The power of being impulsive

Josh Larson at Bushido has a keen insight into the plus side of being impulsive.

In his blog post, he talks about impulsively taking on the challenges that you instinctively shy away from. That helps you develop grit. With more grit, we can not only meet the challenges we now face, but take on even bigger ones.

This attitude can be applied to the purchase of life insurance. Many people shy away from that, for any number of reasons. It could be fear of death. Or relcutance to go through underwriting. Or financial worries.

But as Josh says, if we get into the habit of overcoming our difficulties, then we can meet these personal challenges head-on. We can get the job done, and move on to the next difficulty.

From Josh Larson:

Typically the things that will be the best for us are the ones that are immediately difficult. Because of this, we convince ourselves to wait. We put off the workout, the project, the conversation. It’s within our DNA to want to be safe. So logic tells us “Why would you voluntarily put yourself in danger?” Our fight or flight response tells us to stay away from immediate risk.

We use a biased and subjective truth to convince ourselves that we’ll do it later, that now just isn’t the right time. The tough part is whatever logic we come up with is usually believable. We talk ourselves out of inconvenient and difficult things to save our current self the discomfort.

Part of building a keen personal awareness is in noticing these patterns the moment they arise. If there’s something difficult you need to do, beat logic to the punch and do it immediately.