How to be active mentally? The Inaction Conundrum

 

 

How to be active mentally? The Inaction conundrum

“There are risks and costs to action, But they are far less than the long-range risks of comfortable inaction.”

• John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States of America. 

Now, this quote may be subtle, but it has its beauty when the idea behind it can be well grasped. Read the full article to know how to be active mentally.

Idleness v.s Inactiveness?

It is a cliché to say that an idle mind is a devil’s workshop but what one generally means by idleness is to think of nothing. That can also tantamount to meditating, where one is required not to think anything. 

But the word idle here can be interpreted as not doing anything constructive. This gives way to doing something destructive, referring to your thoughts as the devil’s workshop. But John Kennedy did not mean to refer to anything constructive or destructive. 

If you are sitting on the sofa right now with nothing to do, you can call yourself idle. But when you have decided upon a task without gathering up the courage to do it, you are inactive. 

Demarcating the line between idleness and inactiveness is of much importance to take cognizance of the fact that inactiveness and not idleness is the mother of all failures. 

What's stopping me from taking action?

The point of the whole article here is to elaborate on the harm that you can cause to yourselves by not breaking the inertia. Every little object on this earth has its inertia going by Newton’s discovery. 

Inertia is directly proportional to the mass of the body. What do I mean by breaking inertia when it comes to being active?

The mass of pessimistic thoughts that you carry about yourself is the inertia blocking your activeness. You can sit all day daydreaming, but nobody else will act for you to fulfill your dreams. You have inertia, which will try to keep you at your place instead of getting up and start working. 

Also, you love to procrastinate. You can solve your procrastinating problem by going through the marshmallow experiment and Seinfeld strategy.

What is the self-motivation behind being active? How to be active?

Strong wills can open bigger doors. Your success depends on how much you are willing to pay for something you want. If that something is your life, nobody on this planet can stop you from reaching your treasure island.  

You can only guess the power of the desire of the Freedom fighters, be it Indians or Americans, to free themselves from the rule. 

Rosa Sparks had enough will to stand up in the bus of whites and say a “No” on their faces only to get arrested and trigger the American Civil Rights movement led by another legend Martin Luther King. 

Be it, Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, the inspirational stories are the stories of the people who have broken the chains of their inertia and entered in the super active mode to convert so-called impossibilities into possibilities. 

Mel Robbins’ 5 seconds rule highlights the importance of being active and the way of overcoming inactiveness. Mel suggests us to count to 5 and hop up to start doing what you are supposed to do without giving a second thought to it. You can customize this rule to 3 or 4 seconds. However, it simply suggests that it is the second thought that generally leads to inaction. 

How does this second thought prevent you from being mentally active?

For instance, let us say you want to read 10 pages of a book. Halfway through your target, another pending plan comes up to your mind remaining to be fulfilled. Your blabbering mind starts telling you that the other target is more important. If not this, you will get tired fast and prefer sleep. If your willpower is not strong, the target will, without any doubt, remain unfinished. 

This attitude is infectious as it takes over your other activities as well! Now, what if you close down the second thought here and focus entirely on the book?

Importance of taking action in life

This is easier said than done. Whether the book is interesting or not is out of context. Not only your sole determination but how valuable you consider the words of that book can do wonders here. In other words, you can easily overcome your inactiveness once the importance of taking action dawns on you. 

If you are too inactive to do anything, you need not worry. Inactiveness is not biological. You may find difficulty in waking up to the alarm, but that is not tough if you know the interesting life you will have tomorrow. 

If inactiveness is the mother of all failures, then activeness is the mother of all successes. The author of “How to stop worrying and start living” Dale Carnegie puts it,

“Our trouble is not ignorance but inaction.”

The ignorance being referred to here is the ignorance for doing the right thing. The conundrum is that even if you do not ignore, you will not climb up anywhere because to climb up the ladder requires you to do so for real and not in your imaginations. 

There are three types of people in this world.

-One does not even think or act

-The other thinks but does not act

-Some think and act

Michael Jordan comes in the third category. In which category do you come? 

In the Inaction conundrum, most of the people suffer. There are people around us who can only talk big but lacks the courage to do so. 

To break a pencil, you will need a pencil first! Nature dislikes fakers wearing caps of “failures” who can only shout loud their weenie achievements. They are not meant to struggle. 

They make success sound easy, but only successful people know the meaning of self-motivation. The law of nature requires you to shed away your inactiveness. 

But anything over and above is a poison, and so is hyper activeness. You must act at times when you are required to. 

Inactiveness is not merely not acting upon anything, but a lethargic state where you can only talk loud without doing anything. Self-motivation can lead to activeness leading you to success.

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