Why You Leave Everything Until the Last Moment | It Is Not About Motivation

AVAlexander Volchek

You can put off an important task for months, then, when there is nowhere left to retreat, do it all in one night—quickly, often under strain, and burning yourself out completely. Usually you think, “I lack discipline, motivation, or willpower.” But what if the issue is not motivation at all? Why do you do one task immediately and another only when the pressure becomes unavoidable? Is doing things ahead of time always better than doing them at the last minute? In this episode, we will explore what really lies behind putting things off, why fear of a deadline becomes your main fuel, and how to understand whether there is a problem here that actually needs solving. I think this video will change how you perceive your own system of motivation, and you will begin acting differently, in a way that is better for you as a human being and for other people.

OSOlga Stolyarova

Alexander, today I want to read out a question someone asked you. I think many people will recognize the situation. “How can I change my system of motivation? I notice that fear and the sense of a deadline are generally what motivate me to act. For example, I can put off a work task for a very long time and do it at the last minute, knowing the deadline has arrived, there is no time left to wait, and it has to be done. I sit down and do it. The main thing is that it gets done quickly, but it feels like I am burning myself out.” What would you advise? How can someone influence this, manage it, and motivate themselves differently—with something other than fear—to do things, create things, take care of their health, and deal with other areas of life? There is also a common pattern, mentioned by this person, in health and elsewhere: people put things off until everything hurts, and only then pay attention to the need to get checked. This pattern of action appears in different areas of life.

What can you do about it?

AVAlexander Volchek

The key to why someone works on some tasks and not on others lies initially—at least in the part everyone can analyze and explore—in the reasons, desires, and goals behind each task. Perhaps “goals” is the better word. Why do they want to do something? Why do they need to do it? Or do they not want to do it? Why have they decided that this work task matters, yet keep putting it off? What kind of state is that? Are they mistaken in putting the task off, or in believing it matters to them, having created this particular social motive for themselves? Or perhaps they cannot do the task at all. They may be incapable of it for various reasons; they simply cannot do it. We live in a society where people generally believe they could do an enormous number of things themselves and just do not want to. Very often, someone's basic assumption is that they could do a particular task but do not really want to.

At least that is what they often say to other people, acquaintances, and loved ones, even though inside they may be completely insecure. Looking at society today, we see many deeply insecure, lonely people, people living as isolated individuals who avoid not only contact with others but contact with their surroundings and themselves. Some supposedly welcome contact: they post a great deal on social media, publish things, meet people, and attend training sessions or gatherings. Yet this activity may be the flip side of their own insecurity, and they may remain profoundly insecure. So when we ask what someone should do about only tackling a task when the pressure becomes intense, as you put it, that explanation itself is also an excuse. It implies, “I can do it; I just need to be under pressure. Once I was, I did it.” But in practice, plenty of people have been under pressure and still done nothing.

Take people without jobs. Because I have a wide circle of contacts, I meet quite a few people who do not work. Listen carefully, and they say they are not working because they are not really looking very hard right now. Or they have not started a business because perhaps they lack confidence or do not want it that much—as though, if they wanted to find a job, they would find one instantly, or if they wanted a business badly enough, they would start one immediately. But the connection with desire is far from straightforward. Something interesting can happen: with a particular person, you find the energy to do things or work on a project. People often automatically make a mistake here. They think, “That means it is right and important to be with this person. It is a sign that we should work together.” Why might that be a mistake? Feeling harmonious beside someone, finding energy and even mental and physical stability with them, does not mean you should go into business with them.

It does not mean you will make money together, because money may have entirely different causes and connections. That person might even reduce the amount of money you have. Or you may feel good beside them, but spending a long time together may create a space of unease. You will not associate that unease with the person; you will associate it with something else, something vague and incomprehensible. You may not even know what is happening. You need to be very attentive to these things. Conversely, some people feel very strange to interact with. They may provoke indignation or give you an odd feeling about your shared “vibe,” yet help you achieve tremendous business or professional results: a sharp rise, major results, extraordinary progress. Do not underestimate this. Likewise, do not underestimate what happens in your family when you live with your husband or wife. Do not underestimate a person's influence even if you never discuss a particular subject with them.

