Estimated reading time: 16 minutes

Most people are ineffective and unproductive. They delay important tasks until deadlines, engage in mind-numbing and pleasurable activities for hours every day, and then wonder why their lives never improve. Some of them want to stop being lazy, but just don’t know how to do it.

One of the most uncomfortable truths about human existence is that to be successful, or at least live with freedom, you need discipline.

You need to put in the effort and work hard consistently, especially when you don’t feel like it.

How do you actually stop being lazy, though? 95% of people live like degenerates, or if they try to improve themselves, they do good habits for 2 weeks, and abandon them to go back to their old lifestyle.

In this article, I want to give you strategies and tips necessary to stop laziness and unleash your true potential.

1: Shift Your Expectations

In January, millions of people start going to the gym and eating healthy, proclaiming: “New year – New me.”

Out of all of these millions of motivated guys, though, only a few thousands manage to create the habit of working out regularly. Why?

We live in society whose main value is instant gratification. Most of us live in comfort, pleasure, and indulgence, expecting the things that we want to come immediately and with little effort.

For this reason, whenever lazy and weak-minded people try to change their lives, they fail. They expect a perfect physique with low body fat after 2 weeks of eating clean and working out. Or, when they try online business, they quit after several weeks, because their expectations of “passive income” and “get rich easy” get destroyed by a harsh reality: to succeed in business, you need to sacrifice and work hard for several months straight.

Change only comes after months of consistent efforts and building good habits.

This is known as The Slight Edge – ideology that says that actions done consistently over long periods of time bring corresponding results.

This is why to stop being lazy, you need to shift your expectations: nothing comes easily. Good things only come after months of regular efforts, whether you like it or not.

2: Set Clear Goals

This is the second most important step you need to make to overcome laziness. The major reason people fail at ceasing laziness is that they have no clear goals or objectives.

They simply try to ‘Get rich’ or ‘Get in shape’, without ever defining what exactly do those goals mean, and how you can measure or achieve them.

Instead of setting an uncertain goal like ‘Get rich’, set more specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals. Be honest: ‘Earn $30000 a month by selling supplements for fitness through building my own company’ sounds much better than simply ‘Get rich’.

If you want to achieve more in your career or life in general, set proper productivity goals, define actions that you can take to achieve them, and starting from today, go on and do them regularly.

3: Start Small

Most people make this simple, but deadly mistake: whenever they try to be productive and build good habits, they give it their all on day 1, and later abandon change entirely, going back to laziness and couch-sitting all day long. This is not how you do it.

You need to realize that consistent goods always beat intensive greats in the long run.

For example, if you want to start reading regularly, it is a bad idea to try to read 80 pages every day. Although you will likely manage to keep this pace up for 2, 3, maximum 4 days, you will quickly get tired and quit the building of this new habit. Trust me: if you really try this ‘badass’ approach, you will go back to sitting on the couch watching porn, scrolling on TikTok, and playing video games all day like a fucking loser. Intensity simply doesn’t work.

To stop being lazy, you should do the exact opposite: start small by reading , let’s say, 5-10 pages a day, and once you get comfortable, expand your daily reading practice. After 21 days, you will have built a new habit that will take no big effort but bring enjoyment and wisdom.

Start small, keep up the pace, and you’ll slowly but surely build a better life.

4: Find Your ‘Why’

Another primary reason people fail to cease laziness and change their lifestyle is that they don’t have a specific direction to move towards. They can’t identify what exactly they’ll achieve by starting to work out, or going an extra mile at work.

Lack of potential benefits in case of achievement prevents people from gaining true motivation that is needed to launch the positive cycle of change. To make more progress, find your ‘why’. Find out your reason to start and engage in the process.

For example, if you want to start your own business, give yourself an exact picture of your future life. Imagine yourself being free from the mind-numbing rat race, doing favorite hobbies, living in the house you want, driving in the car you want, and spending time with people you love.

Complete freedom is the main benefit, the ‘why’ that will keep you motivated to work hard instead of being lazy when times get difficult.

Whatever you want to change, find out the benefits of such decision and the ‘why’. Remind yourself of your purpose every day and practice visualization regularly. Speaking of visualization…

5: Visualize Your Results

Visualization is a powerful practice that can help you skyrocket your progress in all spheres of life if used correctly and consistently.

