Now I am practicing turning a coin over when I want a cup of coffee. I’ve turned it over twice today already. I’ll turn it over again later when I get to work.
Sometimes its not clear what barriers are in our way and sometimes its not easy to see that coffee (or anything else) can get substituted for the hard stuff we need to do. Oh, I need to get to work, I’ll have a cup of coffee. Having a cup of coffee is much easier than actually getting to work, taking risks, and producing something.
What’s detrimental to this habit is that having a cup of coffee may seem like progress but its not. Your brain just gets it confused with other things that give you good feelings because its always there. You tell yourself that I must do great work when I drink coffee because I was drinking coffee when I did that great thing (over and over).
Reality though, is that its not the coffee. Might as well make it about turning a coin over or some other banal act of fulfillment. Then you can get on to the real work that still needs to be done.
Bam, it’s a nice trick.