On Monday I started by working on
my audio-course, the practical guide for IndieHackers on how to meet new people and build meaningful relationships. During the week I made some good progress. I drafted my launch strategy and broke it into 3 phases.
- First the private invite-only free course version where I will interview some people and will write the course outline.
- Then the pre-sales where people can buy the course for a discounted price and also influence the course directly with their feedback.
- Finally the official launch phase where the course is completed and things get even more serious for me.
On top of these I also scheduled some interviews for the next week with people who are infestered, and prepared some momtest-style questions for them.
For some reason though, it wasn’t easy to do this progress. I was constantly feeling that my progress is too slow. But still, I couldn’t change anything. It was hard to focus. It was hard to get into flow and execute. To start making progress. I had the tendency to spend more time reading successful stories of others and research for best-practices, instead of working on my course. I was looking for motivation and excitement.
I realized that execution is tough and uncomfortable. Reading and brainstorming is exciting cause no decisions have to be taken. Execution is about risks, decisions and progress. It’s about getting exposed, trying new things, failing fast and sometimes succeeding as well.
At some point I read
this article that my girlfriend sent to me. It gave me a lot of clarity on what’s going on in my mind.
Self-disciplined people view motivation as extra credit—nice to have when it shows up, but never to be expected or counted on.
Feeling inspired and motivated to hit the gym, study for a test, or work on that backyard project is great. We all love that feeling because it makes it relatively easy to do hard things.
But here’s the thing:
Most people assume that feeling motivated is required to do hard things.
People think that “if I’m not feeling it” I can’t really do it or it’s not worth even trying. We go about our lives waiting for inspiration to strike, but all the while our dreams, goals, and aspirations fade further and further into memory as life seems to pass us by.
Self-disciplined people don’t fall into this trap because they understand the true nature of the relationship between feeling and action:
Action leads to feeling just as often as feeling leads to action.
In other words, the relationship between feeling and action is a two-way street: Sure, feeling good helps you do hard things; but doing hard things makes you feel good—in particular, it makes you more motivated to do future hard things.
“Ok it’s clear now. Action brings excitement. Even if it’s not exciting at first. Once I start making progress I will feel the excitement. The only thing I need at this moment is to just become more self-disciplined and focus on executing. It’s like skateboarding. The first times I tried to ride my board, I was scared and sucked big time. But every time I tried and made some progress I was hyped and kept doing it. That’s your challenge for the next weeks Jim. To get into more action.”