Now, of course, I said yes [to doing a TED Talk]. It’s always been a dream of mine to have done a TED Talk in the past.

–Tim Urban

That’s a problem for Future Homer. Man, I don’t envy that guy.

–Homer Simpson

It’s easy to make plans for Future Me. And they’re always good plans! Things that will move me closer to my business goals, relationship goals, fitness goals, everything.

For many of us it’s infinitely harder to follow through once it’s Present Me that has to do the thing that was earlier laid out for us to do.

That resistance we feel in the moment is real. But it only exists because we’ve ascribed meaning to the whole endeavour. There’s something about what it says about us, our identity, what it means for us in the future if it doesn’t work out (or if it does!) that’s immobilising us.

And so the best antidote I’ve found is to zoom in far enough that there’s no meaning to the action any more. It’s just a raw action.

As in:

• Agree with myself that the best thing for Future Me to do is to send an announcement email to my list
• That decision is final!
• Present Me just mechanically does that task. Zoom in to the level where actions look like ‘sit’… ‘open email tool’… ‘write first sentence’. At this zoom level there is no audience, so fears like ‘what if the audience hates it’ don’t make sense. And there’s no concept of a good vs bad email, either. Just these meaningless tiny actions.