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How to Stop Procrastinating and Finally Take Action

2025-02-07 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 16:30 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Productivity and time (also: Mindset, motivation and happiness) · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: Feel-Good Productivity thesis, His own products discussed, Lesson from a book, Evidence-based framing

Mixing his own comments with animated audiobook passages from Part II of Feel-Good Productivity, Ali argues that procrastination is often driven by fear rather than laziness and gives six experiments against it: the emotion label, the identity label, the 10-10-10 rule, the confidence equation, stopping spotlighting and the Batman effect.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Fear as the hidden cause of procrastination; introduction and the book

  • ★★★ Ali says people who struggle to get started are usually not lazy, unmotivated or undisciplined: fear is the emotion holding them back. — 00:00:00
  • ★ Ali says his book Feel-Good Productivity is now a New York Times bestseller, available in paperback, Kindle and Audible formats and translated into 35 languages. — 00:00:29 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)

00:01:09 — Seven years to start his YouTube channel, and the amygdala hijack

  • ★★★ Ali wanted to start a YouTube channel from 2010 but made no video until 2017; he thought perfectionism held him back, but now says it was fear of failure, of judgment and of not being good enough. — 00:01:20 · YouTube
  • ★★ Once Ali understood the role fear played in his life, he could identify it as the primary obstacle between him and his ambitions; getting to know our fears, he says, is the first step to overcoming them. — 00:01:47 · first in: 2024-01-01, How to stop fear holding you back 💪
  • ★★ Procrastination is often about fear and anxiety, not only motivation or discipline, Ali says, because of the amygdala hijack: the brain's threat detection system overreacts to anything scary or uncertain, even with no real danger. — 00:01:47
  • ★★ The amygdala, Ali says, treats posting on LinkedIn, starting a YouTube channel or quitting a job to follow a passion as real threats, and to keep us safe nudges us towards doing nothing. — 00:02:35 · YouTube

00:03:00 — Experiment one: the emotion label

  • ★★ Ali cites a UCLA study in which people afraid of spiders who named their fear out loud felt less afraid and were more likely to approach a Chilean rose-haired tarantula. — 00:03:02
  • ★★★ Ali's first experiment against procrastination, the emotion label: instead of excuses such as being too busy, acknowledge the real fear holding you back, such as fear of failure or of what people think, and it loses its grip. — 00:03:31
  • ★★ Naming a fear works in two ways, Ali says: it increases self-awareness of our emotional patterns, and it reduces rumination. — 00:04:00
  • ★★ To name a fear, Ali advises asking where it comes from: a "me reason", about your own ability, or a "them reason", about how other people will react to what you do. — 00:04:56
  • ★★★ When Ali cannot tell what fear he feels about a task, he imagines a story of someone in his shoes and asks what they would fear; depersonalising it makes the fear easier to name. — 00:05:21

00:06:00 — Experiment two: the identity label

  • ★★ Ali cites Howard Becker, who in the 1960s found that people labelled criminal after a first crime are much more likely to offend again: labels become a self-fulfilling prophecy. — 00:06:27
  • ★★★ Ali's second experiment, the identity label: a positive label can overcome fears as a negative one amplifies them; when he feels self-doubt he calls himself a lifelong learner, who would never stay stuck procrastinating for long. — 00:06:53
  • ★★ One of the strongest forces in human personality, Ali says, is the need to stay consistent with how we label ourselves, so changing the label can change the fear beneath it and end procrastination. — 00:07:30

00:08:03 — Experiment three: the 10-10-10 rule and fear-setting

  • ★★★ Ali's third experiment, the 10-10-10 rule against catastrophising a setback such as a rejection: ask whether it will matter in 10 minutes, in 10 weeks and in 10 years. — 00:08:35
  • ★★ The 10-10-10 rule, Ali says, shows the real size of a problem: usually the failures we worry about now will not define us, and today's fears will not always matter so much. — 00:09:01
  • ★★ Whenever he faces a big or scary decision he has been putting off, Ali runs through the journaling prompts of Tim Ferriss's fear-setting exercise, which usually show him the fear is greater in his mind than in reality. — 00:09:01 · Tim Ferriss

