If you're ambitious but feeling lazy, then read this article

Ever felt like an invisible force is keeping you from taking action? You want it so badly. You think about it every day. But something stops you - you’re feeling mentally paralyzed, just like in those dreams where you can’t move or run.

I was in your situation, and I created a system that not only destroyed this invisible wall, but it helped me win the National Informatics Olympiad, get promoted in record time in 6 months as a software engineer (while still in university!), and in another 6 months I left and joined Amazon.

The best part: if you use these methods, you will be able to accomplish your goals no matter how motivated you are. When results are coming you will naturally be so happy and energetic that you don’t need any strategies to take action, but in those inevitable down periods without results or when you feel down, these methods will make your mood irrelevant!

Let’s finally destroy this force forever!

Step 1: Make a brain dump.

Did you know the average person has over 6,000 thoughts per day? Your brain is silently sabotaging you by trying to juggle all of them.

If you’ve ever felt mentally exhausted but couldn’t explain why, this is it. Those random thoughts popping up while you’re working? That’s your brain interrupting itself trying to remember everything.

Here’s what’s happening: your brain is made to process and find solutions, not to store information. Using your incredible brain as a to-do list is like using a Ferrari as a storage shed - a complete waste of high-performance machinery on a task any cheap structure could handle. Or like asking a surgeon to memorize your phone contacts - their expertise is wasted on something any phone can do.

Think about it - have you ever been solving a complex problem when suddenly your brain interrupts with “don’t forget to buy milk”? Or could not focus because your mental energy was consumed by remembering appointments and deadlines? That’s your Ferrari engine being used as a storage closet.

The solution is simple but transformative: get EVERYTHING (tasks, meetings, worries) out of your head and onto paper or a digital system you trust. The immediate relief you’ll feel is just the beginning - wait until you experience the surge in creative problem-solving when your brain is finally free to do what it’s truly designed for.

Step 2: Let’s filter!

Here’s a shocking truth: 80% of what you’re trying to accomplish right now may be completely worthless. I know that sounds harsh, but stay with me.

To find out if a goal is useless, ask yourself this question: “Will this goal make any meaningful difference in my life 1, 5, or 10 years from now?”

If the answer is no, it’s 100% stealing time and energy from what actually matters. Be ruthless. Only do the remaining goals; anything else is totally useless and a distraction.

Now, this isn’t about ditching essentials. Of course, eating supports long-term health. Going to school can indeed be a distraction, but only if you have a better plan.

Now for the remaining goals, let’s add another filter to make sure you actually want the results: Do you do this goal to impress or please others? My system would work for these goals also, but this is your life to live and you only get one, so don’t spend all this energy to climb the wrong ladder.

Stick with me, because I’ve got a bonus hack later in this video that specifically handles this pressure of ‘what other people think’.

We just won a lot of life back not only by not spending effort, but also by not worrying, scheduling, and forcing ourselves to do a goal that we weren’t supposed to do anyway.

Now we can focus our precious resources - time, energy, money - on the small number of goals that will actually transform our lives.

Remember: These sacrifices of time and money are needed for accomplishment; that’s why it’s important to only sacrifice for the goals that are worth it.

Step 3: Let’s Break Down

Your brain craves clarity and completion. When a task is undefined, your mind will constantly loop back to it, creating that feeling of overwhelm that keeps you frozen in place.

Here’s how to break the cycle: get specific about what a “done” task looks like. Then break it down into smaller steps.

But why this works? Let’s imagine that invisible force we talked about is literally holding you down. How do you defeat it? It’s impossible unless you complete a specific task! And you cannot know if a task is completed unless you define it or break it down into manageable pieces. Each completed piece is like slapping this force. If you define when a task is done, then you know exactly when you land a slap! Even better, seeing a visual progress bar fill up automatically as you complete a piece makes this concrete – you see the slap land. Otherwise, with vague tasks you’re not sure when the task is done, so we are not sure that force received the slap. It may sound crazy, but if it works, who cares.

This force, whether it exists or not, its damage is real and it’s taking your time forever; you cannot get it back later.

Other people face external barriers - corrupt systems, economic hardship, or even war zones. Your barrier is internal, which means you have complete power to overcome it. Take advantage of this and don’t let your internal force be worse than an external force.

Take your revenge now, create your first task; the task can even be to break down your goal. I recommend using PerspecTask, the app I made specifically for this. Your goals are end-to-end encrypted, so nobody can read your goals. You can find the link in the description.

Step 4: Get them done somehow.

Now that you’ve identified your most important goals, broken them down into specific tasks, and scheduled them - it’s time for the most powerful step: Take yourself out of the equation.

These goals need to get done. Period. It doesn’t matter how: maybe someone randomly slips and falls on your notebook and decides to do your tasks, maybe you pay someone capable if you have the resources, or most likely, you do them yourself - but the point is, they must happen.

This removes your biggest excuse: “I don’t feel like it.” It’s not about you anymore. It’s about the tasks. They need to somehow get done.