A person can have an incredible influence. Or consider the real influence a child brings when they enter a family. I do not mean the usual things people describe, such as sleeping poorly, taking children for walks, or going everywhere together. I mean the true, actual influence people have on one another. As a reminder for anyone who has not watched before, I live in Silicon Valley, California, in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area. In America, we have what is called an open house. When a home is for sale, certain days are announced when anyone can come in and walk around. They might say there will be an open house on Saturday. There is often even food; you can have something to eat and look around the space. My wife called me recently about a house one house over from ours that had been listed for sale. “I am in this house now. Come and take a look.” I went over and walked through it. The asking price was seven million dollars.

Some of my children were there, running around and saying, “Wow, what a great house! We should buy it.” My wife turned to my son and said, “Do you know how long you have to work to earn enough for a house like this?” As we left and walked down the street, I told her, “There is no connection between how long you work and earning enough to buy a house. There is no connection at all between the number of hours worked and the ability to buy a seven-million-dollar house. It does not exist.” You might think, “But you still have to work to buy a house.” Even that is not necessarily true. Perhaps you need to sell an old family home, receive an inheritance, win some money, or happen to buy shares that earn enough to buy a house.

All sorts of events could explain why you buy a particular home, why you can or cannot earn enough for it. Many events can happen that you do not control. If we are talking about a seven-million-dollar home, only a small number of people in the world can buy one. It is clearly less than 0.1 percent of the world's population. I am not even adding more zeros; it is a small number. If the percentage is small, your probability of this happening is small. That is the only thing we can say: the probability is small, not what you need to do to buy it. Essentially, there is no real causal connection in a person's life that tells them what they must do to buy it. Some people can do it more easily; they are closer to that small percentage. For others, it is not a question of being easier—it is impossible. It has nothing to do with work. Many people work three jobs, sixteen hours a day, and will never even approach the possibility of buying that house. They will not even come close to the possibility.

I am not even saying they will do it or that they need to. We are not considering the separate question of whether it should be done at all. This is extremely important for how you think about a task. Do you see it as something you will only do once the pressure is on? Or do you understand that you may never do it, or may be incapable of doing it? If you consistently do not do something, might that mean you are incapable of it—incapable, full stop? Perhaps it is not procrastination, not wanting to, lacking energy or the right mood, or being busy with something else. Perhaps you are simply incapable of doing it. Let us discuss what incapability means so we can arrive at what to do in these situations. What does it mean to be incapable? People generally assess their ability or inability in relation to particular social tasks and work.

The example you gave was work, right? Then you mentioned health and other areas involving some action. Fundamentally, people connect being capable or incapable with their brain: their knowledge, intellect, experience, or skills. They link any ability to how developed their intellectual or physical system is. But let me focus on the intellectual system. Physically, for example, I have a fairly realistic understanding that I cannot carry two hundred large bags of cement every day. You might say, “Why not? Perhaps you could if you had to.” Perhaps I would die if I started carrying them. What does it do to the life of the person who carries them and supposedly can? Does it shorten or lengthen their life? Does it not shorten it? What actually happens?

Let us stay with the intellectual aspect. People generally judge whether they can do something by their intellect. Can they start a business? How do they assess that? Imagine evaluating whether you could start a business. You judge it by your intelligence or experience. Some people believe experience helps you start a business. Intelligence and experience do help with many things, but how do you assess them? Someone who became president had no previous experience of becoming president. Someone created a business that made them a hundred billion dollars; such people exist. Did they study how to do that? Did they have experience? Not only did they lack that experience beforehand, they do not have experience of how these companies are developing now. Take Elon Musk and the company he created. Does he have experience of that? He has none. Or take Mark Zuckerberg. Does he have experience of creating a company worth two trillion dollars, or a little less? He does not.

