When You Lie to Yourself, Your Lack of Results Make You Frustrated

Here's how to stop lying to yourself and take action right now

Photo by Oleg Ivanov on Unsplash

Lying to yourself should really piss you off.

Like you should be fiercely angry when you catch yourself lying. A subscriber of mine proved this point today.

“I'll never follow through - too many distractions, too many irons in the fire, not enough commitment to my dreams. I have so many purchased (and incomplete) courses on my to-do list! A bit like all the books I bought and have yet to read. One of these days my someday-maybe projects will be ready to start.” – Bryan (made up name)

Bryan is lying to himself every day. He has zero results and wants to use busyness to cover up his crime worse than murder. One goal is all he wants. But all his tiny goals prevent him from getting started on that one goal.

So what does he do? He stays on the treadmill. He logs in every morning and works the job he calls “a pain in the ass.”

That pain in the ass takes all of his attention and energy, so he never reads those books or does those courses – even after he’s invested a small fortune that forces him to work even harder at his job.

Here’s how to get over lying to yourself and get the results.

The power of only doing one thing

The lie is you can have multiple goals at the same time. It rarely works, especially if a lot of your time is down the drain thanks to a dead-end job.

The antidote is really simple: quit all goals and choose one. Is it to travel, write a book, start a business, have a family? Pick one. I used to make this same mistake. I tried to have lots of goals. What changed is when I decided that writing is my sole focus. That level of focus 10x’d my results.

It made planning the day easy. I wake up and write. There’s no to-do list when you have one goal. To-do lists full of goals are a sign of not deciding. I call it dabbling.

You go from goal to goal and frequently change like your underwear. Because the depth of focus is so shallow, you never get any momentum. Then you end up blaming a company or screaming at the internet on twitter.

One thing is more powerful than multiple things. Choose one goal.

Listen to the BS you’re saying to yourself

If Bryan read back his email to me he’d be horrified. He’s literally telling himself “I’m all over the place and have no idea what I’m doing.” Bryan has wanted to write a book for his entire life. He still hasn’t started. Why?

He can’t see what he’s doing to himself. The lies he tells are so frequent that they look like reality after several decades. Putting off a goal to any day other than today is lying.

If a goal is important you will do one thing today towards it. Read that again.

A genuine goal, not a flaky goal, starts today. Saying you will start a goal when you have time is total bullshit. If your child was stuck in the hospital with an ax through her leg, you wouldn’t say to your boss, “I’ll visit little Lucy when I have time.”

Nope. It’s important so you would leave work right away and take time off.

The same applies to your goal. If your goal is urgent enough you can simply call in sick for work and start right now. Lies you tell yourself are destroyed by urgency. Make your one goal extremely urgent.

Mantra: when would *now* be a good time?

Use the bee’s dick approach

A bee’s dick is tiny. You need a microscope to see it (not that I’ve tried). So it’s the first step of a big goal. The first action needs to be tiny. It needs to be so tiny that you don’t even notice you’re taking action.

Tiny looks like making a 60-second phone call.
Tiny looks like bookmarking a website.
Tiny looks like scheduling 15 minutes of research in your calendar.

This is where enormous momentum is found. A tiny task is easy for your mind to process. When a task is too big for your brain, you simply schedule it later. You think to yourself “when I have more energy, time, willpower … then I’ll start.”

The truth is when these once-in-a-lifetime moments do occur, you’ll forget to use them to work on your goal. It’s natural to think you’ll have a superpower in the future you can use towards your goal. It’s also a giant unicorn fantasy.

You feel like doing the work when tiny results show up in your life. Results give you the energy to stop procrastinating and start taking action.

Stop spending money on solutions

Spending money can equal procrastination. You can buy more tools or more information. That’s what Bryan did. But all of it was useless because he never did anything with it and simply filed the resources away as “when I get time.”

You don’t need to buy a book. You need to work out what you want.

Once you know what you want, the way forward is obvious. Money doesn’t buy you the desired results. Results produced through your own effort are where the rewards lie. There’s a reason self-made feels so good.

Marry yourself

Lying to yourself shows a lack of commitment. You don’t get married and then say “I’ll spend time with them when I can.” Nope.

When you get married you commit to the person. You commit to listen to them, spend time with them, and show up for them when they need you. Marriage is a contract that’s expensive to get out of.

Imagine you married yourself. Imagine you wrote a contract with yourself about what you were going to commit to. Imagine you shared that contract with friends and family and tied the clauses of it to a penalty. Well, then you’d have motivation. Then you’d have a level of commitment that most do not, and will not ever have.

Get over your commitment issues. Make a decision you can’t easily BS your way out of. Once you get results, the desire to escape doing the work will be a thing of the past, and habits will take over and automate the action needed.

Bringing it all together

A lack of results will make you frustrated. It’s because lying to yourself erodes your level of commitment. When lies are the foundation of your life, nothing will move forward. You’ll fail automatically at most things. Radical honesty is the answer. Pick one goal you’re going to focus on and work on tiny actions to begin with.

If you find yourself delaying parts of the process, that’s a sign your liar’s brain is kicking in. Defeat lies with “I am doing this today.”

Make your one goal urgent and it will be. The results you get will remove frustration and take you to a place of exhilaration.

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