This mindset demolishes common excuses:

“I’m not motivated today” - Irrelevant. The task doesn’t care about your motivation. What does motivation even mean? It means you have a reason to do it. If you don’t have a reason worth the time and effort, then stop doing it; it makes no sense. The goal somehow skipped the filter in step 2.

“I’m tired” - Legitimate, but only introduces a temporary delay until you’ve rested. Being tired doesn’t cancel the goal, just postpones it briefly.

“I’m distracted by social media” - This is different. Unlike hunger or fatigue, social media addiction isn’t a biological need. It’s a pure delay with zero upside.

Here’s a crucial insight: If you stop wasting time on addictions, that doesn’t mean you accomplished your goals; you still have to do them. There’s no upside if you don’t have addictions. So there’s no point even talking about them.

If you feel lazy, it’s because the task you want to do is boring compared with all of the notifications and distractions on your phone or computer. Your brain actually tries to help you, it wants you to have the biggest dopamine, so it makes this specific task boring so that you do something else.

For simple tasks, maybe you can afford a few interruptions – your 5-minute job becomes 20. Annoying, but doable. But for those hard, important tasks? The ones that truly move the needle? You have zero chance if your focus is broken. They’ll drag on forever, or worse, you’ll never even start. This is where you become ruthless: Remove. All. Distractions. Your phone, noisy notifications, anything that distracts your mind every 5 minutes.

Start a timer for your task so you can commit to it and do it as fast as you can. Next time you can use this to try to beat your record.

Step 5: Rewire Your Brain’s Reward System

Here’s the brutal truth about motivation: your brain doesn’t care about your long-term goals. It cares about dopamine - the neurochemical that makes you feel good right now.

This is why scrolling social media for 3 hours feels easier than working on your business for 30 minutes. Each notification, like, and new post gives you an instant dopamine hit with zero effort. Your brain is being hijacked.

But instead of fighting this reward system that has existed in the brain forever, why not use it to your advantage? What if you could train your brain to get more pleasure from achievement than distraction?

The secret is understanding that dopamine isn’t just released when you experience pleasure - it’s released in anticipation of reward. This is why the excitement of buying something is often better than actually having it.

Here’s how to rewire your reward system in 3 steps:

First, create immediate rewards for taking action. When you start a task, you can start a timer: now you’re on a mission to do it as fast as possible. It’s like a challenge and game to you to see how fast you can do it. Just like a game where you need to finish the level or the race as fast as possible.

Second, celebrate progress. Acknowledge every tiny win along the way. The act of marking the task as completed and seeing your progress bar increasing, triggers a small dopamine hit. Your brain learns to associate progress with pleasure.

Third - and this is crucial - track your streaks and achievements. The visual evidence of your progress creates powerful dopamine feedback loops. I use the reflection page where everything is calculated automatically. I can see streaks, number of completed tasks every day and my working cycles. This is done automatically, otherwise with pen and paper would be hard to manually track all of this. This makes you motivated to keep the streak and to improve your past performance, just like any athlete. Without this tracking you don’t know what to improve and when you managed to improved it.

Now, a crucial condition for this rewiring to work: You have to reduce the cheap, easy dopamine hits from elsewhere. If your brain is constantly flooded by the instant gratification of social media or sugary snacks, the subtle-but-powerful dopamine from achievement will be insignificant in comparison. A person living 100 years ago would be addicted to this system and accomplish more than you because he didn’t have your distractions. You have a huge advantage over him by having all of this technology available, you can do things 100 or even 1000 times faster. But if you introduce distractions, you’re like the rabbit who runs very fast for a few minutes, then takes a break for a few hours. While he is the tortoise who walks slowly but constantly. In the end he beats you even with all your advanced tools.

Remember: By deliberately triggering achievement-based dopamine, you create an upward spiral where taking action becomes the default, not the exception.

Start with just one small task today. Track it, celebrate it, and watch how your brain begins to crave the feeling of accomplishment more than distraction.

Bonus hack: Don’t care what others think.

I promised you a hack earlier in the video, here it is:

A lot of people stop from taking action because they think friends will not talk with them anymore or they may judge them. Solve this by remembering that they are not the ones facing the consequences: you are.

After realizing this, some people genuinely don’t care what others think anymore.

But, if you still care, I have a solution for that also. Is hard because it is ingrained in human brains since birth, then instead of fighting this, use it to your advantage. Think about role models, or even better if you personally know them, that you want to impress, and impress those. Think about what type of person would be impressed if you achieve the goal you are procrastinating, and try to impress that person by achieving it. In this way, even if you’re from a country where caring about what others think is ingrained in your blood, then use it instead of fighting it. Instead of others using this against you, you use it to your advantage. That’s smart. If you don’t know anyone to impress to your advantage, invent one; otherwise, it becomes a new excuse that you don’t know anyone to impress.

Conclusion

So, what’s your first move? Write your first task in PerspecTask, break it down if necessary, then, commit: Start that timer, eliminate distractions, and see it through. Even if it feels like a grind at first, finish that one task. After you’re finished, I’ll see you in the next video where I show you how not to let life pass by without grabbing its fruits.