Why You Leave Everything Until the Last Moment

You can put off an important task for months and then, when there is nowhere left to retreat, get it all done in one night — quickly, often under strain, burning yourself out completely. Usually a person thinks they lack discipline, motivation or willpower. But what if it isn’t about motivation at all, and the reasons for inaction are completely different?

In this conversation with Olga Stolyarova, I look at what really lies behind procrastination and the habit of acting only once you are “under pressure,” and why the fear of a deadline becomes the main fuel. Why does a person do one task right away and keep postponing another? Are they capable of doing what they are trying to force themselves to do — and do they need to? And who decided that doing everything in advance is more correct than doing it at the last moment? Perhaps the problem is not that you aren’t trying hard enough, but that you misunderstand the task, your own capabilities and the reasons you are trying to do it.

Why we put off important tasks

– Alexander, today I want to read out a question someone asked you — I think the situation it describes is familiar to a great many people. “How can I change my system of motivation? I notice that what generally drives me to act is fear and the sense of a deadline. For example, I can go a very long time without doing a work task and then do it at the last moment, knowing that the deadline is here and there is no more waiting — it has to be done. I sit down and do it. It gets done quickly, but it feels like burning myself out. What would you advise? How can I influence this, how can I manage it, how can I motivate myself differently — not with fear but with something else — to do things, create things, take care of my health and other matters?” It is also a very common pattern: the person describes how the same thing shows up, for example, with health and in other areas — things drag on until everything already hurts, and only then does a person notice they need to go and get checked. This pattern of action shows up in different areas of life. What can be done about it?

– The key thing for every person — why they work on some tasks and not on others — lies initially, at least in the part that everyone can analyze and study, in the reasons, in the desires, and more likely even in the goals of a given task. Why do they want to do something at all? Why do they need it? Or do they not want to do it? Why did they decide that this work task is important, while simply putting it off? What kind of state is that?

Are they mistaken in putting this task off, or in thinking it matters to them — having created a particular social motive for themselves? Or is the task in front of them something they simply cannot do — they are incapable of it, for various reasons.

We live in a modern society where people believe they could do a huge number of tasks themselves — they just don’t want to. Very often a person basically believes they could do a given task, they just don’t want to. At least that is what they often say when talking with other people — acquaintances, loved ones. Although inside they may be a completely insecure person.

If you look at modern society, you will see a huge number of very seriously insecure people, lonely people, “mono-people” who avoid not just contact with other people but contact in general — with the space around them and with themselves. There are people who are supposedly open to contact: they post a great deal on social media, publish things, meet up, go to trainings or gatherings. But in fact a person may be doing this as the flip side of their own insecurity — and still remain in incredibly strong insecurity.

“I need to be under pressure”: what lies behind it

So when we come to the question of what to do about a person who, as you put it, takes on a task only when the pressure on them is very strong — in essence, that is an excuse too.

There is an excuse in this phrase: as if I can do it, I just need to be under pressure — the pressure came, and I did it. But if you look at the facts, a huge number of people have been under pressure and done nothing.

There are people who don’t have a job. Because of my wide circle of contacts, I meet quite a lot of people who don’t work. If you listen to them carefully, they aren’t working because they aren’t looking very hard for work right now. Or they haven’t started a business because they probably aren’t confident or don’t want it that much. As if, had they wanted to find a job, they would have found one instantly, and had they wanted a business badly enough, they would have started one instantly. But this is only very loosely connected with desire.

Why you suddenly find strength next to a person or a project

An interesting thing can happen: you interact with a particular person, and it is precisely with them that you find the strength to do something, to do some project. And here a person often automatically makes a mistake. They think that it is right to be together with this person, important to be together, that it is a sign — they should work with them.

Why can this be a mistake? The fact that you feel in harmony with someone, that next to them you have found strength and even psychophysical stability, does not mean you should do business with this person. It does not mean you will make money with them, because money can have completely different causes and completely different connections. What’s more, this person may even reduce the amount of money you have.

Or you will feel fine next to this person, but over a long time together you will create a space of a certain unease. And you won’t associate that unease with this person — you will associate it with something else, vague and incomprehensible. You won’t even know what is happening. That is why you have to be very attentive to these things.

In just the same way, there are people with whom interaction feels very strange to you: they may stir up human indignation in you, a strange feeling of — let’s use the word — a shared “vibe” from being together. And yet such a person can give you a very strong result, for example in business or in your professional life: a sharp rise, a big result, incredibly strong movement. Don’t underestimate these things.

