You don’t do what you want, you are not honest with yourself and you are definitely not determined.
Me neither. Otherwise I would have written this text months ago.
So you are facing an important task. You are sitting on the couch and wanted to go to the gym 40 minutes ago. You are scrolling on TikTok. You are thinking, it feels pleasant. Not good pleasant, but pleasant. More and more reasons come to your mind why it is okay to keep going like this. “Today it is not worth it anyway” “I am not missing anything” “I am happy like this too”

I know this way too well. You look after the other option and know that next time you will not choose it, even though you told yourself you would. It is like an unfulfilled love that keeps you awake at night, something you feel drawn to, but at the same time powerless against.

We took the easy path. The bad one.

In the end, we feel unhappy, Empty and notice that something bothers us. We cannot turn back time, but we tell ourselves that we can change it in the future. But we keep acting against our own happiness.

I assume there are many people out there who live like this. Why do they ask themselves why they are not happy?
Your brain is screaming, but it is not being heard.

You know what you want, but you give your impulse no value.
Let’s look at what that actually looks like.

It is because you are not honest

Our brain, our body, always strives for our well-being.
When you are thirsty, you drink something. You do not simply endure the thirst, because afterwards you would only be even thirstier.
You are honest with yourself;
you get yourself a drink to satisfy the thirst, so that your survival is secured.

But we are no longer in the Stone Age where we only deal with survival. We have the privilege of having so much free lifetime that our brain can strive for a meaning in life beyond survival.

Your brain can give you a signal, like a thirst signal, that you should become smart, as a simple impulse. Use the privilege of finding one or several purpose(s) in life.

That is a simple impulse that tells you a lot. Through it you can find out your reasons, motivations in life and who you are.
It is a hint toward your happiness in life. If not even an exact roadmap.

first: be honest

We think in a vicious cycle

You want to do something - But you weigh it against all the things that hold you back: fear of consequences, effort you have to put in, ignorance that you cannot do it anyway, your environment which you could “hurt”.
Those are simple excuses, as you notice.

Because of that you search for new options, because what you wanted to do no longer works from a purely “logical” point of view. But the new option does not work either, because again you are only looking for excuses. So back to the first option. “Ah right, that does not work because of xy, so the other one after all.” -> vicious cycle.

People often avoid decisions by postponing them, not acting or staying with the status quo. Important drivers are anticipated regret, negative anticipations, decision difficulty and uncertainty about one’s own preferences.

Those are all avoidable things, right?

So the second thing we have to do: reduce choice

We do not put everything together properly

With the insights so far, we can think.
Proper thinking, in short, is simply connecting existing knowledge and impressions with new ones, which creates new insights.

You know: In the morning you are always tired (1), you have no goal that you live toward during the day (2), so you search the internet for causes (3). Now you connect it:

“I am flat in the morning because I go to bed without a winddown (3) — and demotivated because the day offers me nothing (2). That is exactly what makes me tired (1).”

It is that simple:

1. Know what you know

2. Know what you do not know

3. Gain new impressions

4. Connect everything with each other -> like a mind map

Collecting new impressions is important because it leads you to new insights.
Missing impressions hold you back.

third: think

That is why we know what we want

As just explained, our body and mind strive for our well-being.
We know what we want, we just do not dare to be honest, to stand by it and to live by it.

Listen to your impulse.
The impulse that makes you happy long-term. It is the idea you have had for so long, always in the back of your mind. The idea that could break the vicious cycle of decisions.

When we logically distinguish between the “real” impulse as a drive and the “escape” impulse as an aversion, the picture becomes clear.

So you do not watch TikTok, you go to the gym. TikTok only came as an “escape” impulse because you were not honest with yourself about what you want, even though you know it and it even makes you happy.

We know what we want. But still we look for simple excuses. That does not make us happy. It drains us, so that we are Empty.

We could live such a beautiful life, happy. Through that we would only do what we want, would have special motivation for things and would go to sleep every day looking forward to Tomorrow.

That must be what it feels like to live a life you Love…

That is why honesty is so important. We have to perceive what we want and accept it, not run away from it, that makes no sense.

Deep down we know what we want, our brain strives for our well-being.

What if you really do not know what you want

Then you are distracted. You have not dug deep enough inside yourself, or did you even dig inside yourself at all? Did you even have a conversation with yourself? Did you ever pay attention to when you feel like this? Did you ever write down everything you know about your current situation and connect it with your knowledge of how it could be better? Did you ever form a clear thought?

Or did you just say “yeah I feel like shit, I do not know what to do, I do not want to do xy…”

If you did all of that and still do not know, I can advise you to either be honest with yourself, admit that you did not do all of that - That is how I was too, or maybe still am now, or you need more impressions, in order to connect them and come to other conclusions.

Either you research what psychological needs are, or you briefly ask yourself whether your autonomy, belonging or competence is being violated or not fulfilled.

For my part, I strongly strive for competence, which is why I am writing this right now. I have the feeling that I am smart and if I upload this somewhere, if only one person sees it, and I was able to help them - then I did that through my “competence”.

But I only came up with that idea just now while writing this through thinking. I have simply always liked questioning things, educating myself further, building on what already exists and so on…

Thinking can help you enormously with this, as I said.

The mechanism that can solve the problem

“wrong” thinking

We know that we are indecisive, or rather, that we do not do what we want. That is because we think wrongly, show ourselves the wrong possibilities and accordingly also think wrongly. Of course there is no clear wrong, but I think that if you are not happy, something is going wrong.

In other words:
Impulse -> weigh against external factors who do I hurt? what do I lose? what keeps me in my current situation?..), meaning looking for a reason why the impulse should not be fulfilled / followed <- wrong thinking -> Unhappy: permanent inner need to do something differently, or always looking back at another past decision.

