Speaking Loud, Acting Soft: Unmasking the Action Paradox

You wake up one day and go to work. Or you go to school and you are already thinking about what job or which profession you want to get into after you graduate. After all, that is what you’ve been hearing since you were a child? But that isn’t the topic of this article.

Every single one of us has also had big dreams since we were little children. I remember, Lego was poppin off when I was little. I wanted to be a Lego designer in Denmark where Lego has it’s headquarters. At the time I was maybe 6. And i’m pretty sure you’ve had similar dreams when growing up. But as we slowly started to grow up, we started being worried about the grades in school, about our every day duties, and forgot a little bit about the things we actually wanted to do. The timeline is usually similar for most people. Big dreams when being a child, dreams slowly starting to fade away as we grow up, but then at one point you get tired and actually start wondering how to achieve these dreams again. Maybe your boss yelled at you again for the 4th time this week, or you got another F from the teacher you hate with a passion. So you decide to make changes. You tell everyone how you’re gonna become jacked, how you hate the this toxic environment and you hate everyone here. You tell this to everyone. You post a story on Instagram from your first day in the gym. The day after you go again. Then the 3rd day comes, your teacher perhaps didn’t yell at you for a whole week and you kind of forget why you wanted to start lifting in the first place. And you stop. Life isn’t THAT bad after all isn’t it? Then your teacher gives you another bad grade a few weeks later. And the process begins all over again.

By now I hope you understand what i’m trying to say to you. As the title says, speaking loud, acting soft. People of this generation are the most spoiled they’ve ever been. It takes so little for people to say to themselves “Life isn’t that bad”. Literally all it takes is to unlock your phone, open Instagram or Tiktok, maybe Netflix. And watch for hours. Just sit, maybe lay down, and watch, consume. It’s all it takes for a person to literally give up on something they wanted anyway. Even on Tiktok and Instagram which is literally poisoning you from the inside, you see a lot of motivational content on there. You decide to like every single one of them. You might see an edit of Conor McGregor, you might hear a motivational speech from David Goggins for example. You like both of these posts and continue scrolling. By hearing how you should never give up, and that you can achieve anything, it gave you a false state of satisfaction when in fact you haven’t done anything, only consumed content.

This is also called “mental masturbation”

Very little takes for humans as a species to be satisfied. It takes one little device, or one week which went alright. Makes you forget about your goals completely. But I am here to make you never forget.

Approach your goals with the same intensity and consistency every day. Learn on the way. Doesn’t matter if you want to be a doctor, athlete or you want to start a digital business. Because consistency and discipline beats short term motivation every single time. The key to being consistent is fullfilling a certain set of tasks every day no matter how you’re feeling that day.

It took me years to fully understand this.