Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Okay, perfect. Do you recall what you were feeling right before you went to Twitter or checked email or did the thing that you didn't want to do as opposed to the thing you said you were going to do? I don't know if this is an emotion or feeling, but there's just this, I need to get serious and start using my brain and there's going to be this deep work moment where I just get real deep and it takes a lot of effort to push me into that. Sometimes easier, sometimes harder. So, maybe it's avoiding this, "Oh, okay, I'm going to really have to think." It's like, I guess, it's the fear of the brain starting to really have to work. Yeah, that's hard work. So maybe, it's a bit of laziness. Maybe, it's a bit of momentum. There's this uncomfortable feeling of this cold start problem. "Oh, I don't really want to do it right now." So, this is incredibly important and I appreciate your candor here around what you feel because all of us experience it and we don't want to talk about it. We want to think that it's, "Oh, I'll just grayscale my phone," or, "I'll just turn off notifications and that's going to solve the problem," and it never does. And let me tell you, I tried all of it. I went to Alibaba and I bought myself one of these flip phones from China like we used to have in the 1990s with no apps, no internet connection, and then I got myself a word processor off of eBay, so that I could just sit down and write and do the important stuff. And even when I stopped using all the technology, even when I got rid of all the apps, I would sit down on my desk and I'd say, "Oh, you know what? There's that book that I've been meaning what to do some research in," or, "Let me just clean off my desk real quick," or, "You know what? I should take out the trash." And I kept getting distracted because the problem is not our technology. The problem is our inability to deal with discomfort. So, what I have adopted for myself and what I'd advise anyone who finds themselves in this situation is to always identify what is that internal trigger, what is that itch that you are looking to escape when you get distracted, because that is the source of 90% of our distractions. It's not the pings, dings, and rings. It's the feelings. But to me, that's incredibly empowering because once you realize, "Wait a minute, it's just a feeling." It's all it is, it's just an emotion. Then you can have tools ready to go. You can have arrows in your quiver ready to take out as soon as you feel that discomfort. So, let me give you one tool that I use every single day. Feel free to use it next time you feel this same problem. It's called the 10-minute rule, and this is just one of a dozen different techniques that you can use that I put in the book, but this is one that I use almost every single day. So, for me, I've been a professional writer now for over a decade, and writing is never easy. I hear people say like, "Oh, just form a writing habit." I think that's ridiculous. I don't know what they're talking about. A habit is defined as a behavior done with little or no conscious thought. I don't know how to write out of habit. Writing is always hard. Fricking work. I've written two bestsellers, thousands of articles and let me tell you, it's always difficult. It's hard, and all I want to do when I write is just Google this one thing or let me just check the news real quick or let me just do anything but the actual writing. So, here's what I do.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.