What is visualization? It is the activity of using your brain’s power and imagination to draw a picture of how you want your end results to look like.

Your mind cannot tell the difference between something that is real and something that is merely imagined. It means that if you see yourself being successful at something in your imagination, your body and mind will act as if success has happened already.

This will give you a boost of confidence and allow you to identify yourself as a winner, work your ass off, and stop being lazy.

Sit down in a quiet room for 5-10 minutes every morning, close your eyes, and imagine becoming successful: earning $10k a month, having an amazing physique, eating a healthy diet, or if you like your job, getting that promotion.

Imagine these successful scenarios as vividly and realistically as possible, engaging all 5 senses, so that your mind gets reprogrammed to chase progress and prosperity over stagnation and misery.

6: ‘Eat The Frog’

This is an extremely effective productivity technique that can help you get rid of your overthinking, excuses, and just do the necessary stuff.

Basically, if you don’t feel like doing some sort of work, and want to go scroll on TikTok instead, close your eyes, count from 5 to 1, and say to yourself: “Eat the frog.” After this you immediately start your work and do it for at least an hour with no distractions or focus-killers.

‘Eat the frog’ is the most effective in the morning, as when you complete an important task early in the day, you set up the rest of it for success and achievement. You will want to pursue more uncomfortable tasks, finish more and more of them, until at the end of the day, you lay down on your bed and sleep with pride and fulfillment.

If you have any doubts or excuses popping up in your head, ask yourself: is it better to procrastinate on the task, and feel regret for not doing it? Or is it better to finish it immediately, so that you can spend the rest of your day with pride and drive to do more?

Obsviously, the second option is a million times better. If that’s the case, why not pick ‘eating the frog’ over procrastinating and being a total loser?

Try to do the most uncomfortable task, like working out, or taking a cold shower using ‘Eat the frog’ early in the day, so that you spend the rest of it by conquring and achieving.

7: Associate Work With Pleasure

You likely already know about dopamine and what it is. In case you don’t: it is a neurotransmitter chemical in our brain that is responsible for the functioning of the reward system. It gives us motivation to do certain activities and makes it pleasurable.

Why do you think social media, porn, video games, drugs, and other degenerate habits are so hard to quit? It’s because they overstimulate the dopamine system, lower the brain’s sensitivity to dopamine, and make it crave more of the bad habit for the sake of getting that high again.

The more pleasurable an activity is, the quicker and more effectively it turns into a regular habit.

Knowing this you can associate good habits and hard work with pleasure. For example, if you want to start going to the gym regularly, you can turn on your favorite music there to associate gym with pleasure.

Similarly, if you want to do more work in less time, you can motivate yourself by drinking a cup of tea or coffee for each successful work session. Your brain will associate the reward (tasty drink) with a desirable activity (work).

This way you can trick your brain into discipline and doing hard stuff instead of being lazy and laying on the bed all evening.

8: Use Pareto Principle

Many people who want to start self-improvement or do more work never get to do so. They use “I don’t have time” as an excuse and keep living the same comfortable lives.

Oh man, I hate people like these. You do realize that all the successful folks you see around didn’t have much time too when they started? They had jobs, school, family, social lives, and yet they still managed to find time for building good habits that would slowly but surely change trajectory of their lives.

One of the main difference between successful achievers and mediocre lozers is that the former value their time and spend it only on things that truly matter.

An average guy spends 3-4 hours every day on his phone. It would be somewhat okay if that time was spent on business, or learning new information. But no. 80% of that time is wasted on mindless TikTok scrolling and weird fetish porn. Some degenerates out there waste 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, even 12 hours on their phones every fucking day!

Yet these same people whine that “they don’t have time” and cry that they supposedly can’t make a positive change and stop being lazy. Don’t be like these men.

Using Pareto Principle for Achieving More in Less Time

“So, what exactly is Pareto principle? How do you use it?” Pareto principle says that only 20% of tasks are responsible for 80% of results.

It means that to be effective and produce much more results in less time, you need to focus on those 20% tasks.

If you want to increase your business sales and get less headaches, focus your attention on calling 20% of customers who bring you 80% of income, and ignore the rest unless they call you first.

If you want to build more muscle in the gym, focus on eating the best foods, doing the most effective exercises that build muscle efficiently, and cutting out stuff that wastes your time.

There are tons of ways to use Pareto’s distribution to skyrocket your productivity and stop being lazy. Click here for a full guide on implementing this law in different spheres of life.

