How getting ready can ruin your life

Do you make plans and schedules, but never actually do the things you want or have to?

Then feel like a failure. Like the biggest procrastinator on the planet?We know, been there.

Alright, story time. We remember 2012 for a couple of things:

• Our best friend got married
• We finally got out of the slump we were in after graduating from university a year and a half ago
• We got the idea of writing a health book with healthy recipes, advice and all that stuff. Since we didn’t have a lot (or ANY extra) money back then – we decided to start a blog instead. It costs under $100 and it seemed people were making good money from it. This would be our opportunity to save money for the book.

Then, like with everything else in our life, we waited. And waited.

Then we waited some more for the right time to come. The time when we're ready and know everything about starting a blog the right way.

We read about a million and four income reports from people who made a tremendous amount of money working wherever they wanted in the world.

When we read these reports, we felt inspired, motivated and we would start to daydream.

Like, we could almost feel how we're doing this too and it’s working out for us and we're living on some sunny island, writing blog posts while drinking cocktails out of a coconut. Being able to support our family and retire our parents earlier.

But. Then we would just, for some reason, not do about it. Not ever do it. Things that were more important came and somehow the time was never right.

Until 2015 came and we felt lost. At that point we decided we have nothing to lose, so we'll just start this blog. And we did.

But the getting ready part didn’t end there. Our blog design was never solid and our content was never good enough to be seen by other people’s eyes.

It was ours and it sucked.

So we'd keep adjusting our site, keep redoing our content, keep perfecting “our strategy” and schedule, planning to get serious about it all this next month.

The time somehow never came that year. We always had work to do, places to go, people to see.

We thought that we need to be more productive, that there’s something other people know, that we don’t know.

And then we started to make plans and schedules and to do lists and reading all the time management articles that we could find. That took a long time and it gave us the illusion that just because we read all these books and listened to all these podcasts, we would somehow be able to magically finish all our tasks.

We thought that if we invested one hour planning our entire week we will be able to finish everything sooner.

Wrong.

We got into the habit of making these silly plans and full-on strategies on a regular basis.

And we can tell you: this was the biggest waste of time for us. They never happened.

Now, years after, we actually figured out how to stop always just getting ready and to finally get our life together.

How we stopped getting ready and actually got our life (sorta) together

Tip #1: Do.

Before you make a complete plan and figure out the entire strategy imagining what could and what couldn’t happen – just do. Stop wondering how this would work and what wouldn’t work. Whether this is a good idea or not.

Because honestly – you don’t know.

And the only way to know is to finally do whatever you need to do and see how it goes.

To not think that the whole world will crash and burn if you don’t fulfill your crazy goal by the crazy deadline you’ve set for yourself. If you fail.

Just do and see what happens.

Tip #2: Find beauty in the journey

If you do everything with stress, obsession, pressure and no real motivation other than getting to your goal, then that whole time between the start and finish will suck.

We've spend hours and hours and hours working on things just because we thought they’d bring us some enormous benefit. And we were hating every minute of it. It was like doing our homework with someone making us do it. Like self-discipline on steroids.

And once that much hated task was done, true we would be relieved, but then we would be crushed when we didn’t get the result we wanted. And there would be 10 more much hated to do’s waiting for us.

So now, We focus on feeling good. Not that you can feel good all the time, but we focus on not hating what we do. On doing everything with more excitement, with love and with thought.

And this is key: not overdoing it!

Whenever we start feeling “that’s enough” – it usually is, so we take a break.

For example if we want to batch create content for our blog, we do whatever we can in one day. If we can write just one article – well, that’s it for the day and we schedule it. In the past it was always first write 5 articles and then schedule them and edit them until they’re unrecognizable. Those 5 articles didn’t take one day. They took weeks and didn’t perform well.

But when we focus on one thing at a time, give it our all and then FINISH IT – we feel better, less stressed and we are actually quicker.

When the things you do feel good and you see you’re making progress, you aren’t going to want to put them off.

Tip #3: Best Things Aren’t Planned

Obviously, life happens when you’re making other plans. So stop obsessing over them. Stop expecting things to go this or that way.

Trust your life, it’s trying to show you something that’s good for you. We never thought, ever, that we wanted to work with people. We never thought that we would ever be writing a blog.

Our belief was always that we like to be alone and focused and to work in a laboratory or at a desk job. We seriously thought we were an introvert or just a weirdo. But then life put us more and more in situations where we had to work with more people.

And it surprised us. We enjoyed being around others and felt happier and more alive when we were in constant contact with others. It brought us to life and we felt like we were a kid again.

While at our desk – we felt like we're dying. We didn’t see any point in what we were doing and We were gaining weight on top.

Working with people was not something that we had planned, ever, it was never a goal of ours. But it’s something that we now know is for us. And if we didn’t trust life, if we were obsessing over our plans and rejecting what was happening in front of us – we would probably be somewhere locked in a laboratory feeling miserable right now.

Same thing with starting a blog. It wasn’t something we dreamed about when we were a kid, we wasn’t good at writing and talking to strangers wasn’t something we were interested in. But as we grew more and more, we needed to do it. We had to share what we knew and not keep those thoughts to myself, imagining that we're something special and that others have no idea about life or anything else. We needed to share, even if we wasn’t an expert at everything.