If you had… One shot… One opportunity…
Would you capture it, or just let it slip?
I see people quibble endlessly about many things, but surely not about the fact that Eminem’s Lose Yourself is the most uplifting song ever. I’m sure the intro piano notes and the first loop of the guitar beat already give you goosebumps, too.
I used to listen to this track every day on the bus on my way to work. I couldn’t help but progressively turn the volume up, accumulating a kind of inner energy that would burst when the beat drops just after “The clocks run out, times up, over, blaow!”. From this moment, I would be transported in a higher state until the climax of the 1’39 refrain, that instant where you’re so keyed up that you feel you could fight Gregor Clegane or go for a wingsuit flight right away.
Then the bus would drop me next to the office, I would take my headphones off and would just rush into… a dull work day. I’d know about my insecurities, but do nothing about them, do the same old things in a robotic way, but never change my routine. I’d just want to blend in and go about my monotonous life until the next time I’d listen to Lose Yourself .
Well, I’ve to admit that I definitely lost myself in this cycle. But how is that? Here’s the explanation I came to.
In the “If you had…One shot”, I used the if as an excuse. An excuse to say that “if not”, then it would be okay not to get anything going.
Postponing all the effort after a poorly defined “if” is a powerful and widespread procrastination/avoidance hack.
Every day, you can convince yourself that this won’t be The day, that there’s nothing special on the agenda to stand out, or that you’ll pass (again) this time because you’re not ready.
Every day’s circumstances can serve as an oh-so-convenient reason for inaction in good conscience.
We thus need an opposite hack, and here is my suggestion: what if we rephrased this very first line of Lose Yourself? What if we said that every day we had (at least) one shot, one opportunity? Easier said than done.
To turn this sentence around, we indeed need to shift perspectives, trade our spectator suit for an actor one, trade our absolute cost reasoning for an opportunity cost one. To understand this shift, let’s look at two examples.
- That Monday evening when I just binge-watched Netflix.
- Spectator suit, absolute cost lens: well, nobody called me to go out or go work out and there was no Facebook notification regarding an event nearby, so I did not miss anything. I did my best but I really couldn’t have had a better evening.
- Actor suit, opportunity cost lens: I could have called Ben to try that Thaï restaurant we talked about. I could have called Sam to ask him if I could join him during his running session. I could have searched the web the week before and found out that there was an event in that museum I like. Well, I definitely missed something and let all of those opportunities slip by.
2. My $10.000 bank account earns 0 interest rate.
- Spectator suit, absolute cost lens: that’s a pity, but that’s life. At least I don’t lose money.
- Actor suit, opportunity cost lens: if I did the work to invest my savings in the right financial product, I would easily earn a 2% annual net return. The cost of doing nothing is 2% x 10.000 = $200 a year.
Opportunity cost reasoning is harsh. Presented this way, it is filled up with regret and guilt. But used wisely, it can be a tremendous source of motivation to change for the better. Here are some tips to turn it this way.
- Make no excuses. We’re incredibly creative and resourceful when it comes to finding excuses for inaction: children, work, health, money, bad timing, being tired, falling behind with household chores, associative duties — I could stretch the list to make this post a 10-minutes read. Let’s use our energy to find how we can get things going instead of using it to justify why we can’t. Fun fact: many times, what we use an excuse for not doing is something we didn’t do even when the excuse didn’t exist. Bad faith, when you hold us…
- Be ruthlessly lucid on what you truly renounce to when choosing what to do with your time. Acknowledge that not deciding is a form of decision and that choosing to do nothing is choosing not to do everything you could do instead. In many cases, we do not “lose” anything in the absolute cost referential, but we do in that of potentiality. And losses can be huge. Keep Laura Vanderkam’s words in mind:
Time is finite. You are always choosing. Choose well.
- Think ahead and inquire. When you’re in the spectator suit waiting for things to come to you, it’s okay to sit there and see. But if you want to explore the world of possibilities, you have to do your homework and anticipate how you’ll spend your free time. What associations/club sports exist nearby? Are there any interesting cultural events in the coming weeks that I should register to? Which friends did I lose sight of and therefore should catch up with? Didn’t I take the resolution to go for a long walk at least twice a week? What are the long-term goals I don’t dedicate enough time to when I’m in the vortex of short-term pseudo-emergencies? Remember that in many ways, failing to plan is planning to fail.
- Fight resistance. The unstoppable rise of the attention economy gave birth to a profusion of low-quality leisure, which attractiveness is as hard to resist as the fast-food temptation. It is therefore becoming increasingly difficult to curb our natural preference for the easy solution, the instantaneous pleasure, the first order positive (but most of the time second order negative) habits. Consider this analogy: if fast-food temptation is an increasing function of how empty your fridge is, low-quality leisure attractiveness is a decreasing function of (i) the number of better options you have (hence the need to think ahead and inquire) and (ii) your ability to fight resistance.
Of course, losing or winning in the realm of potentiality is totally subjective — the same behaviour can be a win for Ben and a fail for Sam. My point is that our natural tendency to avoid putting in the hard work, coupled with the domination of low-quality leisure and distractions, will make us most often lose than win if we’re not seeing things from a cost of opportunity view.
Incidentally, shifting perspective made me cut my online time by 2 and I now engage in 8 hours of quality leisure each week, which I would have claimed impossible, dressed in my spectator suit and sporting my armada of procrastination reasonings. Now that I’ve found myself, I can truly use Eminem’s song to fuel projects that matter in the long run.
So tell me: given that you have at least one opportunity today, will you capture it, or just let it slip?
For those who would want to go further, here are inspiring references that fuelled some of the ideas above:
- Cal Newport, Digital minimalism: on the attention economy, the distinction between low-quality and quality leisure
- Laura Vanderkam’s Ted talk: on how flexible time becomes when you clearly set your priorities
