Dan Martell - September 09, 2025


You’re not Lazy. You’re scared. Here’s how to fix it.


Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

153.8355

Word count

1,480

Sentence count

93

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

What if procrastination wasn t laziness, it was fear in disguise? What are you delaying because you re scared of the outcome? What s stopping you from achieving your goals? What s holding you back?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
00:00:00.000 What if procrastination wasn't laziness, it's fear in disguise?
00:00:05.640 What are you delaying because you're scared of the outcome?
00:00:10.200 What are you putting off because you're actually scared of achieving, not failing?
00:00:18.460 Think about it. I want you to do a few things.
00:00:20.600 Number one, I want you to identify the real fear behind it today.
00:00:26.160 Whatever that decision you're looking to make,
00:00:29.100 whatever scares you about it,
00:00:31.360 I need you to give it a name, give it a label.
00:00:34.820 Be clear about it.
00:00:36.780 Again, most people think, well, no, I'll get to it.
00:00:39.940 I'm just, you know, I'm trying to get it better.
00:00:41.420 No, no, there's something about it that scares you.
00:00:43.560 Use this thing called the two-minute rule. 0.75
00:00:45.360 My philosophy is that if I get an email, a text message,
00:00:49.960 something that gives me anxiety around like,
00:00:52.780 should I say yes?
00:00:53.640 I just want to use the two-minute rule to move it forward.
00:00:57.020 What's the smallest possible action I could do to move it forward?
00:01:01.240 Sometimes I call it the mins, most important next step.
00:01:04.320 That two-minute rule gets me to default to action.
00:01:09.040 Not slow down, not overthink it, move it forward.
00:01:13.300 And then for me, it's the whole reframe that action is less painful than anticipation.
00:01:21.900 This one's crazy.
00:01:23.640 Have you ever seen people, maybe you've done it, I know I have, where the anticipation of failure
00:01:30.660 is the pain and is bigger than actually what happens from deciding to do?
00:01:37.220 Wild, but true. The second big idea when it comes to procrastination is that motivation isn't
00:01:47.200 required. Motivation follows action, not the other way around. Hear me say this again.
00:01:52.680 motivation follows action not the other way around when i was a teenager i found myself in a sticky
00:02:01.520 situation i ended up in prison an adult prison due to the severity of the crimes i'd committed
00:02:08.360 i grew up in addiction i grew up in really troubled to say that it was colorful would be
00:02:15.140 an understatement. But here's the gift that that gave me, is that I realized anytime I had
00:02:23.000 negativity in my mind, I could drop down and do push-ups. I could do tricep extensions off my bed.
00:02:30.020 I could do air squats. Essentially, the fastest way for me to change my mental state was to move
00:02:37.560 my body. What a crazy concept. Or even just like sit down and write a letter. Like, get out of my
00:02:45.680 head. Not sit there and think about it and think about it and think about it. See, the action
00:02:53.140 created the momentum. Momentum created motivation. Most people get it wrong. They're like, I don't
00:03:00.840 feel motivated. Don't do that to yourself. If you've got to be motivated to take action,
00:03:08.280 you're in trouble. Default. Go. Move. Action. That's my question to you. What's the simplest,
00:03:17.240 smallest action you could take in the next five minutes to push that thing forward?
00:03:22.640 You know that thing you've been putting off? That one? What is the action that you could take right
00:03:28.040 now in the next five minutes that would do anything at all to move it forward it could be by a domain
00:03:35.880 it could be create that instagram account it could be published on video you know do that
00:03:43.080 here's a few things that help you really crystallize this concept first off is don't wait
00:03:50.520 for the perfect headspace create it don't wait for it don't wait for you i gotta be inspired
00:03:57.160 don't do that create it how take action that leads to motivation the other thing is to think about it
00:04:06.440 like stacking micro winds right like stacking them early in the day like when i wake up
00:04:14.920 i want to use my morning when i am most in tuned to what i want to create most in tune to
00:04:21.880 to the motivation, the inspiration, and use that to take action to win.
00:04:32.320 There's this guy, Charlie.
00:04:33.940 He has this idea called winning streaks.
00:04:36.600 He celebrates the micro wins.
00:04:39.000 Because he celebrates the micro wins, he creates the momentum.
00:04:42.160 Every time, no matter how small of a win he has, he goes, winning streak, winning streak.
