ALOIS GRABER

Date: 24th february 2025

SUBSTITUTION FOR ACTION: HOW TO AVOID NOT DOING WHAT YOU WANT

Backstory

Skip to the theory part if you want to.

6 months ago all I wanted was to pass university. Please god let me pass.

Like the typical young person I was spending 4h per day watching stuff like Youtube. But I had a feeling inside of me that wanted to do more. To make something. To be someone. And I felt that something was holding me back. I couldn't quite say what. But I felt something.

This was when I saw a video of HeathyGamerGGtalking about end-stage screen addiction. So I stopped. I just did. No more entertainment of my mind. But I didn't pressure myself to work for school. I just didn't do screens.
So I did nothing. And after some time I was stuggling a bit to face myself. But I kept at it. After a couple of hours I decided I wanted to do something for school. And I did.

Three months later I finished the first semester being the 2nd best of all of the people I knew in my class. I never had good grades in my whole life. I felt like Kung Fu Panda when he used his pinky finger to defeat the enemy. What did it mean? Why was this happening?

Some time later I fell on this ted talk from Derek Sivers.

Theory

Whenever anyone of us wants to do something there is energy in our minds that tells us to do it. The problem is that instead of actually doing it, we have a lot of substitues in todays world. Substitues are great if the thing you want to do is bad. E.g. if you want to kill someone and you tell them instead of doing it then it's probably a good thing. Or if we want to get people involved in something or brainstorm ideas it is common sense that we need to tell them. But they are increadibly dangerous if you actually want to do something. They satisfy the need to do something without us actually having done anything. They send a lot of dopamine. But when we need that dopamine to execute the action it isn't here anymore. The result is that we feel numb. Unable to move towards something. Here are a couple of substitues:

• Seeing other people do what we want to do or something else. E.g. Instagram, Tiktok, Youtube.
• Telling someone what we want to do. If we tell someone what we want, next time we'll want to do it instead of actually going out and doing it, we will have learned that we can get the same dopamine just by telling it to someone else. That said if we need to say it to someone else we should add a line like: "but it's a lot of work and if I don't do it, kick my butt".

Once you know that, the first step is not to move towards something, but to let go of what we used to do by doing nothing and staring at a wall.

All the best

Aloïs