00:10:01 — Experiment four: the confidence equation and lowering the bar

  • ★★ Ali often procrastinates on writing because he is suspended between a genuine desire to write a beautiful, helpful book and a voice saying anything he writes will be garbage. — 00:10:17 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★★ Ali's fourth experiment, the confidence equation: self-confidence equals perception of ability minus perception of standards, so we feel confident when we believe our ability exceeds the standard needed and doubtful when it falls short. — 00:10:43
  • ★★★ Against self-doubt, Ali advises asking whether you could just get started even while feeling unconfident; in most cases, he says, the answer is yes. — 00:10:43 · first in: 2023-12-16, This hack will level up your confidence ✅
  • ★★ When trying something new, Ali says, waiting to feel confident before you begin is a blocker of its own: make a start, since you will not need to be perfect for a long time. — 00:11:12 · first in: 2023-12-16, This hack will level up your confidence ✅
  • ★★ Ali finds self-doubt common in smart, successful people: trying something new, their standards are high from habit while their ability is low, yet you have to suck at something at first to get good. — 00:11:33
  • ★★★ From Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks, which he calls a very good book, Ali takes the strategy of lowering the bar and embracing mediocrity: accept that the first 100 reps will be awful. — 00:12:02

00:12:20 — Experiment five: stop spotlighting

  • ★★ Ali cites papers from the early 2000s by psychology professor Thomas Gilovich and co-authors showing that people greatly overestimate how much others think about or judge them. — 00:12:26
  • ★★★ Ali's fifth experiment, stop spotlighting: reduce the spotlight effect by reminding yourself that no one cares, for example if your first YouTube videos are terrible and cringy. — 00:13:10 · YouTube
  • ★★ Ali thinks of a "no one cares muscle": the more you do things and find that no one gives a toss, the stronger it gets, until you no longer struggle with what others will think of you. — 00:13:37

00:13:58 — Experiment six: the Batman effect, and a summary

  • ★★ Ali cites the Batman effect, found by researchers led by Rachel White at the University of Pennsylvania: children asked to imagine themselves as a superhero or admired character showed better self-control, focus and perseverance. — 00:14:01
  • ★★ Ali's sixth experiment, the Batman effect: embodying the traits of a fearless, confident alter ego lets us tap into courage and determination our regular selves might not feel. — 00:14:41
  • ★★★ For speeches Ali's alter ego is Charles Xavier: putting on fake glasses is his trigger, so he still wears glasses in public despite laser eye surgery, to overcome the imposter syndrome he often feels. — 00:15:09 · imposter syndrome
  • ★★★ Ali sums up: the solution is to develop the courage to face fear rather than to get rid of it, drawn from three sources: understand your fear (what am I afraid of, and where does it come from?), reduce it (the 10-10-10 questions against catastrophising) and overcome it (remember that most people are not thinking about you). — 00:15:09

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: 10-10-10 rule · amygdala hijack · Batman effect · confidence equation · emotion label · Feel-Good Productivity (book) · identity label · NOC mindset · spotlight effect

Also: People: Howard Becker · Oliver Burkeman · Rachel White · Thomas Gilovich · Tim Ferriss

Works: Four Thousand Weeks

Organizations: YouTube

Concepts: catastrophising · embrace the suck · fear-setting · imposter syndrome · lifelong learning · perfectionism

Characters: Charles Xavier

Also centred on Batman effect: The Batman Effect 🦇

Also centred on NOC mindset: How to overcome the fear of getting started.

Also centred on spotlight effect: How To Beat Imposter Syndrome · The Spotlight Effect 🔦 · One of the most embarrassing moments of my life 😳

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