamed on circumstance, parents, the world, the grass, the flowers, the dogs, the office, the boss, whatever it could be but yourself.
This story has literally no contribution to your life. Even worse, it drags you down and belittle yourself.
In contrary, you heard someone resigned from his day job, work his butt off to start his new path, live with a tight budget that might feed him a bread in a day and ended up getting to nowhere. This is not the end yet. He might be in debt, struggling through a hard time to look for a new job.
I believe you come across to these stories too.
“What a poor little guy that believe in dream will come true if you work hard!”, “ Thanks god that I’m mature enough to hold myself back from being such impulsive.”, “ Well, not everyone is ‘destined’ to be an entrepreneur.” , “ If and only if this is that easy.” , “ I won’t let myself to trap in this shit for sure.”
Your mind then linked this pathway to dangerous and insecure. Whenever there is the moment that your adventure spirit is calling, it comes out and put a leash on you. You surrender and take a step back to the comfort zone. The distance between you and John’s life became farer and it takes at least twice of the effort to step out again.
This story either has no value added to your future.
We have been told to avoid negative and only stick to the positive. There will not be so many commit suicide cases if this advice is worked. Negative can’t be avoided and it comes across to you in every single day for as long as you connect with the world.
Here’s the thing. Your life will still come to plateau if the processor, your brain is outdated. The information itself, no matter it associates with negative or positive influences, will not going to add any value in your life without an updated software. Like the two cases above, an “ old brain” literally makes no differences in your life regardless of the type of informations that enter to it.
Whenever a message prompt us to take action, our mind naturally biased to the safe path, a path that it knows the outcome for, by tricking us to feel comfortable in this zone. This is what makes success so precious and rare as it takes perpetual actions of intentionally thinking in the opposite way and forms the new brain.
This is a state that urges you to live intentionally, consciously prioritize your time to take massive action that you already knew you should have done in order to reach the next level in life.
It is not about getting rid of negative feelings. It arouses anyway. It is about learning to go against the flow. Take a step back when your feelings prompt you to take a certain action as usual and ask why. Has this action makes any differences in your life? Or you do this because you just feel comfortable?
For instance, you feel envy, insignificant about yourself and being so defensive when you meet someone successful than you. As usual, you self console that in someday, you will be even successful than him but just not now as you don’t have what it takes for now. You then continue with your life and wait for the someday to come by. What if you pause for a moment, pull yourself back from follow the motion of the old thinking would bring you to, and intentionally focus on what actions step that you can take for now? Internet browsing to search for relevant topic? Ask your close friends? Whatever it could be for as long as it’s not the same old path.
