Or to go to the gym or to work hard

in school or at your job?

Do you often postpone the work that you know you should do?

Or maybe you just wish that somebody else

would do it for you.

If you answered yes to any of those questions

then the world has probably told you that you are lazy

or that you're a procrastinator who lacks motivation.

At least, this is what I was personally told.

And for a long time I believed them.

I bought into their BS and I labeled myself

as that lazy procrastinator who would

never achieve any great academic success,

and I carried this mediocre mindset

of getting mediocre grades and putting in mediocre effort

all the way up until my college years.

But one day I was presented with the opportunity

to study abroad in Europe.

And this got me really excited,

and nothing ever remotely related to school

had ever got me excited.

And I started to imagine myself laying on the beach in Italy

or eating churros in Spain

or going to a party in the Czech Republic.

And after weeks of research I decided

that I wanted to study abroad in Lisbon, Portugal

because it had everything that I had wanted.

In my mind going to Lisbon was going to be the thing

that would make all my academic struggles worthwhile.

At that time it was the most important thing in my life.

But when I was talking to one of my professors

about the exchange program

I learned a few interesting things.

I learned that Portugal was the number one

most popular choice among all the students,

so there was going to be some competition.

And then I learned that my university chooses

where all the students go based on

how good their grades are.

And at this time mine were okay at best.

And then I learned that only four students

are selected to go to Portugal,

which meant that if I wanted to go to Portugal

my grades needed to be in the top 1%

of my entire business program.

So it was me, the lazy procrastinator,

going against all the other kids who had dedicated

their entire lives to school.

That was my competition.

So the next day I started to study really, really hard,

way more than I ever had in my entire life.

I can still remember walking through the library

and seeing the other kids from my class

who I knew wanted to go to Portugal,

and we would just make eye contact with each other

and we would just have this intensity in our eyes

because we both knew that we were

competing for the same thing.

So the stakes were really, really high.

As the semester went on my grades got higher and higher

and my social life became more and more nonexistent.

But one morning near the end of my semester

my mom said something to me that was really interesting.

She said, "I have never seen you work this hard in school.

"Maybe you aren't a procrastinator after all."

And this line really got me thinking

because during that particular semester

no teacher, no student or parent would say that I was lazy.

In fact, they would say that I'm a really hard worker

who really gets after it.

But in the previous semester, just five months ago,

those same people would all say that I was a procrastinator

and that I was lazy, so which is it?

I can't be both, can I?

The truth is, is that no human being is just one thing.

Nobody here is 100% lazy or 100% not lazy.

I first really understood this idea back in the 10th grade

where I would do anything to procrastinate doing my homework

because I hated school.

But I would put everything on hold in order

to play a computer game called StarCraft II,

which is actually a national sport in South Korea.

And I would spend hours just researching

how to get better at StarCraft.

I would practice my skills, practice different strategies,

and at one point I actually beat

one of the top 200 players in North America.

I'm not saying this to brag.

I'm saying this to make a point

that when it came to school I was really lazy

but when it came to gaming I was the opposite.

So the question, how do I stop being lazy

isn't actually a great question to ask yourself.

A much better question would be why am I feeling lazy?

And the reason why I was feeling lazy

and why probably most of you are feeling lazy

is because we were all doing the wrong thing.

Maybe you're studying the wrong stuff

or you're working at the wrong job.

When you feel lazy you should pay attention and take notes

because sometimes that is your intuition or your body

or spirit or whatever you wanna call it

saying to you, hey, you're doing the wrong thing.

Do something else.

So when you're feeling lazy and you

truly want to feel motivated again,

you need to understand these two key things.

The first one is to make sure you know the why

behind what you are doing.

Because if you have this you will always be able

to do those things that you don't really want to do,

but they are stuff that you need to do.

For me, it was being motivated to do well in school

in order to go to Europe.

And yes, I did actually end up going to Portugal.

So the lazy procrastinator won.

So there's hope for all of us.

And two, and this is the best option in my opinion,

is to start doing something that

you're actually passionate about,

because life is short.

If you have not found the thing

that you really love to do,

then you need to start at the very least looking for it,

otherwise, you will wake up at the age of 80

and think to yourself, man, I spent my whole life

doing the wrong thing.

And this image is really scary to me.

But Mitch, how do I find something

that I'm passionate about?

The number one best way to do this is to try new things.

Unfortunately, despite what the movies tell you,

your passion is not just gonna appear one day.

It's not gonna come into your dream

or just come into your life.

It's something that you will actually

have to go and search for.

And the best resource that I found to discover your passion

is a website called Skillshare.

Skillshare is an online learning community

that can literally teach you any skill you want.

They have over 25,000 classes in design,

business, technology.

They can even teach you how to become a successful YouTuber

or a successful animator or a writer or a photographer.

And the first 500 people who sign up

using my link in the description will gain access

to all of this 100% free for the first two months,

and the last time I talked about Skillshare

I think like 500 people signed up in the first hour.

So, if you click it and it's still there,

consider yourself very lucky.

Let's make 2020 the year where we finally

start doing the things that we love to do.

Thank you for watching, and I'll see you soon.