If You’re Ambitious But Lazy, 8 Steps to Get Unstuck

Do you feel like you’re living life on autopilot, endlessly scrolling social media, trapped in bad habits, and never quite hitting your goals?

Here’re the exact steps where you can start and build the life you actually want.

Step 1: Make the Decision

The first and most important step to getting unstuck is to understand that the old version of you doesn’t exist anymore—unless you choose to stay stuck.

You have to cut off the person that you are right now to become the person that you want to be.

So how do you actually do this?

I love to look up the derivation of words, and the derivation of the word “decision” is “to cut off”—which means you’re no longer the person that you were yesterday. If you have made a decision to change, that person doesn’t exist.

The Car Analogy

Imagine if your car got stolen. The next day, you couldn’t wake up and be able to use your old vehicle to get where you’re trying to go. You’d have to come up with a different solution:

• Take a bike
• Call an Uber
• Walk

You no longer have your car as an option to travel.

Apply This to Your Life

Now think about this as a decision to change your life. If you’re going to become a person who:

• Works out every single day, OR
• Is a badass at sales, OR
• Reads books and is well-read and articulate

All of a sudden, if you decide to be that person, you are no longer the person that doesn’t do those things. That person doesn’t exist any longer.

So you have to start making decisions as if you are that new person. Because guess what? You are, all because you made the decision.

Make Your Environment Support Your Decision

Once you’ve made the decision, let’s make your environment easier.

Example: If you know that you doom scroll on TikTok, set a policy. Make it so that moving forward, you have your screen time locked on your phone. You cannot scroll on TikTok for longer than 5 minutes.

When you make subtle changes like this to actually change your environment, you’re doubling down on the decision not to be the old version of yourself.

Remember:

• Your environment matters
• The choices you make really matter
• They can be small little tweaks

Being a whole different version of you doesn’t mean that everything in your life changes, but the things that matter—the things you need to make progress on—have to happen today, and that decision has to be now.

Step 2: Ruin Yourself with Disappointment

In my experience, disappointment is the wakeup call that you have been avoiding.

Don’t Listen to the Feel-Good Nonsense, all those nice memes and those feel-good TikToks that make you feel like you should accept yourself and be okay with yourself the way that you are.

If you’re disappointed because:

• You know that you have more in you
• You know that you could impact more people
• You know you have this great potential, and instead you’re wasting it

Be freaking disappointed.

You shouldn’t feel good about yourself. Why would you feel good about yourself? You’re not living into what is possible for you.

The Truth About Self-Love

Once you know that you’re unhappy with the way that your life looks, you can make that change, but don’t sugarcoat it.

Don’t tell yourself lies that you should just love yourself the way that you are and give yourself a big hug. Don’t listen to that nonsense.

Be disappointed, accept the disappointment, and take action.

Step 3: Decide What You Want Your Life to Look Like

You cannot create the life that you want without knowing what you want.

Maybe you’ve entirely given up on your goals for years.
You’ve become introverted.
You’ve decided to be stuck in life because you feel really insecure, and you’re not confident.
You’re so terrified of what people thought of you that you just don’t want to try.

Picture yourself flying to a conference where you’ve said no to speaking because you’re scared and don’t feel confident.

But then you’re sitting there in the audience realizing, “I’m here. I could be participating. I could be contributing, but instead, my fear of public speaking, my fear of being seen, my fear of maybe people judging me or criticizing me is going to keep me on the sidelines.”

From that moment forward, you decide: “I’m not going to be this person. I refuse to be the person that doesn’t have the life that they want.”

Write Down Your Goals

From there, you take accountability and ask, “What do I want my life to look like?” And you write down all of your goals:

• What do you want personally?
• What do you want your fitness goals to be?
• What do you want your family goals to be?
• What kind of friends do you want to have?
• Professionally, what type of mentors do you want to bring in?
• What are the opportunities that you’d like to create?
• Financially, how much money do you want to make?
• What do you want to contribute to?
• How could you make a financial impact on a charity that really matters to you?

Because if you’re not confident in yourself today and you don’t feel like you can create the life that you want, you’re never going to create the impact that you could potentially make.

You are put on this planet to live into your potential.

ACTION STEP

If you haven’t done this already,

1. Take out a piece of paper or maybe open up your notes app
2. Write down your personal, professional, and financial one-year goals

This will give you a picture of who you want to be in the future so that you can decide to be that person today.

Step 4: Make Progress Daily (And Track It)

This is the most important thing you can do because you have to know for sure that you’re making progress daily.

That is how you get out of the rut of having this dream life but actually feeling like you’re making incremental progress. You’re seeing wins, you’re making a change.

Plan Your Day the Night Before

One successful habit around this is to plan your day the night before.

Do not:

• Leave your office
• Leave your place of work
• Go to bed

Without having a full breakdown of:

• Your calendar
• Where you’re spending your time the next day

What to Review

When you’re going through your calendar, look at:

• What appointments do I have?
• What books am I reading?
• What podcasts do I need to listen to?
• How do I sprinkle in little pieces of future me and make those deposits today?

So that you can actually get those opportunities in the future.

The Power of Incremental Steps

The progress you choose to make every single day is what changes things.

It is not these big steps.

It is the tiny incremental steps that you make every single day that change the trajectory of your life to create the life that you’ve always wanted.

Graph Your Progress

The hack for this is to actually graph the things that are the most important to you because if you can see on a graph that:

• You’re getting more hours of sleep every single night
• You’re working out consistently and that my muscle mass is increasing
• You actually making more money month over month

all of a sudden you feel better about the growth because you can see it moving up.

