One of the best predictors of lifetime-success is conscientiousness.What can you do about your industriousness? Procrastination the main obstacle in your way. To stop procrastinating you can work on micro-habits with regards to your conscientiousness and the way implementing it is to set up some aims for yourself.
Set goals, that you actually value.
You're gonna have to put some effort into your life. And you need to be motivated to do that. What are the potential sources of motivation?
- 1) if you're extroverted, you want friends;
- 2) if you're agreeable, you want an intimate relationship;
- 3) if you're disagreeable, you want to win competitions;
- 4) if you're open, you want to engage in the creative activity;
- 5) if you're high in neuroticism, you want security.
Okay, so those are all sources of potential motivation, that you could draw on, that you could tailor to your own personality. But then there are dimensions, that you wanna consider your life across.
If you could have your life the way you wanted it, in 3 to 5 years, if you were taking care of yourself properly, you need to ask yourself:
- 1) What would you want from your friendships?
- 2) What would you want from your intimate relationship?
- 3) How would you like to structure your family?
- 4) What do you want for your career?
- 5) How are you going to use your time outside of your job?
- 6) How are you going to regulate your mental, physical- mental and physical health?
- 7) Your drug and alcohol use. Alcoholism, for example, wipes out 5-10% of people. So, you wanna keep that under control.
Asking these questions helps you develop a vision, of how your life is, and how you would like your life to be, and that associates the goal once the goal is established.
Break down the goal into micro-processes that you can implement, the micro-process becomes rewarding, in relation to their causal association with the goal and that tangles in your incentive reward system.
Of course, you better have a valued goal! Because otherwise, you can't get any positive motivation working out. The more valuable the goal is, in principle, the more the micro-process associated with that goal takes on a positive charge. You get up in the morning, and you're excited about the day, you're ready to go.
Specify your long term ideal.
Specify your goal then follow that, in some sense, as a unique individual. You wanna specify goals, that make you say: "Oh! If that could happen, as a consequence of my efforts, it would clearly be worthwhile!"
Because the question always is: Why do something? Doing nothing is easy. The question is, why would you ever do anything? And the answer to that has to be: Because you've determined by some means that it's worthwhile!
Where should you look for worthwhile things?
One thing you can do is to consult your own temperament. Another option is to look through things that people accrue that's valuable across the lifespan!
Family, friends, career, educational goals, plans for, you know, time outside of work, attention to your mental and physical health, etc.. One can see that's what life is about! Indeed, you don't need to have all those things, but you better have most of them.
If you don't have any of those things, then all you've got left is misery and suffering! That's a bad deal for you.
Something common among people is that they won't specify their goals, because they don't like to specify conditions for failure. If you keep yourself all vague and foggy, which is really easy, then you don't know when you fail!
You could ask: "Well, I really don't wanna know when I fail, because that's painful! So I'll keep myself blind, about when I fail!" That's fine, except you'll fail all the time then! Just won't know it until you failed so badly, that you're done which can easily happen by the time you're 40. Don't let that happen.
Once you get your goal structure set up, you think: "if I could have this life, looks like that might be worth living".
It's gonna be anxiety-provoking and threatening, and obviously, there's gonna be some suffering and loss involved, in all of that. The goal is to have a vision for your life, such that all things considered, that justifies your effort.
Something that probably is going to happen is to turn down to the micro-routine. It's like: "Okay well, this is what I'm aiming for. How does that instantiate itself, day to day, week to week, month to month?" That's where something like a schedule can be unbelievably useful.
Use Google Calendar.
Make a schedule and stick to it. The rule with the schedule is not a bloody prison! That's the first thing, that people do wrong!
Don't know what kind of schedule do you need to set up?
A common scenario could be: "Well, I have to do this, then I have to do this, then I have to do this. Then I just go play video games, because who wants to do all these things, that I have to do?"
It's totally WRONG!
Set the schedule up so that you have the day you want! That's the trick!
It's like: "Okay, I've got tomorrow, if I was gonna set it up, so it's the best possible day I could have, practically speaking, what would it look like?"
Obviously, there's a bit of responsibility that's gonna go along with that, because if you have any sense, one of the things that you're gonna insist upon, is that at the end of the day you're not in worse shape than you were at the beginning of the day, right? If you have a bunch of those in a row, you just dig yourself a hole, and then you bury yourself in it!
You can ask yourself: "Okay well, I've got these responsibilities, I have to schedule the things in, what's the right ratio of responsibility to reward?"
Maybe you do an hour of responsibility, and then you play a video game for 15 minutes. Whatever feels better to you. But you have to negotiate with yourself, and not tyrannize yourself! Pretend like you're negotiating with someone that you care for, that you would like to be productive and have a good life! That's how you make the schedule.
Plan ahead the life you'd like to have!
You may do that partly by referring to social norms. You're someone that you have to negotiate with, and you're someone that you want to present the opportunity of having a good life too! Try respecting yourself with respecting your rules. After all you are the one who has to deal with the outcome. if you assume your time isn't worthwhile, what happens is you don't just sit around randomly in a state of responsibility-less bliss. What you do, is you suffer existentially.