In the same way, don’t underestimate what is happening in your family if you live with your husband or wife. Don’t underestimate a person’s influence, even if you don’t talk with them about a particular subject — what incredible influence they can have. Or, for example, a child who appears in the family — what influence they really bring. Not the influence everyone describes: that with children you sleep badly, that you have to take them for walks, go everywhere together. I don’t mean that; I mean the true, real influence people have on each other.

Why working more does not mean earning more

I live in Silicon Valley — let me remind anyone who hasn’t watched before — in California, in the southern part of the Bay Area, around San Francisco Bay. In America there is a thing called an open house. When a house is being sold, on certain days it is put on display for sale: they announce, for example, an open house on Saturday, and anyone who wants to can come, go in and walk around. There is often even some food — you can have something to eat and take a look at the space.

And then my wife calls me — a house one down from ours had been put up for sale like that: “Listen, I’m in this house right now, come over and take a look.” I come over, walk around the house, look — the asking price is seven million dollars. At some point my kids — some of them were there — are running around saying: “Wow, what a great house, we need to buy it!” And my wife turns to my son and says: “Do you know how long you have to work to earn enough for a house like this?”

We walk out, go down the street, and I tell her: “There is no connection between how much you have to work and earning enough for a house. There is no connection at all between the amount of time worked and the ability to buy a seven-million-dollar house. It doesn’t exist, it doesn’t exist at all.”

It may seem to us: “No, you still have to work to buy a house.” It’s not even certain that you have to work. Maybe, to buy a house, you need to:

• sell your parents’ old house;
• receive an inheritance;
• win something;
• happen to buy some shares that bring in income.

A great many different events can happen that lead to you buying one house or another, or being able or unable to earn enough for it — events you don’t control.

Clearly, if we are talking about a seven-million-dollar house, a very small number of people in the world can buy one — clearly less than one tenth of a percent of the population. I’m not saying there are more zeros, but it is small. If the percentage of such people is small, then the probability of it happening for you is small too. The only thing you can say is that the probability is small — not what you need to do to buy it. Because, in essence, there is no cause-and-effect connection here in a person’s life — about what you need to do in order to buy.

There are people for whom it is easier to do — they are simply closer to that percentage. And there are people for whom it is not just not easier — it is impossible for them. And this has nothing to do with work.

There is a huge number of people who work three jobs, sixteen hours a day, and will never in their lives even come close to the possibility of buying this house.

I’m not even saying that they will do it or that they will need to: right now we are not considering the separate criteria — whether it should be done at all.

Procrastination or inability to do the task

And look, this is very important in terms of how you think: if you are talking about a particular task, how do you see it? That you will do it only once the pressure is on? Or do you understand that you may never do this task, or that you are not capable of doing it? This is a very important aspect.

How a person assesses their own abilities

Let’s now talk about what inability is, so that we can arrive at what to do in these situations at all. What does “a person is incapable” mean? Basically, a person considers themselves capable or incapable in relation to certain social tasks and work. You gave work as an example, and then you said there are also topics related to health — when some action needs to be taken.

Whether a person is capable or not — basically they connect this with brains: with knowledge, experience, skill. They connect any ability of theirs with how developed their intellectual or physical system is — with what they are capable or incapable of doing.

I’ll focus on the intellectual system now. Because with the physical one, for example, I understand quite realistically that I can’t carry two hundred big bags of cement every day. You’ll say: “Why can’t you? Maybe you could if you had to.” Maybe I would die if I started carrying them. The question here is how much the life of the person who carries them, and supposedly can, gets shorter or longer. What really happens to their life? Doesn’t it get shorter?

But let’s stay with the intellectual side. Basically a person measures this against their intellect: can they do it or not. Can they, for example, start a business? But how do they assess it? Imagine: how do you assess whether you can start a business or not? You assess it in terms of your intellect or your experience.

False standards of work and productivity

There are people who think experience helps you start a business. Indeed, in many things intellect helps, in many things experience does. But the question is: how do you assess it? The person who became president had no experience of becoming president. There are people in the world who created a business that earned them a hundred billion dollars. Did they study how to do that? Did they have experience? What’s more, not only did they not have that experience — they have no experience of how these companies develop.

