Planning your life isn't living it
I watched a video recently with a few points that are really worth sharing, especially if you often have lots of plans that still never get going.
It’s not because you lack ambition.
If anything, sometimes there’s too much of it.
You want to write. You want to start a business. You want to be productive. You want to upgrade your skills. You want a more orderly life.
But the more you want, the harder it is to start.
Planning feels like progress
The first point: we’re often more excited about planning our lives than living them.
When you get a new idea, it feels great.
You open Notion. Make a roadmap. Watch references. Set targets. Picture a more productive version of yourself.
It feels like progress.
But sometimes that isn’t work yet. It’s just enjoying the picture of the day you’ll finally change.
New ideas win the first 48 hours
The second point: new ideas usually win in the first 48 hours. At the start, everything looks possible.
- Writing a book looks cool.
- Building a business looks like freedom.
- Exercising looks healthy.
- Learning a new skill looks promising.
- Making content looks fun.
But once you hit the reality phase, you start to feel it.
Turns out it’s boring. Turns out it’s slow. Turns out it’s tiring. Turns out you have to repeat it every day.
That’s where a lot of dreams start dying, slowly.
Then we go back to watching
The third point: once the excitement is gone, we usually go back to being spectators. This is the part I relate to most.
We stop working on our own ideas and go back to scrolling.
- Watching other people write.
- Watching other people run businesses.
- Watching other people exercise.
- Watching other people live productive lives.
- Watching other people live the life we’d just designed in our heads.
In the end we feel more and more left behind.
When really, what’s happening is that we haven’t truly moved from dreaming to doing.