How To Stop Feeling Rushed

Welcome to Hard Talk. I'm Isaiah. You're here for the hard truth and I'm here to give it to you. Life will push you around if you let it. If you don't set the agenda for your life, other people will set the agenda for you. On a long enough timeline you'll feel pushed and pulled by dozens of mandatory activities. Get to work on time, go to this meeting, answer this email. Then at the end of each day you'll get home exhausted and have nothing left to do. You have no energy left to do anything meaningful. You'll pop something in the microwave, sit in front of the TV for 4 hours and pass out on the couch like a drug addict.

The only way to avoid this fate is to reclaim your sense of urgency. You need to stop letting other people use your sense of urgency against you and instead start using it to your own advantage.

Look, the more you let others control your sense of urgency, the more miserable you'll be in life. In order to live a happy life you need to control your sense of urgency. You need to use it to your advantage only. There are 3 keys to making this happen. First, stop letting other people make you feel hurried. Urgency is a blessing, but it can also be a curse. It depends on how you use it. It depends on who you let use it. If you use your sense of urgency to your advantage, you will achieve your goals quickly, but if you let others use your sense of urgency against you, you will meet your doom, you will be miserable.

Allowing others to constantly hurry you, to press you forward and do their bidding, is what will make you feel busy and empty. You'll feel like you're hurrying up and waiting all the time. This is how you will feel every day, like you're running someone else's race and you can never catch up. You'll be told to sit and wait your turn, and then to hurry up, so that you get your turn. You'll never be happy.

The only way to break free from this cycle is to realize that nothing anyone else wants you to do is urgent. Really it's not. The only thing that's urgent for your life is the achievement of your personal goals. You can either chase your goals urgently or live frantically trying to help everyone else chase and achieve their goals. Start training others to never use your sense of urgency against you. You can do this by being less and less responsive to other people's urgent requests. Your sense of urgency is a tool you should use on yourself to get your mission oriented tasks done. It's not a tool that other people should use on you to get their tasks done.

Second, commit to the moment by eliminating backup plans. Bet on yourself, not others. The first step to making your biggest goals a reality is to make a decision. A real decision where you cut yourself off from other options. Too many people clutter their lives with secondary projects, stale relationships and comfortable positions in the hopes that they will always something to fall back on. They choke themselves with these safety nets. Look, you can't develop a master plan for your life until you've burned all your little sad backup plans. Most people are either too afraid to commit or either too lazy to decide on a path for their lives.

The explosion of choices now available to everyone in the world negatively impacts these people's desires and expectations. As a result, they vaguely desire everything without really wanting any one thing. They expect it all but have no idea what to expect. The only way to avoid to this trap is to trust yourself. Rely on yourself. Cast aside your backup plans and your safety nets, and commit completely to where you are right now. Commit to a single path forward. Commit to the biggest, scariest thing that you want to achieve. Realize that your life is ending one minute at a time and your one chance to achieve something great is now, not later.

Third, take risks that put you in do or die positions. Necessity is the mother of invention. This is an English saying meaning that difficult or impossible scenarios create innovation. They create solutions that would otherwise never be created. The solution is only possible with the problem. Without an urgent problem to solve, nothing would get done. The same is true for your life. It's only when you are forced to act urgently that you become imaginative and tenacious. It's only when you're given no way out that you create a way out.

The key is to start using this to your advantage. You have to step outside of your comfort zone and put yourself in unsafe positions where you have to either act or go down. You have to take risks. You have to break the rules. No one is ever going to come up to you and tap you on the shoulder and say, "It's your turn," or, "It's okay to break the rules." Instead the world is going to continue to dump rules on you and say things like, "Think before you speak," "Wait your turn," "Do what you're told," and, "Don't get ahead of yourself."