What Bodybuilding Taught Me About Procrastination by Nicolas Cole

Bodybuilding taught me something very important about this idea of “wasted time.”

Left: 15 years old / Right: 23 years old

In order to successfully put on muscle, one must eat a certain amount of food. And in order to eat that much food, one must divide their day up accordingly into 5 or 6 sections. In each section is a meal, and that meal must be eaten in order to fuel you for that night’s lift. For example:

8:30 am — Meal 1

10:30 am — Meal 2

12:30 pm — Meal 3

3 pm — Meal 4

5:30 pm — Meal 5

LIFT

9 pm — Meal 6

Now, let’s say I procrastinated. Let’s say I just “don’t feel like eating my first meal right now. I’ll eat it later.”

Meal 1 is big in itself. Meal 2 is big as well. If I don’t eat meal 1 and try to eat it along with meal 2, that’s a disgusting amount of food, and when I say disgusting I mean you’ll have to stop half-way through, go to the bathroom, come back, and force-feed the rest.

Let’s say I’m just having a super lazy day though.

“God, I don’t want to do anything right now! I’ll do it later. I promise.” — said every procrastinator, ever.

So then Meal 3 approaches and I still haven’t eaten.

By that point, it’s too much. No normal human being could possibly eat that much food. I’m down, I’m depressed, I’m starting to regret not having forced myself to eat Meals 1 and 2. Why? Well, because I can’t eat them now — it’s too late — but more importantly, my lift is starting to near and since I haven’t eaten any of my meals, I’m going to be walking into the lift exhausted.

My meals are my energy.

So think of it this way:

Say you have a test tomorrow night. The test is like the lift. To prepare for this test, you have 5 meals to eat. You have to review the chapter on chemical bonds, you have to read through the study guide, you have to finish that volcano project, you have to write 5 questions for your in-class Trivial Pursuit game, and you have to complete 10 practice questions from the back of the book.

You know what you have to do but “ughhhhhh! I am just feeling so lazy right now!”

So you decide to watch Netflix instead of getting started the day prior (meal 1). 3 episodes of Scandal later (meal 2) and you’re all, “Omg but what happens to Olivia Pope! I have to know!” You decide you’ll get started after 2 more episodes, just 2 more! (Meal 3) By now, it’s 10pm at night, you have to be up early in the morning for school, the sun is down, it’s dark outside, the whole house is quiet, you’re actually more tired than you thought, so you go to bed. You wake up the next morning (meal 4), no time. There’s no way you’re going to get everything done in the 30 minutes you have before school — despite your best efforts at convincing yourself otherwise. You try to get it done in the first few periods of school (Meal 5) but it’s shit, it’s all shit, you know it, your teacher is going to know it, your classmates, everyone will know. “Dammit,” you say to yourself, probably in the bathroom mirror. You show up for the test empty-handed. You curse yourself for procrastinating.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

This is how most people live their lives. Parkinson’s Law states that “work expands to fit the time allotted,” meaning that if you give yourself a week to do something, it will take you the entire week to complete the task. If you were to give yourself that same task, however, with a deadline of 3 days, you would get it done in 3 days. It’s not the work’s fault it took a week. It’s your own.

I like using fitness analogies to illustrate certain lessons because it’s one of the few things you can point at in life when discussing work ethic to show “this is where you start, and this is where you end.” People see it, they get it, it makes sense.

If you want to fix procrastination, divide your day up into 5–6 meals. Eat all meals, every day. If you do this, you too can achieve your end goal. If not, good luck getting shredded eating 2 haphazard meals a day. (Or becoming a lawyer, or a doctor, or launching your start-up, or etc. etc. etc.).

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