The Consequences of "Later"

Have you seen the book "The Power of Now" in the bookstore? I don't own the book, or else I will be taking picture of the book as my cover for this post.

The Consequences of "Later" is something like the opposite idea of "The Power of Now". I only flip a few pages of the book "The Power of Now", it's basically emphasize on the importance of bringing our thoughts and idea into reality as soon as we can before we forgotten about it or we somehow give excuses to delay it and in the end, we procrastinate too much and we are not doing it at all.

Can you recall the last time when people ask you about something and you reply "Later"? How long does it take for you to remember the task or subject requested by other people and finish it up? Small matters that does not take us much time & effort probably not going to take long. But stuff that make you feel clinging to do it would take a long time, and they are either important to you or not important and you don't feel like doing it.

Would you be surprise that the things that we usually would say "Later" are usually something that are important to us? Remember the time when you thought to yourself that you need to clean and tidy up your room but soon, you tell yourself that you do it later but end up dragging it for days or weeks. And during college or university time, you told yourself that you will study after dinner but end up surfing Facebook or doing other stuff, and you told yourself that you will study later after all these relaxing activities but end up it was too late and you need to go to bed, so again you told your that you will study tomorrow.

We can witness and experience unlimited times when we or other people would say "Later" but only choose to remember it when we wanted to. To a certain extent, you can consider that things that we would procrastinate are usually things that we dislike and it's just because we are suppose to do it, one of the serious issues that I notice is the procrastination of people dream and ambitions.

As I'm getting older (not really that old, currently I'm just 26yo), many of my friends are getting into the stage of slowly realizing that they need to get into an advance stage where they need to have dreams, and they need to persuade them and start changing their life for goods. They should not stay at the same stage and most of them feel uncomfortable thinking that their life would be just like that for the rest of their life.

But in order to get out of our current life and start changing, you need practical plan and clear idea of what you want to change and how. You need to find a nice & relaxing place to think and best if you could write down everything in your mind and make sure you truly know what you want instead of thinking about your thoughts over and over again. This is the life changing stage where we call it "Planning". But do you know that most people who seeking for life changes doesn't failed during their life changing process, but failed in this initial stage because they have problem starting it?

In Chinese, there is a saying: "Everything is hard in the beginning". This quote perfectly apply to this situation. Because we do not know how we should start changing, we have no idea what we truly want and we not sure how we should think or do about it, so when comes to starting your plan for it, you frequently or unconsciously tell yourself Later.

If you have experience on the situation above, try to think if you have any dreams or wishes that you thought about them a lot in the past but eventually, you totally forgotten about it and even if you remember it now, it doesn't seems important to you?

Time flies, a lot of things that matter to us in the past no longer seems significant to us, but doesn't mean that those dreams and wishes don't play an important role in our life. Imagine if you have a dreams in the past to became a singer. Now you know that being a singer is tough, but what if you pursuit your dreams during that time and succeeded to be a famous star? If you stubbornly hold on to the passion at that time, you might be, or perhaps I should say you definitely living a total different life right now. But that is only IF you did not tell yourself to do things "Later".

There is no saying of what could come true in the future. Quote from Steve Jobs: "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards." Yes, you can't know what's going to happen ahead, but you know things that already happen. If you experience the lost of passion in the past because you frequently push your passion to "Later", you should not let the same thing happen again right now and in the future.

Thinking about 10 years later when you look backwards, what do you wish to see? Do you wish to look backward and blame yourself that you did not chase after your passion again but let them fade? I'm sure you don't want it.

If "The Power of Now" is insufficient to ignite the passion for you to do what you wanted to do now, think about "The Consequences of Later" to remind yourself that you want a meaningful and fulfilling life and not a regretful life of not achieving anything.