It may seem that he has it now, but that is relative. Does he have experience with three trillion dollars? If the shares become worth three trillion tomorrow, has he suddenly acquired experience? What changed? Another question: if he has experience, does that mean he can start another company like it? In the venture capital industry, people often give investment money to those with experience. I see some of the people receiving funding in Silicon Valley; I also set up funds or participate as an investor. Investors say, “They are experienced.” I look at what those people are doing and say, “Actually, they have no experience of this at all.” In fact, it would have been better if they had not had their previous entrepreneurial experience, because it has nothing to do with what they are doing now. Saying they have experience is a very serious mistake. There is no pattern. You are firing a huge cannon at sparrows, or looking for a needle in a haystack.

That is how much of a pattern there is—there is no pattern. Yes, the person is intelligent, educated, and understands something. People have attached these general, abstract labels to them. Yet nobody examines what is happening in their family at that moment, the state of their family or relationships with their children, wife, or husband, how they feel internally about their relationship with their parents, or the psychological structures of their perception. Very often, money ends up going to people who are actually mentally unstable and crazy—crazy in a particular area, people outside the norm. Yet this is the group society aspires to join. I am by no means belittling those people; I am talking about the very standards society has created. They are not those people's own standards. On top of that, you then force them to work very long hours, violating the basic patterns of human development and life on Earth, in which people should live in some balance, interact with others, remain open, and spend time with children and parents.

You violate that law. There are many mistaken understandings of cause and effect. Here in Silicon Valley, with its tech businesses, people like to single out tech entrepreneurs—or entrepreneurs generally. I have also followed that path in my life, or you could say I am still on it. Tech business has always been one strand of my work. But I have never agreed with these standards, such as the idea that owners of tech startups work more than anyone else. Who told you that? Or that their husbands or wives suffer, depending on who owns the startup. I smile because I have worked quite a lot for most of my life. There were periods when I left for the office at six in the morning and returned at eleven at night, without being in the tech business. Yet my wife did not start doing different things because I was away working fourteen hours instead of three. She led exactly the same kind of life whether I worked three hours, did not work, was on vacation, or worked fourteen hours. Her way of life did not change; it had no effect on it.

Mine changed; hers did not. There are false conclusions about who has it easier or harder, or which children have it easier or harder. There are many different patterns in the world. When we ask why someone truly does not do a task and supposedly only does it under pressure, thinking about it that way reflects their selfishness, insecurity, personal suffering, inability to understand adequately where they are and the causes and effects involved, and lack of awareness or understanding of their goals. It is an inadequate assessment of whether they can do the task. They need to acknowledge whether they can or cannot. Yesterday I saw a reel about a minister from some country—I do not remember, I think Turkmenistan—who had supposedly been seen working as an Amazon delivery driver in America. He had been a minister, then moved to America and became a delivery driver. Nobody likes stories like that. What is wrong with it? Perhaps it is interesting to be a minister first and a delivery driver afterward, rather than the other way around.

Perhaps that is a wonderful life experience: a varied life in which you experience different things. How many people would choose it? Would you choose twenty years as a minister followed by twenty as a delivery driver, or twenty as a delivery driver and then become a minister? Everyone will say, “Could I skip both and just be a deputy minister for all forty years?” Some people can. Some lives stay the same throughout. One person herds cows their whole life; another spends their whole life sailing on a yacht. Or someone grows up in an extraordinary family, happily receives a good education, has plenty of money and a wonderful family of their own, and dies in a good, happy state.

