The Impulse of Will - How to Get Things Done

Happy New Year!

2019 was the year I became a life coach by accident. I was consulting on a project for this guy and our conversations became less professional and more personal as the project came to an end. Not personal in a, “What are you wearing and how big are your testicles?” sort of way, but just in the sense that we started talking about his broader goals and life ambitions.

I’m very pragmatic about this sort of stuff. You want to accomplish X? Okay, what are the steps to accomplish X? Okay… well… take those steps. Problem solved. For people who overthink every last dumb detail of their lives, this sort of directness is appreciated but doesn’t come naturally.

“You give good advice,” he told me. “Would you be able to work with me as a life coach?” he asked?

“No, that’s not going to happen,” I said.

“I’ll give you $500 a month for a one hour phone call, once a month, for the next 6 months.”

$500 for one hour of my time each month seemed like a pretty great deal. “Sweet,” I thought, “Once this takes off I can shit-can that stupid magic blog.” (Just kidding, I love this stupid magic blog.)

But what I realized was this… I wasn’t getting paid $500 for a one-hour phone call. I was getting paid 70 cents an hour to take on someone else’s issues for a full month. I wasn’t just taking on his concerns and questions during that one hour, they were with me all the time. Looked at that way, it didn’t seem like as good a deal.

But, I stuck to our agreement and he ended up accomplishing a personal goal in four months that he had been working on for 14 years, and he felt it was due to my assistance. I don’t know about that. I think it just helped to have someone to feel accountable towards, and to be paying that person $500/month. That probably makes you want to make it worth it.

I asked him if there was one concept we talked about that he found most helpful and what he mentioned is what I’m going to tell you now…

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This is the type of thing that maybe won’t resonate with most of you, but it works for me and some of the people in my life.

It’s based on the notion that getting things done is easier than you think.

I’ve written four books, 12 issues of a magazine, dozens of newsletters, and 1000 or so posts in the past few years and I always hit my deadlines, even though I don’t consider myself someone who naturally has great self-control or time management skills.

You might think it takes willpower or self-discipline to do things, but I don’t think that’s true in most cases.

Resisting doing things (not eating a doughnut, not smoking crack, not spending your kid’s college fund on prostitutes or beanie babies) takes willpower and discipline.

But actually doing things is something else altogether.

Let’s imagine you need to mow your lawn. “I need to mow my lawn” you think, but it’s not something you want to do. So instead of mowing your lawn, you get online and screw around on there for a while. Then you watch some TV for a bit. Then you get back online. Then you rearrange your playing card collection. Then you watch more TV. Hours pass. It may happen that you actually don’t mow your lawn that day. But eventually, you mow your lawn.

Once you start the process of mowing the lawn, it doesn’t really take any willpower to continue. There’s not much of a chance of you stopping halfway and going back inside.

So you aren’t exerting any willpower/discipline while you’re procrastinating, and you aren’t exerting any willpower/discipline while you’re actually doing the activity.

The only time your “will” plays any role in this is in that brief moment when you decide to stop what you’re doing and go mow the lawn. It’s not an extended effort of willpower. It’s just an impulse of will that flips the switch from not doing something to doing something.

You don’t have to become a master of self-discipline, all you have to do is get better at flipping that switch with less delay. All your effort needs to be focused on just that one moment. You don’t have to worry about the full hour-long walk, you just need to flip the switch to get yourself up and put your shoes on and head out the door. You don’t need to worry about writing the whole chapter, you just need to flip the switch that gets you off the couch and on the computer writing that first sentence.

But how do you get better at flipping that switch?

You just create a magic trigger that flips the switch for you.

The trigger can be anything. it can be an action (pressing your right thumb into your left palm). It can be a word or phrase. It can be something you whistle or hum. My magic trigger is the first line of a song, so whenever I want to make myself do something, I just say, sing, hum, or tap out the rhythm to that line of the song and it magically makes me do whatever it is I know I want myself to do.

It gets stronger the more you use it, so I use it for all things big and small, whenever I want to invoke its power.

The trigger automatically flips the switch and now you’re doing the thing you want to make yourself do. Whether that be mowing the lawn, starting work on a project, approaching an attractive stranger, or closing the laptop and going to bed. You say your trigger and that signifies the end of any debate in your head. You say the trigger and get going. It works because you want it to work. It works because the part of your brain that wants to accomplish things also wants to have a magic trigger that somehow compels you to work on things.

So it’s a two step process:

First, understand that getting something done is not a matter of discipline that you need to maintain in the long-term. It’s simply a matter of flipping that switch. You may look at a task—writing a chapter in a book, say—and find it daunting, as it feels like it would require 8 hours of discipline. But it doesn’t really, it just requires enough discipline for you to initiate an impulse of will to get you to start doing it. Yes, you may feel a desire to stop doing something after you start, but that’s a weaker force than the inertia that prevents you from getting started in the first place.

Second, create a trigger—a word or action—that represents the flipping of the switch to get started. That way it’s not some free-flowing, ambiguous moment of inspiration that you hope to tap into. Instead, you create that moment by saying your trigger word.

So now, as long as you act as if you have a magic trigger, you’ll have one. (This is similar to the idea of the Magic Book in the JAMM issue 12).

But Andy, this is just a mental trick. There’s no real magic trigger. I could very well say my trigger word and then not do the thing too.

Yeah, no shit. That’s all everything is. If I said, “Here’s how not to get run over by a train. Walk next to the tracks., not on the tracks.” You could say, “Hey, that’s just a mental trick, I can still decide to walk on the tracks and get hit by a train.” Yeah, sure, dummy, you can do whatever you want.

This is a just a mindset thing that I—and some people I know—find helpful. I don’t really think of myself as self-motivated, or self-disciplined, I figure I have a good 30 seconds of discipline in me every day. But it only takes a couple of seconds to go from not doing something to starting in on it, so that 30 seconds is enough to get me on the right track multiple times throughout the day.

That’s all. Hope you all had a good holiday. I’m enjoying the shit out of myself. 2020 is going to be sweet. I’ll drop back in soon. xoxo