Take Elon Musk. The company he built — did he have experience in that? He has no experience at all. Or take Mark Zuckerberg. Does he have experience of creating a company worth two trillion dollars, or a little less? No. Now it seems that he has this experience, but that is relative. Fine, but does he have experience of three trillion dollars? If the shares are worth three trillion tomorrow, will he suddenly have the experience? What has changed? And one more point: if he has experience, does that mean he can start another company just like it?

We see in the world how, in the venture industry, investment — money — is often given to people who have experience. But let’s look at the facts: I see some of the people who were given money in Silicon Valley — I myself set up some funds or take part as an investor. People were given money, and they say: “They’re experienced.” I look at them and say: “Actually, they have no experience at all in what they are doing.” What’s more, it would be better if they didn’t have the entrepreneurial experience they had, because that experience bears no relation to what they are doing now.

You are very seriously mistaken when you say they have experience. There is no pattern. You are simply firing a huge cannon at sparrows or looking for a needle in a haystack — the pattern is exactly the same. It isn’t a pattern.

Of course this person is smart, educated, understands something; some general abstractions have been stuck on them. Yet nobody looks into what is happening in this person’s family at that moment: what state the family is in, how they interact with their children, with their wife or husband, how they feel inside about their relationship with their parents, what psychological constructs of perception they have at all.

If you look, very often the money ends up going to people who are actually mentally unbalanced and crazy — in a certain zone these are crazy people, a non-standard society. The very one society ultimately aspires to. I am by no means belittling these people; I am talking about the standards that society itself has created. They are not their standards.

What’s more, you then force these people and say they must work a great deal — thereby violating the patterns of basic development on planet Earth and of people’s lives, in which people should live in a certain balance, in interaction with other people, be open, interact with their children, with their parents. You are breaking that law. There are a great many wrong causes and effects.

Since I am in Silicon Valley, where there are IT businesses, people here like to single out IT businessmen — or businessmen in general. In my life I have also gone down the IT business path, and you could say I am still on it. It has always been one line of my work. But I have never agreed with standards like these: for some reason it is believed that owners of IT startups work more than any other people. Who told you that? Or that their husbands or wives suffer — depending on who owns the startup.

And I smile and think: look, I have worked quite a lot almost all my life. There were periods when I left for the office at six in the morning and came back at eleven at night — and it wasn’t an IT business. But my wife didn’t start doing anything different because of it — because I was away working fourteen hours rather than three. She led exactly the same way of life whether I worked three hours, didn’t work at all, was on vacation, or worked fourteen hours. Her way of life didn’t change because of it; it had no effect at all. Mine changed, and hers didn’t.

The real reasons a person doesn’t act

There are false, unreal conclusions about who has it easier or harder, which children have it easier and which harder. There are a great many different patterns in the world.

And when we come to the question of why a person truly, genuinely doesn’t do some task but supposedly does it once the pressure is on — if they think about it that way, that is their egoism. It is:

• their own insecurity;
• their own personal suffering;
• an inability to understand adequately where they are, to understand causes and effects;
• not knowing and not understanding the goals where they are;
• an inadequate assessment of whether the person is capable of doing this task.

And acknowledging it: whether they can do this task or not.

Yesterday I saw a reel online about how a minister of some country — I don’t remember, I think Turkmenistan — was supposedly spotted in America working as an Amazon courier. So he was a minister, and now he has moved to America and works as a courier. Nobody likes cases like this. But what is the problem with a case like this? Maybe it is cool in your life to work not first as a courier and then as a minister, but the other way round — as a minister and then as a courier?

Maybe it’s a great life experience — when your life is varied, diverse, and you get different experiences? How many people would choose that option? Which would you choose: first twenty years as a minister and then twenty years as a courier — or twenty years as a courier and then a minister? Everyone will say: “Could I be neither a minister nor a courier, but a deputy minister right away, all forty years?” Some people can.

For some people life goes by the same throughout: one herds cows all his life, and another sails a yacht all his life. All of his life. Or lives in an incredible family, with an incredible upbringing, happily gets a good education, is surrounded by a lot of money, has a good, wonderful family — and dies like that, in a good, wonderful state, and at a hundred at that. There it is, the dream.

So what is better, and what isn’t? This is one of the most fundamental stories — a truly big case. What is more interesting for a life: twenty years as a minister and then a courier — by the way, that man’s life isn’t over — or the other way round?

