There are sometimes when you cannot get reward except from a certain type of work. Even if something is right, an amazing idea, or the one type of task that will get you dramatically ahead in your career or professional life, any kind of reward that you can get from doing it right now or currently sometimes might be blocked, even if it is otherwise insanely potentially rewarding, because there’s something else that your mind has decided to not get any reward from anything else other than this one particular goal or type of task or work.

The reason why you’re struggling with being successful or productive is that you haven’t succeeded, won, or produced, achieved, or created amazing or great stuff enough times in the past. Your training to become more successful, more productive, or better in any way should involve practical segments of aiming at nothing but doing or finishing something without failing.

A lot of the time you find yourself thinking: there are several choices that I should pick one of them to begin doing or working on now. All these choices are stuff that falls under the same category of work. They are not necessarily of equal importance, priority, or effect concerning the general outcomes that you intend to reach with your work today. Pick any random one of these choices. Completely arbitrarily. Even if your choice doesn’t make any sense right now. Even if it were the worst of these choices. It doesn’t matter, as long as it wasn’t from a pool of choices that has nothing to do with your work goals of the day.

We should learn to control ourselves to be able to work smarter instead of automating ourselves to work harder for a longer time without being aware of ourselves and present at the current moment. It’s not just about implementing unique strategies that are going to get you there quicker or easier. It’s about being more awake and alive while you’re working. It’s about actually being smart while working as opposed to applying smart techniques, tricks, and hacks.

There’s a balance between knowing that your circumstances are holding you back and not giving up because your circumstances are bad. Failure to acknowledge that there’s anything wrong in your circumstances or environment indicates that there’s no reason for you to fix or improve anything. Everything is acceptable and perfect the way it is. I cannot imagine a pathway to apathy, indifference, lack of ambition, and degeneracy stronger than that. Failure to recognize that there is something wrong in the external world, as opposed to something that is wrong with you, the effort you put in, or your mindset, is an example of you lying to yourself, which lowers your IQ significantly in the long run, and would leave no room for you to feel that there’s any value in making anything that exists outside of your brain and body better in any way possible. This does not mean that because your environment or circumstances are not perfect already, you will not even try because of these excuses. Taking responsibility for your life if is based upon you ignoring how bad your situation is will only be a case of delusion, which might dramatically contribute to the feelings of indifference and lack of fulfillment you might experience when you get to all that you want in life and then ask yourself is this all there is. When you tell your body you can be happy regardless of your circumstances and reality, this makes your body unable to celebrate you making a difference in the real world by making you happier. That is, this teaches your body to detach itself from reality and increases your chances of suffering from anhedonia.

Taking responsibility for your life could be turned in your favor if you determined to get there anyway without making any excuses as to why you are bound to fail or why you shouldn’t even try to make anything better in the first place.