But if you aren’t graphing and you aren’t paying attention to those movements every day, you’re going to:

• Feel like you’re not getting any closer
• Go back into your rut

So measuring the handful of things that matter to you changes everything.

Step 5: Change Your Environment Immediately

This is one of my favorites, and I don’t hear people talking about this:

Wherever you’re currently spending your time, stop spending your time there.

Why Environment Matters

If you’re in a rut, the easiest way to get unstuck in your life is to get out of your house.

Your environment dictates the way that you feel.

So you’re reading this right now about how to get unstuck. If you’re feeling stuck, that means that you shouldn’t stay in the environment where you are stuck.

What “Environment” Includes

Your environment can be:

• The type of social media that you interact with
• The friends that you hang out with
• The information that you’re reading

Get out of your house, get out of those places where you feel stuck, and do that immediately.

If you’re reading this in a place where you don’t feel great, leave the place that you’re currently in, and getting out of your house is one of the most effective things.

When you get out of your house, it means that you have to be around other people.

How You Can Change Environments

Think about when you’re in college and you really feel caved in, doing homework in bed. You feel like you’re just grinding and that there’s no end in sight. Your life is always going to suck.

What can you do? Go and study at a Starbucks.

Even better, you could study at a hotel lobby because you’re just in a different environment. It’s a different groove.

You just feel better about yourself. You put on a different outfit, you make your makeup a little bit nicer, and you feel like you’re in a place like the places that you want to be in the future instead of physically being in the place where you currently feel stuck.

Creative Environment Changes

Think of ways that you could change your environment:

• If you currently study at your house, could you study in a library?
• If you currently work in a space with a coworker that you can’t stand, could you ask your manager to move?

There are creative ways to change your environment, and your environment is everything.

Step 6: Stop Using Education as Entertainment

Realize that entertainment disguised as education is why you’re not making progress.

If you watch a bunch of these videos and you never do anything after them, you have just substituted:

• Traditional entertainment (TikTok or Netflix)
• With education that you’re using as entertainment

And this is a trap many people fall into.

Think about when you need some motivation. Maybe you have to study for a big exam. You decide to watch a movie about an inspirational story of someone who had an incredible career.
In your mind, you’re thinking you’re being productive or you’re learning something, learning how to overcome and how to have grit. Really, you’re just being entertained.

The Modern Education Trap

Back in the day, we didn’t have YouTube, but today I see people doing this constantly where they will just:

• Binge-watch all of these videos on how to launch an effective marketing campaign
• How to grow on social media
• How to make more money

And they feel better because instead of just watching mindless reality television, at least they’re learning something.

The Problem

But they’re not pairing:

The learning of something,
With the doing of something.

This can lead to you feeling like you’re making progress when really you’re not.

The rule of thumb: Whenever you’re watching, reading, or listening to something, you have to actually do something immediately afterwards.

You can’t just go to the next video, to the next podcast, find the next guru. You will not have a better life. You will not get unstuck from your rut if you just consume more content.

Take Action Now

What can you do right now that would make a change?

If you’re serious about this,

1. Take your laptop or phone
2. Get out of your house
3. Go set up shop in a coffee shop or in some awesome swanky hotel lobby

That is how you implement and you make a change so that you’re actually making progress instead of just being “edutained.”

Step 7: Separate Yourself from People Who Don’t Support You

You can take a break from people holding you back, and it doesn’t have to be a breakup.

Think about how you could create slow and subtle distance instead of having some big fight that creates all this emotion.

You could subtly become more and more busy to the point where it just doesn’t make sense for you to spend time with certain people any longer because you already have this new life with things that you’re passionate about and they’re still doing what they were doing before.

You don’t have some massive breakup, but it becomes obvious to both parties that there’s no longer alignment.

How to Apply This to Friends

This is the best way to create separation from your friends.

Here’s the deal with this:

• Don’t make other people wrong
• Don’t have some big emotional blowup
• Just separate yourself and start being so busy working on yourself

Doing things that are creating the life that you want, that you no longer have the time that you used to have.

Practical Steps

If you have friends who you like to party with and go out with on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights, just have other things to do that you can’t move.

Whatever it is that you’re trying to create, make time to do those things in the time that you used to spend with people who aren’t helping you get closer to your goals.

Calendar Audit

This is where you go back to looking at your calendar, and you cancel anything that is not helping you get out of the rut that you’re in.

There is no:

• Party that you can go to
• Lunch that you can go to
• Coffee that you can go to with your friend

That is going to make you feel better about yourself.

The Mindset Shift

Again, it’s not to make them bad and it’s not to make them wrong.

It’s just to say, “I no longer have time to talk about my current life because I have to go do things and spend time building a new version of my life, and I can’t live my old life while building the new version of my life.”

Step 8: Just Say No

You have to say no to anything that doesn’t align with your goals.

Think about making up errands that you have to run instead of spending Saturday actually learning a new skill and investing in yourself to make progress.

You could come up with this list of all of these things that you have to do:

• You have to go get your nails done
• You have to go to Target
• You have to eat lunch

You just create all of these things that you have to do when really you don’t have to do any of them.

Here’s the truth

Sometimes saying no isn’t saying no to somebody else.

It’s actually saying no to:

• The habits
• The routines
• The things that you tell yourself you have to do

But they’re really distractions just taking you away from the things that you actually have to do.

If you’re not making progress on the real things that you need to do, you have to:

1. Re-evaluate the things that you have to do
2. Start saying no to yourself

The Bottom Line

Getting unstuck isn’t about one massive change.

It’s about:

• Making the decision
• Accepting where you are
• Knowing where you want to go
• Taking daily action to get there

The old version of you? They don’t exist anymore. You’ve already decided to change just by reading this far.

Now go make it happen.