We simply live in a society that feeds on this incredibly strongly. Everyone presses on each other, tries to devour each other — endlessly. They deceive everyone. Lies are already crawling out of every corner. Laws aren’t observed — I’m not even talking about common sense and human sanity. People don’t observe laws at home, between each other — husband and wife — or with themselves. They constantly deceive themselves.

Doing things at the last moment is not always a problem

So, Olya, there is no problem whatsoever in a person not having done something at all.

There is no problem in a person not doing something for four months and then, when the pressure came, suddenly pulling themselves together and working for four days straight to earn the money and pay for their apartment.

There is no problem in this at all. What difference does it make? And who said it should have been done differently?

Imagine if everyone acted that way — it would be the single standard, and the ones suffering would be those who said: “You know, something is wrong with my character. I do everything in advance.” I, for example, am a person who has done everything in advance all my life: I try to do everything in advance, to foresee things in advance, to allow for things in advance. And there are people who do everything at the last moment. They suffer because everything is at the last moment, and I suffer because I can’t do everything later.

And I often do things that simply didn’t need to be done — they aren’t needed. I spent a huge amount of time and everything else to do something in advance, and it didn’t need to be done in advance: later everything changed.

How to approach my reflections properly

There is a very important point about watching my content, and you need to understand it incredibly well. When you watch other content or interact with any other person, you very often interact with them from a position of your own importance and your own significance, from the position of solving your own questions. And on the other side, the person who is telling something also very often acts from the position of solving their own questions. You always need to remember this incredibly strongly. And the person on the other side — what are they about at all? What are they talking about, what are they teaching, what are their goals?

To answer the question of how to approach my content properly and get incredibly strong benefit from it, I’ll give an example. Recently an acquaintance came to me, in particular about resolving a family conflict at home. Usually, when people ask for advice on such a matter, they willy-nilly want help for themselves specifically — especially if they have access to a particular person.

My position in resolving any family matters or any human life matters will always be the same: the matter needs to be resolved correctly from the standpoint of the laws of the Universe.

This means I have no preference for one person or the other. Preference does not exist. In the same way, working on myself, I always try to relate correctly and honestly to people’s relationships with each other and to my own relationships with other people. I perceive another person as the same kind of person as myself — just as I see my own children as the same as other people’s children, and my wife as the same as any other woman.

And this person who came to me heard from me very precisely that I treat both people in the conflict the same way — as people. Any recommendations I give are universal human recommendations. People don’t like this. People don’t want to hear it, they don’t want to accept it.

And very often people watch my content from a position of conflict or argument with me, or try to find some scheme for themselves in order to pull it on other people. And that is a big problem. And the big problem is not that there are other people, but that there is your own ego and you want to manipulate through it. When you come to learn some information while hiding your own secrets, without truly opening up.

But since watching videos like those on YouTube is often one-sided — after all, I am personally not even trying to learn the truth about you — the first, most important thing you need to do is to agree with yourself that you take in this information independently of your personality, independently of your ego-computer, of your ego structure.

You take in this content with your whole spiritual being, with everything you really are, and not just with your first and last name or as this person at this moment in time. Because very often people want to resolve the situations of this moment. Even though five years ago they didn’t even know this problem existed: that they would have such a debt, that they would want to change their family, that they would have problems with a child or such an illness, that they would need to quit their job or find a new one. They didn’t even know this would happen. They are interested in the current moment of life.

You need to detach yourself from the current moment of life. It is the only way to look at the situation truly honestly.

I can tell you that I rarely see people who, while working on themselves, truly open up across all ranges — and these are whole enormous worlds within a person — and want to look honestly, truthfully, with open eyes at absolutely any side. When what interests them is not their own gain, not confirming their egoistic problems and pleasing them, but when they want to understand everything that is happening ever more broadly. Ever more broadly. This breadth is infinite.

And here, on my channels, I try as much as I can to show you this — whichever channel it is. There is the channel with meditations — content about meditation, about expanded perception. There is content about personal development. I also have a channel about artificial intelligence. It is, first of all, a channel for people to truly look at their social life more broadly — even if within certain limits, within a certain subject, such as technology, the development of artificial intelligence. But so that they look at their life more widely, try to see and come to know everything that is happening more broadly, more fully and for real.

What makes a life correct or incorrect

So who lives more correctly? In essence, we will see that the one who lives more correctly is the one who lives the way society has decided and said. That is a mistake.

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