Success comes to those who do unessential sh*t.
I have to remind myself of this mantra a 100 times per day, yet once internalized and followed, it’s gotten me to stick to commitments and has yielded massive results
You buy a hyped-up self-help or productivity book.
You vow to take it seriously; to implement the advice and follow the 30-day protocol to a T.
You hit the ground running. Enthusiasm blooming by the inspiring words of the intro.
You reach the end-of-chapter exercises.
Start by doing X, it says, which you do.
Now do Y, which you start, but stop half-way ‘cause it’s sorta weird and… ok you get the point.
Time now for Z… um… well … like you get why others might need to do Z, but, you… yeah, you can skip that. It really doesn’t apply. It’s useless, really. Unessential.
You figure that your time would be better spent moving on and taking productive action directed to your specific goals. No need to expend calories thinking of what you’d want someone to say about you at your eulogy (or some other sh*t).
You start up on the next chapter. Some of the time-management and habit making type stuff seems practical so you make a few mental notes. You end up skimming most of the exercises, again justifying it all with what feels like perfectly logical and valid reasons.
You get through maybe 2 or 3 more chapters like this before your interest wanes out—ok, sweet, I’ve gotten the gist of the method, let’s put it to work.
Within a few days, the practices from the book start to feel more and more like the exercises: taxing, unessential, skippable for today, not directly useful or applicable for me and my situation.
As the days go on, you continue to tweak and simplify and skip. Soon enough you’re back to your old ways, with another half-read self-help book, collecting dust on a shelf.
That was me for the longest time.
This sort of thing didn’t just extend to implementing advice in books. This habit—my kneejerk mentality to reject any activity that felt “unessential”—permeated my entire existence.
Planning and timeboxing my day, for example, seemed like a needless chore. There was no need to go through the motions: I had a mountain of work, I knew what to do, what to prioritize—so the thing to do was to get on with it and stop dilly dallying with schedulers or lists or fancy calendars or vision boards or 5-year-goals or whatever-the-heck-else.
I kept insisting to myself that the cure to procrastination, and by extension the solutions to all my life’s problems, was to just effing take action. Planning etc. was the optional, nice-to-have part. The work was not.
Needless to say, this did not play out well—and then I was hit with a massive realization.
It happened, oddly enough, as I was newly nestled in my cozy bed, exhausted after a long day. I was just about to reach over and turn off the bedside lamp when I realized I forgot to do my nightly stretches.
In that moment, my brain flooded me with the usual reasons why I should push it off. I’ll catch up tomorrow, I thought. I’m tired and need to sleep and I would mess up the sheets and I would disturb the dog, on and on … in a word, doing my stretches was entirely “unessential” and thus justifiably skippable.
But something in me made me get up—I think I had this George Costanza moment where I realized that, up until that moment, I always trusted and listed to my instinct, which would always lead to crushing failure and regrets, so maybe it was time to do the opposite.
I realized that, yeah ok, the key to staying consistent with my commitments was to stay consistent to my commitments, but what is crucial was I needed to do the things even and especially when it felt trite, unnecessary, skippable. Unessential.
In fact, it’s ALL about recognizing and grabbing at those moments. The moments were something feels unessential is, paradoxically a GIANT NEON ARROW telling you, in fact, this is essential. The more you say eff-you to your instincts and do the “unessential” the better your life will be.
One of the furry beasts we’re all fighting against on our tireless quests to get disciplined is Complacency. Complacency is the tendency to be overly-confident. To be flippant and to feel like we know what’s up, what’s at stake, and so we could do no harm.
Complacency has you think
C'mon, I have a mountain of work to do; I got deadlines up the bumbum and the stakes could not be higher… there’s just no effing way I’d rationalize pulling up my phones and risk getting sucked into Reddit. I don’t need to waste time and energy with the rigmarole of defense mechanisms—planning my work session, doing my CBT routine of getting mindful of the present moment, activating webblockers, setting up a pomodoro timer—I just need to get to work.
Complacency is the opposite of being careful. When you’re careful, you triple check that the doors are locked—meaning you do menial, repetitive, often irrational things, to eliminate ANY risks. You do your routine. You don’t trust; you don’t just let things slide. You act.
Complacency, on the other hand, has you assume all is well, and is back-up by neat rational excuses.
This all stems from our ego. And our ego is fragile. It won’t let us believe that we are flawed. Or maybe we are flawed, but it won’t let go of the idea that we have ability to “fix” things all on our own. So we resist the idea that we need assistance. We prefer to rely on willpower, on “motivation” and “inspiration”. On grit and resolve.
We don’t need training wheels and crutches to get our work done. We don’t need a bunch of rules to follow, or a schedule to dictate what we need to do and when.
We rationalize this by saying that every second that is spent on unessential planning or prepping is a second not spent on our obligations and goals.
We all are under so much pressure. Our mind constantly nagging us about how far behind we are on our work and on our dreams. We cling onto this fantasy of sitting down, working for 16 hours straight, 8 days in a row until we are all finally caught up. Only then will we do the “unessential”. Only then will we do the non-urgent. Only then will be start to meditate, or eat right, exercise, volunteer our time, or make diligent use of an agenda and day-planner.
But that’s not how it works.
What feels unessential is essential. What feels useless has it’s use—yet it’s just hidden to us in that point in time. Like votes, one is insignificant, but it’s the accumulation that counts. We need to remind ourselves of this time and again.
Today I’m not perfect, far from it. I have good days and bad days.
But one thing’s for sure, and this I learned from pure empirical data: if I have a good day, it’s only because I carved out time to do the unessential. I doggedly respected the boundaries and protocols I set ahead of time, even when it felt unimportant or useless, even when I had good or even amazing reasons to do otherwise.
That’s the key.
The day I pried myself out of bed—the coziest effing place on earth after a long hard day—to do my stupid useless annoying stretches that I could just do effing tomorrow and not die**,** was the day that the tide shifted in my development.
If you want another example, now, also before I go to bed, I’ll get myself to jot down what I will do from the moment I wake up and until dinner time.
630-700 – wake, coffee, read
700-800 – run, shower
800-815 – meditation
815-915 – obligatory 1 hour writing session
900-1200 – first work session: composed of X, Y, Z tasks/priorities/objectives
Etc.
All written out by hand.
Very often, the plan is identical to day before. Technically, the better idea is to just put an arrow in my agenda and write “do this again”. But I know that just won’t do. I have the life experience that says so: I did my experiments, which arrived at the result that I need to do my useless nighttime planning thing or else I’ll wing it the next day to an oblivion of non-important work and time wasting.
…
I care about what works, not what I assume would/should/could work.
I try to be smart in what I do. I try to optimize. But I also always make sure I do what feels unessential.
So should you.
-Simon ㋛