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Monthly Method Podcast is a show for solopreneurs, creators, and artists who have a burning desire to launch a project. The project your best life depends on.
Your host, Polina Bee, is a certified SCRUM master. She brings a proven record of launching successful projects, both professional and personal.
You will hear about tested techniques that lead to calm, consistency and results.
Subscribe to turn your idea into reality one month at a time.
[00:00:00] This year I've realized Something counterintuitive about Black Friday and it helped me. Look at New Year's resolutions from a new angle and also explain the best decision I've made last year.
The Black Friday Story
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So what was it about Black Friday? This year i've noticed something interesting and counterintuitive about my own purchasing behavior,
starting in about late October whenever I wanted to buy something non-essential, I would tell myself, I'll wait for Black Friday. I'm sure it'll go on sale and I'll come back and buy it and that way I'll save a lot of money.
I postponed a bunch of purchases I would otherwise make till Black Friday .
Then guess what? Black Friday came, [00:01:00] and I didn't go to a mall because going to a mall on Black Friday
it's basically my nightmare. The only thing I bought was this microphone and I bought it online through Amazon, and that's it. It wasn't even the thing that I postponed purchasing. All the things that I postponed, I did not end up buying . And funny enough, I don't even remember half of them.
So that got me thinking. Yes, black Friday is a huge sales day. I get it. I'm not arguing against the statistics, but how much do stores lose on revenue leading up to Black Friday when people like me start postponing their purchases and I'm sure. A big chunk of this postponed purchases don't end up happening on Black Friday.
My [00:02:00] question, if Black Friday didn't exist,
would all that spending just be equally spread out throughout the month leading to Black Friday?
Are we just kind of like compressing all this purchases to one day?
It was very clear that in my case, . The economy. Would see a lot more of my purchases of my money. If Black Friday didn't exist, there would be a lot more impulse purchases leading up to Black Friday that would not get postponed.
How Black Friday is similar to New Year's Resolutions
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And then the bigger realization hit me. This is exactly what we do with our New Year's resolutions. Come October, November, December, we start postponing our goals. We start saying, I'll start on January 1st. On the first. I'll get serious [00:03:00] about this thing. And if you miss January 1st, there is always your birthday or back to school season.
So there's always like a big date that is coming up in a few months that you can postpone your goals till. But what we're actually practicing three months leading to January 1st is the art of waiting. We are rehearsing postponement.
We are training our brain to think when something is important. The first thing I do. Is I find a good date sometime in the future for when I can start it.
That's what I like to call The Meta Lesson so there's the verbal lesson. Okay. I'll start on January 1st, but the meta lesson is what are you teaching your brain? What's the neurological pathway you are practicing at the moment?
And then January 1st [00:04:00] comes . We go all in for two or three weeks, and then our New Year's resolutions fade away. There is plenty of stats on that, and my question is, is it the willpower problem? Or is it the fact that for three months leading to January 1st, we've been practicing the meta lesson of waiting instead of doing,
Is it because we became really good and proficient at waiting. when the time came to act, we were not ready for that. We were not preparing for that. We were preparing our skillset for waiting.
My best decision of last year
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That's why my best decision of last year was simple. I decided not to wait. My new Year's resolution was to start going on a [00:05:00] daily morning walk.
As a new mom, I wanted something realistic. Simple movement that I can do anywhere, fresh air, some alone time, and something good for my mental health. Again, just. Some me time . Instead of telling my myself that I'll start on January 1st, I picked a completely random day in December.
And just started. I honestly don't remember what day it was, and it was intentional. I did not write it in my calendar, in my journal, on my phone. I did not record it. I didn't want the pressure of a big symbolic day. I just wanted to begin. I wanted to be as low key and mundane as possible.
New Year's resolutions never worked for me in the past
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One reason I started early was that every New Year's [00:06:00] resolutions that I've set for myself failed. So it was quite obvious that I didn't want to repeat the strategy that never worked for me in the past.
New Year - Old Me
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I've also noticed that in the past there was like this whole new year, new me kind of pressure and tell me if you can relate. You pick one activity, one habit that you want to establish or break, and then January 1st comes and you wake up. And this whole new year, new me vibe is flying around.
So. All of a sudden you feel like this one activity is not good enough. So you are trying to be perfect at everything and trying to reinvent all your other areas at the same time. And this perfectionism in all these areas is pretty much impossible to maintain. [00:07:00] And that's why I think a lot of our New Year's resolutions.
Fail because we have this assumption that it's new me so that it's a new life for myself. And I thought that if I start on some random day in December, I don't have the same pressure of becoming a new person. It is just one activity that is. Added to my life. It's just the morning walk. It's just waking up early and going for a walk.