By impulse I mean what you strive for / your motives / the reason why you get up / what you want to achieve / your goal.

This is how the vicious cycle happens:
You have to decide: 1. Stay at home 2. go to friends 3. go to the wedding. No matter how long you look for a solution, you do not find one. You try to make everyone happy, but that does not work, you always hurt someone with the cancellation:

Decided for friends: “But the wedding is only once in a lifetime” -> chosen wedding: “But the friends prepared something extra” -> chosen friends.
And again from the beginning.

Again and again you looked for reasons not to do what you want to do. The option you had been thinking about the whole time was consciously left out, the one that gives you inner anticipation, attracts you like a magnet, but you consciously turned away from it. Because it takes courage to cancel both, simply stay at home, phone off, thoughts off, book in hand.

Feel free to apply it logically to the situation from last week. Also something deeper, like breaking contact or quitting.

You can observe: Whoever only looks at what does not work, instead of listening to their impulse, quickly starts spinning in circles.

The process of choice was therefore not fulfilled, we are still looking after the old option, asking ourselves whether it would not have been better. Thus the meaning of decision is not fulfilled.

You are indecisive.

Decided is the corresponding verb: It describes the completed process of choice, a firm attitude

Thinking is not bad. Overthinking is.

But now really the system and “right” thinking

If, instead, you change only one single thing, add one decisive thing to your problem-solving process, the equation solves itself. As long as the conditions are met.

Of course this cannot be transferred to everything, especially not rigidly one-to-one, but it should help you find your way a little more.

So let us add the value.

The value is formed from your impressions, the thinking that comes with them, and is rarely not externally determined. But you still decide how you put the puzzle together, so a value, as long as you have not simply taken over a stranger’s thought which would not be reprehensible, is never 100% externally determined.

Impulse -> weigh options against values which option weighs more), which often already makes many options simply fall away -> remaining external factors, weigh them as before -> Decided.

That simple.

For this we are honest, reduce the choice through the value and think with everything we have.

The option to stay at home weighs more. You would only go to the wedding or to the friends to satisfy them, you did not name a single thought that shows your impulse to go to the appointments. You have no impulse to go there at all. From the beginning you only wanted to stay at home, it was the option that did not fit into your equation. But maybe the equation itself was just set up wrong.

Transferred to another example:

You want to delete TikTok. For many unimaginable, but you have already made it this far with your attention, so keep going!). The impulse has been there for a long time, but you never decided on it. Not because you do not want it, but because you are indecisive. In the evening you notice what you could have done instead; call that one friend you have not seen in a long time, read the book you bought impulsively, or cook again instead of ordering. The typically known excuseskeep you from it, fake importance to you: “this is how I keep contact” “I will lose my streaks” The problem is that you ignore your impulse. It actively told you. So at some point you decide impulsively to follow the impulse and enjoy satisfaction instead of being torn apart.

Do not overthink
Simply think
Simply Do

The limits

The system of right thinking cannot be transferred to everything.

You also have to be patient, control yourself, follow rules, not neglect duties and social things. Things like that require active thinking, so that we find out in which situation it is appropriate not to follow our impulse, but simply to engage with the situation.

For that we need to reflect a little. For which we need patience.

It takes time to find out what our impulse is, if we do not know it.

With this writing here, it took me 3 years and who knows whether it is the right impulse I am following…

When you watch TikTok, notice something bothers you, afterwards you feel Empty, drained and cannot think clearly. - You do not have an impulse telling you that you should delete TikTok. It takes time until you find it out, and you only manage that through control:

Do not distract yourself anymore, do not run away from the emptiness with even more TikTok, instead question yourself why you feel this way and when, through thinking, you have worked out options, add the value, decide.

Or rather the decision is usually already made once we are honest about what pulls us where.

One more mini tip

Build routines that take thinking work away from you. “What do I wear today” becomes “How do I want to feel Tomorrow”. “What do I do tomorrow morning” becomes “I will already put out the coffee and the newspaper”.

No questions
Statements

Do it

Your body resists the unknown, that is true.
But that is a good sign.

If you do not do something out of fear of the unknown, it only shows that a change is coming. You will learn to deal with new things. Without change you stay exactly the way you are right now.

We should all dare to simply do things. In a certain way it is also a protective mechanism. But who cares? Why not live that one time the way you want.

Security comes through Doing, not through Thinking

Dare to make mistakes, we need mistakes in order to think

The system can cause mistakes.

You cannot know everything, you cannot have and understand all connections. Neither can your subconscious and your intuition.

I often also have an impulse against meetups, but when I then go, I am happy. When I engage with the situation. That speaks against my system, but it works because I have learned from my actions and think one more time before I cancel.

So make mistakes, be proud when you make mistakes, you learn from them.
Next time you know how it works differently. Whether your thinking is enough to follow your intuition.

But most importantly, you have taken one step toward happiness.

Wrong decisions are better than no decision.

• Dan Koe

Short and simple so you take something with you

Notice what bothers you -> think -> find out how it comes about and why, how you can change it -> be honest with your impulse -> give it a value, make it the only option -> do it.

And most importantly, be satisfied with how you decided. You decided for happiness. If you did not do it, then you will look back and be indecisive, but if you know that you decided for your intuition, then you know that you are allowed to be determined, even if afterwards you still have to learn from it.

Peace does not come from the perfect decision, but from making one and Accepting it. Take Action

Note: This essay was originally written by Hand in German and translated into English with the help of AI. I reviewed it to preserve the original meaning, tone, and message as closely as possible.