Set Your Priorities Straight

Implementing that law can be a bit challenging if you have tons of different tasks and unfinished assignments that need to be dealt with. To combat this issue, sort tasks you have by priority and importance.

Tier 1 tasks are tasks that bring great results, and that must be completed no matter what. Making a report, executing upon your business plan, going to the gym – all these are tasks that you should do as early in the day as possible.

Tier 2 tasks are important too, but are less urgent. Meditating, writing a blog article, making a business call for sales – these are good examples of tier 2 missions.

Tier 3 tasks are beneficial and serve a recreational purpose, but are not 100% needed to be completed. These are things like watching a movie, reading a fiction novel, or going out with friends.

Finally, tier 4 tasks are degenerate and pleasurable activities that not only are ineffective, but also harmful for your life if you overindulge in them. You should do them as little as possible, or even cut them out entirely.

Porn, video games, smoking weed, taking drugs, regular drinking – avoid these like plague, for they act like one. Сut them about to stop being lazy once and for all.

9: Use Deep Work

Deep work is a concept developed by Cal Newport – a Georgetown Universtiy IT professor, who is also an author of several books about productivity and digital minimalism.

It is focused, uninterrupted work done with maximum effort that brings your cognitive abilities to the limits, producing great value as a result.

A good example of deep work is intense writing. Believe it or not, using this technique you can write 1500 words of high-quality content in just an hour, without feeling like your brain is getting fried. How is that possible?

Engaging in deep work for extended periods of time builds focus, concentration, and entrenches one deeply in the Present Moment, turning the conscious mind off and allowing the internal success mechanism to work without any unnecessary interruptions.

The next time you will want to complete a difficult work task quickly, implement deep work.

Clean up your desktop, both in real life and on your PC. Turn off your phone, remove unnecessary, eye-catching objects, delete all unnecessary files on the computer desktop, move other files and icons into the folder titled “Everything.”

Prepare yourself a cup of coffee, or a glass of water, depending on your preference, sit down, and work intensely on the task for 1-2 hours, without any outside interruptions. Put in cognitive efforts for the first 10-20 minutes, and once you maintain that focus, let the subconsious mind do the rest of the work for you.

Take my word: your true productivity and capablities will shock you. Use the motivation you acquire from your first deep work session to kill laziness for good.

10: Do ‘Discipline Missions’

Finally, if you want to stop being lazy, start doing ‘discipline tasks’ every day. Discipline by definition is one’s ability to do and finish a certain tasks, no matter how hard it is or how they feel about it.

Being lazy means neglecting the necessary work, and only doing things that you feel like doing, such as video games, jacking off, and scrolling Instagram Reels like a zombie. If you’re reading this blog, though, you clearly want to be more than average. You want to kill laziness. You want to achieve better results no matter what your environment and mind tell you.

If you want to be like David Goggins, become an effective fighter like John Wick, be effective as if you were under NZT, and achieve great things in general, you need to learn to achieve small things first.

Start by picking several ‘discipline missions’ that you’ll do every day for the next 90 days. It could be washing dishes, cleaning your desktop, going outside and touching grass, or reading 10 book pages. Whatever your discipline missions are, write them down on a notebook or on your phone.

Once you do this, commit yourself to complete these tasks every single day without excuses. Don’t want to make your bed? You make your bed. Don’t have time to read? You read anyway. Too tired to clean up your room? You fucking clean it anyway.

Yes, I know that you can’t clean your room every single day. You can still implement it as a discipline mission that you’ll complete once or twice a week.

Pick ‘discipline missions’, and just like a soldier, complete them no matter the circumstances or excuses in your mind. This is hard, but it is the best way to stop being lazy.

Summary

Ceasing laziness can be hard, especially if you haven’t been a productive person for the most of your life. However, you now have almost all the necessary information you need to stop being lazy, and start changing yourself for better.

Adjust your expectations, set clear goals, start small, find your ‘why’, visualize your results, ‘eat the frog’, make work pleasurable, use Pareto’s law, practice deep work, and do regular discipline missions.

The question is, dear reader: will you implement it, or will you keep wasting precious time that can be spent on things that truly matter?

On the other side of fear and discomfort are the things you desire. Make sure you go after them.

If you have any questions, or want to share your own opinion with me, feel free to comment. See you next time.