That's it. The remaining parts of my life stay the same. I don't have the pressure to be perfect in those areas. it is just. Me doing this new thing
Picking the hardest time to start
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and I also deliberately picked the hardest time of the year to start daily walks December and January in Canada.
And my thinking was that if I can do it when it's cold, [00:08:00] dark,
and miserable outside. I'll have no excuse not to do it in the warmer seasons, and that was kind of like the best hypothesis that actually turned out to be true. So this past summer, I've had a few days where I would feel lazy and I wouldn't want to go for my morning walk, and I would tell myself.
Hey, listen, you walked after an ice storm. You walked during a snowstorm.
You walked when it was minus 27 degrees Celsius. Your eyelashes were frozen.
Things got intense. You had. Ice spikes for your shoes, for God's sake. Because it was so icy, so what's your excuse now?
When it's nice and sunny and beautiful outside. And I felt so lame for even thinking about [00:09:00] skipping on my morning walks because yeah, I've done it in much. More difficult circumstances and so, I'm okay to do it when it's a lot nicer, and so I shouldn't have any reason not to do it now.
The most consistent year
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Overall, it was the most consistent I've ever been when it comes to an exercise routine.
These are some screenshots from my phone.
I don't always bring it with me, but most of the time I do. You can actually see the consistency.
And I think one of the main reasons, I wouldn't say it's the only reason, but one of the main reasons for this level of consistency was the starting point. The fact that I did not wait till January 1st to start on this activity. And as a result, there wasn't a lot of perfection and drama attached to this [00:10:00] activity.
There was no pressure to be perfect, to start a brand new life to do something extraordinary. It was just a random day in December. No one cared. No one was keeping track. I didn't even keep track. I just knew I wanted to do it every day.
And even if I messed up, there's always a random day to continue doing this thing tomorrow. If you start on a random day, you can continue on a random day. Even if you fail today, you can pick up and start tomorrow because there is no perfectionism and pressure of a perfect day.
Not needing a perfect start point
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And I think the main layer to this is that by that point I got fed up with this whole message of the productivity, self-help world, driven by capitalism of course, is that there always should be a prerequisite of a perfect something [00:11:00] before you can start something, a perfect date, be it January 1st or your birthday, or back to school.
Be it a perfect notebook, a perfect app, a perfect coach, a perfect program, a perfect something, as a result, what we are teaching our brain is to always look for something before we start, and I wanted to start teaching my brain a different lesson. I wanted to teach my brain that it's okay to start on a random day in imperfect circumstances. Without having the perfect gear or any of that, that it's okay to just start.
The parenting analogy
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This actually reminds me of parenting as a parent, you are always teaching two lessons simultaneously. The first one is the verbal, what you are saying, and the second one is the meta lesson [00:12:00] of how you're behaving and how it's normal to behave in situations like that. So you might be saying. Smart things, but if you are frustrated and the way you handle your frustration by slamming the doors and walking out the meta lesson that you are teaching your child is that when you get frustrated, you shout at people, walk out and slam doors.
And in my opinion, the meta lessons are the most important lessons. That's the ones that kids usually remember, and the ones that kids model.
What are we teaching our brain?
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The same thing is true with our goals, but instead of teaching our kids, we are teaching our brain something. When you keep postponing something important till the big day when. You are teaching your brain to postpone [00:13:00] important changes, important actions, and that postponing is the first immediate thing that you do after having an idea, you are rehearsing this pattern over and over again. If it really matters, the first thing I do is I find a good reason for why not now, and I pick some magical day for when I will start.
So that's the pattern that we keep practicing over and over and over again.
And so the verbal lesson that you're teaching your brain is that, yes, I want to start this new awesome activity habit, side hustle, whatever. That's the verbal thing. But the meta lesson that you're teaching and the real lesson in my opinion, that you're teaching is that.
When we want to do something, we wait.
Waiting can be great
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And to be fair, waiting can be a great tool. I [00:14:00] have the entire video. About the benefits of waiting, about the benefits of putting things on your backlog and waiting for at least couple of weeks to see if it stands the test of time, because in my opinion, quality is always a function of time and nowadays with social media and.
Podcasts and books and all this access to information. We are always bombarded with all the additional to-dos and all the additional things we should be doing. And so in order to filter those out to something meaningful, what is a signal versus noise situation? We need to pass it through the filter and the best filter is to give it some time.
