Last week I told you mine was about the weekend. I’d catch up on Saturday. I believed it across seventeen newsletters and a lot of Saturdays.
What I never did, for about 4 years, was ask where the sentence came from.
I assumed it came from me. Some flaw with my name on it. Laziness, probably, whatever word you use at 23:00 when you’re annoyed with yourself not doing enough.
I sat down and wrote out the sentences that ended things. Not that easy it turns out, but I knew I must have something tangible. My excuse was there but as unnamed thought, running wild. I had to give it a label. And a leash after.
The exact words, put in one sentence that sounded reasonable at the time.
Came up with 5.
“I’ll start when things calm down.”
“Who am I to publish this?”
“I’ve already worked eight hours.”
“It’s not ready.”
“What if I waste a year on this?”
Count how many are yours. My guess: 3.
Every one of those sentences is correct, at work. That took me embarrassingly long to see.
“I’ll start when things calm down”
Is capacity planning, and at work somebody senior does it for you.
They decide what you have room for and they tell you.
You have never once had to fight for your own time, because the boundaries arrive already drawn.
Don’t wait for things to calm down because they won’t.
You either influence the world around you as it is, or the world around you influences you without asking permission.
“Who am I to publish this”
Is sign-off. Everything you’ve shipped in the last ten years had a signature on it before it left the building.
You learned shipping requires approval, and you learned it so well it stopped looking like a rule.
If you want to tell others about it, you’re someone who knows a thing or two.
You may not be correct, yet, but you know more than the person you’re targeting it to.
You have the advantage of knowledge that goes unseen so many times.
You’d be able to teach driving. You don’t perceive it as something complicated or unknown, you also don’t perceive it as a potential thing you can teach. There are driving schools though.
You can build a spreadsheet that does the calculation instead of you doing it by hand at the end of every month. Boring. Obvious. There are weekend courses on that and people pay for them.
You know which three questions to ask before you agree to a job, so you don’t find out in week two that the budget was never real. You learned that by experience and never thought about it again. Somebody is explaining it on YouTube to 40,000 people right now.
My point is you have more authority in the right people’s eyes than you think you do. Your obvious is someone’s WOW!
“It’s not ready”
Is QA. It’s a good gate. In its original setting it holds the building up.
You left at 17:00. The software is still installed in your head and it’s still running. It still asks who approved this. Nobody uninstalls it for you, because nobody knows it’s there, including you.
So you sit down at 20:30 to work on your own thing and a system built for someone else’s building starts making decisions about it.
That’s why willpower doesn’t touch this. You’re running correct software in the wrong building, and you were promoted for having it.
“What if I waste a year on this?”
Yeah, what if? That one I’m leaving with you.
Do the other half of the sum while you’re at it. What does the year cost if you don’t. Write both numbers down and see which one you’d rather sign.
Number 3 I’m skipping on purpose. “I’ve already worked eight hours” is the heaviest one on the list and it gets the whole post next week.
So that’s where they come from. Knowing that changed nothing for me on a Tuesday.
I’d have the insight on a Sunday afternoon, feel clever about it, and then lose to the same sentence on Tuesday at 21:15 anyway.
Understanding an excuse and beating it at 21:15 are two different jobs, and only the second one gets you a project.
At 21:15, after 8 hours of work, you cannot argue with anything. Being too depleted to argue is the actual problem.
An insight you had while rested does nothing for tired you, because tired you doesn’t get to use it. Tired you has to think of it, and that’s the one thing tired you can’t do.
So you don’t leave it to tired you.
You write the answer down in advance, while you’re rested, and you make it short enough to survive a bad night.
Here’s the one I use, run on the first sentence.
“I’ll start when things calm down.”
Things calmed down in March. I did nothing with it.
I’m not waiting for time. I’m waiting for permission.
Calm was never the input.
The weekend never catches anything.
There is no emptier week coming.
Eighteen minutes fits inside a busy week.
6 lines, 6 different jobs.
1 is evidence.
It names a specific past moment when the condition was met and you still didn't act, which kills the premise with a fact instead of an argument.
You need a specific date in there.
March, last August, or the two weeks off you took and did nothing with, not even rested.
2 renames it.
The excuse survives because it’s wearing a respectable word, and “waiting for time” is respectable. “Waiting for permission” is not.
Say the real thing and it loses most of its weight.
3 is flat denial.
It’s the shortest, on purpose.
This is the one that works at 21:15 when you’ve got nothing left.
Four words. You don’t have to construct it, just remember it.
4 is aimed at the exact shape yours takes.
Mine always came dressed as the weekend, so mine names the weekend.
Yours might come dressed as after the wedding, or after the move, or once this project at work ships.
Write the version that names your specific thing.
5 kills the “later” the sentence depends on.
Every one of these excuses is promise about a future week.
Every one of those weeks arrives exactly as full as this one.
6 doesn’t argue at all.
It offers a smaller door. Eighteen minutes is small enough that the excuse has nothing to grab, and eighteen because fifteen is too standard, like something out of a productivity book, and nobody believes it.
Write two of your own under mine. Yours will be blunter, and blunter is better, because you’re the only one reading them.
Mine won’t sound like your head, and a line that doesn’t sound like your head won’t fire when you meet your problems.
Writing them is half the work. At 21:15 you are not going to open a document called counter scripts. You won’t remember it exists.
Put them somewhere your eyes already go: piece of paper next to the laptop, phone’s lock screen. I keep mine on paper because the phone is the thing I’m usually losing to.
Start with the sentence that repeats.
Go back through your dead projects and find the line that shows up in three of them. That one carries the pattern, and it’s the one worth six answers.
The excuse that felt worst at the time is usually a different one, and it can wait.
You’ll want to skip this on the grounds that it feels like affirmations, and affirmations are for smelly people with weird hair. I’d have said the same thing a year ago.
The difference is what you’re pointing at. An affirmation makes a claim about the future that you have no evidence for, which is why it bounces.
These point backwards, at things that already happened. March happened.
The weekend that caught nothing happened. You’re not talking yourself into a feeling, you’re reminding yourself of a record you already have.
Record is what makes these work. Five quits with the same line running through them is a pattern, and the pattern has a name, and once the name is written on a piece of paper next to your laptop it stops being weather and starts being a thing you can answer.
The sentence still shows up. Twice this week.
The difference is I don’t have to think of an answer anymore. I just have to read one.
You read this far, so you’re going to try it tonight. Two things are going to happen.
You’ll answer the wrong sentence.
One that feels worst is rarely the one doing the damage. Finding the real one means reading your dead projects against each other with a method.
And your six lines will run out of fuel. A counter-script only works if it’s true.
“I’m too tired tonight” sounds convincing, sounds reasonable enough. Calendar doesn’t care though, nor your goals. Were you equally
tired on the nights you did the work? Almost everybody assumes no, and almost everybody is wrong, because the nights you worked don’t get filed as tired nights. They get filed as nights you worked.
The record that makes it true can’t be built backwards. You collect it going forward.
What you just read is one page of Day 4.
The Builder Identity Install is the other thirteen days. It finds the sentence that repeats, writes the answers for all five, and builds the record that makes them fire at 21:15 instead of bouncing. 14 days, eighteen minutes a day, $27. It ships on the September 24th.
Get on the list and you get it as soon as possible!
P.S. Those who got to tests, let me know how is the beta going for you!
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