My relationship with action
Hi friend, it's been a while since I last wrote here.
For the past two years, my biggest question has been, "How can I take more action? What are the components in my personal life that could help me take more action?"
In the past couple of years, I have made big and consistent changes to go from being a reader and thinker/slacker to a man of action.
Here are some things that help me take action:
SSRI
As I mentioned in my earlier post, SSRI has been super effective for me. It still is. I truly feel like it lights up my head and makes me a much more energetic human being. It sucks that this drug helps me so much, but what can you do? Each of us is built differently. SSRI is a big building block for mental energy for me that helps me take action.
General energy levels
Energy is behind everything. When there is no energy, how could you do anything? Everything falls apart if your baseline energy levels suck.
I eat a lot of chicken and fiber, do at least some intense cardio (biking in the gym), and walk every day to help increase my baseline energy levels so I can exert energy better and take action.
Mental models / Belief systems
After mental and physical energy, I think this is the next biggest impact component to help take action. It is the way you project valuations and “how and where are you willing to exert energy?”.
Baseline is, people exert energy to what they see valuable. If I believe being man of action is valuable and leads me to success, I will exert energy to be aligned with that identity. If I believe learning leads me to success, that’s where the energy goes… If I see value of getting really good at shipping things, that’s on my radar and so forth…
So the tricky part with mental world and taking action is the valuation of tasks. Conscious mind might say “that’s not high enough in value”, but in reality most single tasks are not of high value. It is the accumulation of chain of daunting tasks that build something great and opens opportunities. That is where belief systems help me take action. I believe if I do what I’m “supposed to do” consistently, and every day ship and execute things in the right domain, good things will follow.
Conceptualizations that help me take action
Competitiveness
On the “doing things what i’m supposed to do”, frequently I vision my peers doing similar tasks, and I compare myself to them. I know I can do it better. I have evidence from my gaming days that I can be better than others by stretch. This is rewarding and I like to take on challenges.
Being competitive is good fire for action, and I am sure there are many biological reasons why.
Mechanical steps
These days, I only care about the value of the task at hand, which encompasses valuations from my beliefs too. Whether the task is 'enjoyable' or not is irrelevant. The task itself is just mechanical steps. The 'joy' derives from the outcomes and the evidence I build for myself to be good at executing things. I have zero reason for procrastination as I’m always up for a challenge.
Being stuck inside your head
Even if I’m having a really good and consistent run for taking action, I did have week or two where I was drifting. I think I got too comfortable, or maybe because I started doing more declarative learning again, I got too much into my head.
Basically my poor weeks came from internal conflict between my consciousness saying “these are all low value tasks”, which resulted to confusion on what to do, and figuring maybe I need better things to do … which resulted in doing nothing.
Sure, sometimes there are some big steps you can take right away, but I think most big things are chain of smaller (lower value) building blocks. And the more you stack them and on different domains, the more opportunities show up….
So what did I do? I think it was some TikTok video saying “don’t get stuck in the short term game, it just leads to pressure and blblaba”… which lead me to realization that I indeed had bunch of short-term stressors in my life, and I wanted some quick path to relief.
So after that clicked, I kept on going with doing what is on my list, check off the tasks one by one, and being less stuck in my head.
Bonus
P.S. one of the most important tricks to help me execute better is to not get stuck. Brain likes clear orders. It’s main purpose is to decide the next step for animal to take.
Previously I posted about Notes on execution that has step by step “algorithm” of not getting stuck. I still use it with notepad when there is uncertainty in the plan. That and abstraction skills help me keep moving forward.
Besides that, next on my list is getting more efficient and quicker on shipping things. There is lot to learn.
P.P.S, summer is here, so long cold freezing winter of Finland! Hope you have a good one pal.
Niko