And not be, spontaneous about it. I have the whole video on this. Go check it out. I think it's called Chaotic Ambition or [00:15:00] something like that. But since we're talking about New Year's resolutions, it's different.
Chances are that if you. Picked this new habit, this new activity as your New Year's resolution. It already passed a test of time. You've been probably thinking about it from at least October. And it's probably something that you've tried to do. Every single new year and did not succeed. So in this case, I think waiting is not beneficial.
But I just wanted to say that sometimes it is.
What's so magical about January 1?
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So when you are delaying. Your New Year's resolutions, you are just reinforcing the habit of delay. And really what's so magical about January 1st compared to December 12th or January 15th. Not much. You still have pretty much the same job, same spouse, [00:16:00] same number of kids living at the same house. The weather is not that different. So what is it so different about January 1st that makes starting easier? There's nothing, it's all made up. And what I want to communicate today is that when you interrupt this pattern of waiting, you start sending your brain a different message. You start teaching it a different lesson.
When something is important, we act as soon as possible, even if it's imperfect. We act as soon as possible. We don't wait for the calendar to tell us when to start. We just start. And the more you repeat this loop, new Year's resolutions is just the first step.
Practicing the new lesson daily
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You have to practice it every single day for your brain to actually learn the lesson. The more repetitions you do, [00:17:00] the stronger your neurological pathway becomes, and then you just become the person who does things without much delay.
My favourite book about procrastination
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Right now to many of us, myself included, the natural response to improving our lives in a meaningful way is to wait. Is to plan to find a good reason why not now. And speaking of finding a good reason, why not Now, let me show you my favorite book.
One of my favorite books,, highly Intellectual and Sophisticated is. Is the Russian Classic, Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov. I'll leave it in the description notes. My copy is in Russian, but hopefully you can find it in English.
It's a Russian classic . [00:18:00] When you read the really good
book that stood the test of time. There are like thousand mind blowing ideas that have been compressed to a single sentence. And sometimes you read the sentence and you're like, oh my God. So for me, it's just I learn a lot more from this type of books about myself about. People about life.
And if you start reading literature with a lens of, , improving your life, you will find a lot of valuable lessons.
This book describes a person who is incredibly smart.
He can come up with very detailed and sophisticated explanations for why not do the thing that he needs to do now. And when you're reading these explanations, you're like, yeah, that sounds legit. That's a good reason for [00:19:00] why not do this today. This sounds logical. Okay. And then the same thing happens tomorrow and it's a new reason
and he is brilliant at. Coming up and justifying his inaction.
And he's contrasted with a friend, a German guy because, well, there's always a German guy in Russian literature in case you didn't know. And the German guy is not as sophisticated in his intellect as this Russian guy, but his way more fruitful in his actions.
And so the book compares the life of this two men. And for me, this book is incredibly uncomfortable to read, but also incredibly motivating because it describes my type of procrastination.
If you are a [00:20:00] chronic optimizer, an overthinker, an over planner.
Always trying to design just the perfect system calendar to do list trying to find the perfect productivity app, and never quite starting, always having a very sophisticated and smart reason for why not do this now. I highly recommend this book for all my intellectual friends. Yes. I'm looking at you.
People in academia read it. I think it's gonna help you out a lot. This book will hit uncomfortably close to home, but in a good way you'll be better off from reading it.
My proposal
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Let's come back to the New Year's resolutions. Here's my invitation. Don't wait.
Pick one thing. One thing that you wanted to start on January [00:21:00] 1st and start it on a random day, I would suggest start it tomorrow because you are probably watching it on some random day, on some random month, and there is nothing special going on today since you're watching this video, and it's a good day to start, if not today, at least tomorrow morning.
And seriously, why not start today
if you already know that this is something that you want to do, if you already know it's important for your health, for your family, for whatever reason. Why not do it sooner? Why not start getting the benefits of this activity sooner? Why punish yourself with waiting?
And please don't make a big announcement. Don't write this date down somewhere in your calendar. And don't post this dramatic statements on [00:22:00] social media
Just do the first thing as imperfectly as possible.
No one is watching
And don't think of it as a big deal. You are just changing one thing. You are just adding one activity or just stopping one activity. Everything else in your life remains the same. There's no point about making it a big deal. The less pressure you put on yourself, the better.
Because again, with try this new year, new me so many times never works. So let's do the opposite. Let's do same me, same life, just one tiny change.
You don't need the perfect date. You don't need the perfect notebook. You don't need the perfect productivity app, the perfect book, the perfect gear. You just need to start. And the most important thing is to remember that [00:23:00] we are always getting better at something.
And the question is. Are you getting better at waiting or doing the thing?