Tony will do it. Tony’s great at trash.

What’s the deal with motivation? W

ho are these people who say, I can’t bring myself to take out the trash?

Fine. You know what I say when I feel unmotivated?

Tony will do it. Tony’s great at trash. Tony loves trash. He lives for it. Squishing his toes in a mystery liquid is his jam.

Just picture it, you’re sitting on the couch, covered in snack dust, thinking that you can’t bring yourself to do this.

Fine. Call em up.

Tony, get over here!

And suddenly, you’re up, you’re taking out the trash, you’re practically whistling while you do it. At this point, it’s not even you anymore. Tony is the guy you bring in when you don’t feel like doing something.

How do you trick your brain into action? If your mind doesn’t know the difference anyway, what’s the harm?

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Scott, this technique is inauthentic. You’re just deceiving yourself. People are going to think you’re mentally unstable. Pretending you’re someone else will undermine your confidence.

Those are all fair objections. Allow me to address them.

First of all, of course it’s inauthentic. What’s your point? Life doesn’t reward integrity, it rewards results. Deciding to not let your feelings be the reason you don’t do something isn’t deciding yourself, it’s being a mature adult. Don’t be so sanctimonious.

The next objection to my tool is, people will think you’re unstable. No they won’t. Not if you get great results. Not if you finish projects on time and deliver on your promises. Nobody is going to pull you aside into an empty conference room and say, hey man, I’ve noticed you’re pretending to be a nineteenth century explorer to finish your quarterly report, and frankly, it’s making the team uncomfortable.

No, they’re going to say, damn, how’d you pull that off so fast? Can you show me how you did that?

And you’re just going to sit there and go, hey the team needs me, so I got it done. Because nobody cares how you did it. They care that you did it. People won’t question your sanity when you help them crush their end of quarter sales goals.

One final objection to my approach is that pretending to be someone else will undermine your confidence. I believe the opposite will happen. You will build a timeline of credibility with yourself. You will accumulate enough evidence to prove your own competence.

Tony will take out the trash enough times, that any shred of doubt you had about your own abilities will vanish like a fart in the wind.

If you have a better idea that outsourcing your life to someone who actually has their shit together, I’m all ears. But until big pharma invents a smart drug that doesn’t lead to hypomania and addiction, I personally will be delegating tasks to a fictional workhorse who doesn’t whine about it.

Tony is an absolute machine.

My wife is scared of him, but it’s hard to argue with results.