And they die that way at a hundred. There is the dream. What is better or worse? This is a fundamental question, a substantial case to consider. What makes a more interesting life: twenty years as a minister, then a delivery driver, or the reverse? Incidentally, that person's life is not over. We live in a society that feeds off this relentlessly. People constantly pressure one another, try to devour one another, and deceive everyone. Lies are coming out of every corner. People do not obey laws, let alone show sound judgment or sanity. They do not observe laws at home, between husband and wife, or even within themselves. They constantly deceive themselves. That is people's greatest mistake: deceiving themselves. So there is no problem, Olya, in someone not having done something at all. There is no problem in someone doing nothing for four months and then, under pressure, pulling themselves together and working four days straight to earn the money to pay for their apartment. What difference does it make? Who said they should have done it differently?

Imagine everyone acting that way as the standard, while the people who suffered said, “Something is wrong with my character. I do everything ahead of time.” I am someone who has spent my whole life trying to do everything in advance: prepare, anticipate, and allow for things beforehand. Others do everything at the last minute. They suffer because they leave it until then; I suffer because I cannot leave everything until later. I often do things that never needed to be done. I spend enormous amounts of time and other resources doing something in advance, and it was unnecessary because everything changed afterward. There is something very important about watching my content that you need to understand. When you watch other content or interact with another person, you often approach it from your own sense of importance and significance, trying to resolve your own issues. The person speaking on the other side is also very often trying to resolve their own issues. You must always remember that.

What is that other person about? What are they saying or teaching, and what are their goals? To explain how to approach my content and get substantial benefit from it, let me give an example. An acquaintance recently came to me about resolving a conflict at home. When people ask for advice about such things, they inevitably want help specifically for themselves, especially if they have access to a particular person. But my position in resolving any family or human-life question is always the same: it needs to be resolved correctly according to the laws of the Universe. That means I do not favor either person. There is no favoritism. Similarly, in working on myself, I always try to be fair and honest about relationships among people and my own relationships with them. I see another person as a human being just like me, my children as no different from other people's children, and my wife as no different from any other woman.

The person who came to me heard this very clearly: I regard both people in the conflict equally as human beings. Any recommendations I give apply to human beings in general. People dislike this. They do not want to hear or accept it. Very often, people watch my content to argue or clash with me, or to find some maneuver they can use to manipulate other people. That is a major problem. The problem is not the presence of other people; it is your own ego and your desire to manipulate through it. You come seeking information while hiding your own secrets, without truly opening up. Watching a YouTube video is a one-way interaction: I am not even trying to learn the truth about you personally. So the first and most important thing is to agree with yourself that you will receive this information independently of your personality, your ego-computer, and your ego structure.

Receive this content with your entire spiritual being, with everything you truly are, rather than only your first and last name or the person you are at this particular moment. People often want to resolve their current situation, although five years ago they did not even know this problem would exist. They did not know they would have this debt, want to change their family situation, have difficulties with a child, develop an illness, or need to leave a job or find a new one. They did not know any of it would happen or even exist. They are interested in the current moment of their life. You need to detach yourself from that moment. It is the only way to look at the situation with real honesty. I rarely see people who, while working on themselves, truly open up across every range of their being. These are enormous worlds within a person. Few want to look honestly and truthfully at absolutely every aspect with open eyes, without seeking personal gain or validation and gratification of their own ego-driven problems, but with a desire to understand everything that is happening more and more broadly.

More and more broadly. That breadth is infinite. On all my channels, whichever one it is, I try as much as possible to show you this: the meditation channel and its content about meditation and expanded perception, or content about personal development. I also have a channel about artificial intelligence. Its primary purpose is to help people look more broadly at their social lives within a particular framework or subject, such as technology and the development of artificial intelligence. I want them to look further into their lives, to try to see and truly understand everything that is happening more broadly and deeply. Who, then, is living more correctly? In practice, we see that it is whoever lives the way society has decided and prescribed. That is a mistake, because there is no such thing as a correct or incorrect life. There is the life you have at this moment. And that is the right basis for deciding how to act in this situation.