“We’ll start with “Fire Under Your Ass” skill.”
A client came to me last week, asking to work on procrastination.
The kind where important things - like your 10-year career vision, or fitness for when you are 90 - things drift forward, day after day, until one day they become emergencies, or impossible to achieve goals. Ten-year projects. The phone that needs fixing but not quite broken yet. The difficult call you haven’t made yet. The self-care thing you keep meaning to do.
We reflected on human nature first,
You don’t get done what’s right. You get done what’s urgent.
Unless you learn to make the right thing urgent enough.
People tell me all the time they admire my discipline. The daily exercise. The writing. Reading 2 books a week. The calls I make even when nothing is on fire yet. The time I protect for my parents because I know we have just a few summers left, and I am not going to waste them for the next 2-3 decades.
What people don’t see is the internal workout behind all of it. That’s makes discipline unnecessary.
I’ve spent years building what I call the Fire Under Your Ass skill.
And that’s what you need to work on to cancel procrastination that hurts your future life once and for all.
Your brain is wired for urgency — especially when other people are keeping you accountable, or when something threatens your status or survival right now. Evolution didn’t build you to prepare in advance. It built you to react and survive the present.
And it built you for instant rewards. Not decade-long visions.
That’s why you end up watching Netflix when tired, not reading books.
Rest now. Education later.
But just like with speaking and many other skills: you weren’t born knowing how to talk. You learned. And now you can’t imagine your life without it.
The same rewiring is possible for your long-term priorities. You can train your brain to feel urgency about your decade-away future, not just about today’s fires.
Every science-backed model on overcoming procrastination comes back to the same thing, which Nietzsche figured out a few centuries back:
“He who has a strong enough why will find any how.”
When I don’t feel like making the business calls that won’t pay off for six months — or six years — I don’t push through on willpower. I do something different.
I put myself in that future. I feel it. I ask myself: What happens if I don’t do this today?
The answer is never comfortable.
If I don’t do it today, what actually changes tomorrow? Or the day after? I don’t magically will want to do it more. I’m more likely to skip it again. And again. That’s how the best version of your future dies — not in one dramatic decision, but in a thousand small delays.
I have a real chance of cancelling my own best future by not doing the thing today.
That thought makes me restless. Agitated. It lights something. It puts my ass on fire.
I’m already late. Get moving girl!🔥
Same with the small stuff — the banking that gives me some issues, the broken software, the check-up appointment I keep postponing. Left alone, small problems don’t stay small. They wait for the worst possible moment to become urgent. So I make them urgent now, on my terms, before life makes them urgent for me.
That’s the skill. "The “Fire Under Your Ass” skill.
You manufacture the feeling of urgency from the inside, rather than waiting for the world to manufacture it for you.
You bring your future closer. You feel the cost of delay. You let that feeling move you.
This is the most important metacognitive skill I mastered — and the most under-taught. Not hustle. Not discipline in the abstract. Not willpower.
The ability to make your own priorities feel urgent enough to act on now.
Is there something you’ve been delaying? Something important that never quite makes it to today’s to-do list?
What would it take to feel — really feel — what it costs you to keep waiting? What thought can put your ass on fire strong enough to get you moving?