No Matter What, Run the Program

I’m a believer that making plans is sacrosanct. Once you’ve made plans, unless there’s a bonafide emergency, you have to keep them, no matter what. That’s what I believe. After all – you don’t want to let the other people down that you made plans with, do you?

With that in mind, how often do you break promises to yourself? How many times do you say you’re going to do something, but you choose not to? How many excuses do you give to yourself? Things like:

”I’m too tired.”

“I can’t do this, because of what XYZ will think of me.”

“Really, it’d be better if I enjoyed myself now and I did this later.”

“I’m not procrastinating; I’m relaxing!”

All of those are excuses. If you told your friend that you made plans with that you didn’t want to hang out with them because you didn’t really feel like it, you’d let them down. They wouldn’t accept that as a valid excuse – because it’s not.

Then why do you let those same excuses prevent you from doing the work that you know you need to do? Why do you shirk your obligations in favor of anything that doesn’t require any effort?

There is a solution to your procrastination and breaking your own plans…

All you have to do, after you make the plans, is to just run the program. No matter what.

Running the Program

Sometimes, thinking of yourself as a robot is useful. This is one of those times.

If you’re in the habit of making promises to yourself and breaking them, it helps if you remind yourself to just “run the program”, no matter how you feel.

Imagine if you were a computer and could only perform actions that you were commanded to do. When you made plans beforehand to do something at a certain time – take out the trash, do your homework, go grocery shopping, meditate, whatever – you were, in effect, “programming” yourself to do something at a certain time. If you were a program, you would just run the program automatically at the time you specified.

Do computers accept excuses? No. They don’t feel, so they just run the program. They aren’t thinking about tomorrow, or the next day, or how tired mowing the lawn is going to be…

They just do it.

No complaint. It just happens, with a snap of the fingers.

Why can’t you do that? The only thing you have to do is start. Just ignore all the excuses that your mind throws at you, and run the program. Trust me – life’s much better when you start fulfilling all the promises that you made to yourself.

As you begin to run the program, no matter what, it gets easier. It acquires its own momentum, since you’re virtually programming yourself to run the program all the time.

The hardest part of doing anything is sitting down and starting. Once you’ve started, you’ll be naturally compelled to finish it.

Just run the program, get off your ass, and start. Computers don’t care about anything but running the program, and if your mind is generating excuses, you shouldn’t care either.

Note: Studies have consumed my life for the past few week, since I took a number of AP tests. Studying for them took up nearly all my free time, and I didn’t have the time to write. I’m sorry for the brief hiatus – now, I’ll always have a few posts ready in case of an emergency, so I can keep the content coming. At the very least, I’ve learned a valuable lesson, and now I’m back. -Brett