00:04:49.920 I love that concept. Winning streak to move it forward. And then here is the big one, and this
00:04:56.720 is what I do every day, is always set a deadline 20% shorter, 30% shorter than what you think it
00:05:04.400 needs to be to create a forcing function for you to focus. Oftentimes, it's just because we give
00:05:10.480 ourselves too much time to get something done that we could get done sooner, and then we delay
00:05:15.320 and procrastinate, it almost like creates a snowball on itself. So the second big principle
00:05:21.180 is motivation follows action, not the other way around. The third that is the most important is
00:05:28.760 procrastination compounds regret. Procrastination is like a negative spiral. I either think we're
00:05:37.960 spiraling up or spiraling down. And every time you delay, you procrastinate, you just make it worse.
00:05:44.840 you get inside your head. See, I remember one time I had this idea for a software company
00:05:49.920 and I was super passionate about it. I even drew it in my notebook and how it could work. And
00:05:55.540 I probably spent like six months thinking about it, designing it. It could do this,
00:06:00.960 it could do that. And then one day I see online that a company had launched and raised millions
00:06:08.260 of dollars on the exact same idea. Waiting did not make that idea better. It procrastinated
00:06:16.860 the regret. It delayed the outcome. And it was harmful and very expensive. It costs a lot of
00:06:26.880 money. Like, think about it. At any point, I could have launched this. I know you think, oh,
00:06:32.180 but Dan, maybe they've been working on it for a while and you're not them and all these. And I
00:06:36.820 get it because by saying that, you make it okay for you. But I'm telling you, procrastination
00:06:41.840 compounds regret. Here's the lesson I want you to take around that philosophy. First off is that
00:06:47.600 you have to treat inaction as a massive cost. See, most of us, myself included, will do more to avoid
00:06:55.860 pain than we will to get a gain. So it's not a neutral choice. If you want to force yourself
00:07:04.780 to take action, then you have to consider it a massive cost. See, when you start treating your
00:07:10.640 hour as an example, like it's worth $500, maybe you got to go to $1,000. But make it really
00:07:18.680 substantial because then you would go, oh, that inaction, that delaying it, that waste of that
00:07:26.660 time costs me. And that is what you want to internalize to push you forward to stop procrastinating.
00:07:34.780 The other one is that big projects need to be broken down into like 48-hour sprints.
00:07:42.360 Like I just break them down and just go, okay, I got two days to get this part done,
00:07:46.460 two days to get this part done, two days to get this part done.
00:07:48.820 Even within those bigger projects, I like to use Pomodoro,
00:07:52.800 which is 25 minutes of work, five minutes of reset, 25 minutes of work, five minutes of reset.
00:07:57.940 I put my AirPods on, listen to some EDM music, some beats.
00:08:01.620 I don't even like words.
00:08:02.600 and I have my timer on my laptop
00:08:05.640 and it's just going off every 25 minutes counting down
00:08:08.560 and I have a focused outcome for that period of work
00:08:11.740 and it keeps me locked in.
00:08:13.700 You just gotta figure out
00:08:14.820 what is it that gets you focused to take action?
00:08:20.220 And then for me, it's finishing up my day when I'm done.
00:08:25.560 Okay, I have a note file, I open up
00:08:27.240 and I put in everything that I didn't finish that day
00:08:30.640 that I'm committing to starting my next day with.
00:08:34.960 That's how I'm able to like disconnect,
00:08:37.900 go home and be with my kids.
00:08:39.800 Because I don't have open loops
00:08:41.300 because the open loops are written down
00:08:43.040 and that's what I'm deciding at the end of my day
00:08:45.400 to start with the following day
00:08:47.340 to make sure that when I wake up, boom, we attack it.
00:08:50.840 We hit it.
00:08:51.840 Again, we're creating momentum.
00:08:54.540 That is the process.
00:08:57.580 So think about it.
00:08:58.420 procrastination is a is a protection mechanism it's there to keep you from pain that's the fear
00:09:06.080 the other one is that the motivation follows action not the other way around and then what
00:09:13.720 i just shared which is that procrastination compounds regret if we don't get ahead of it
00:09:19.560 it will just make you feel worse so my question below in the comments i want to hear from you
00:09:24.960 what's the one thing you've been putting off what is the one thing that you know
00:09:31.500 on your heart you want to do and because you're listening to this you take action on