Kill Your “Onces”: How to Stop Procrastinating and Start Taking Available Action
Dickie Bush has this concept of “Killing Your Onces.”
Dickie’s an entrepreneur with online businesses:
- Writing Course: $3 million/year
- Ghostwriting Course: $5 million/year
- WriteWithAI newsletter: $500,000/year
- Typeshare: $1 million/year
I’ve followed him on X for a while.
I like his intense attitude toward getting the most out of life by being the best version of himself…which requires killing your “onces”.
- There are things you really want to do in life and in your business
- But you keep saying, “Once I…then I’ll do it.”
As Dickie says, “you’re making excuses to delay taking action.”
Your mind is conveniently finding reasons for why you couldn’t possibly do these things yet.
This is why you need to consistently call your mind out to ensure it’s not choosing fear or procrastination over available action.
Here’s a Thought Exercise you can use kill your “onces”:
#1: Create a list of goals you want to achieve
#2: Write down the reason you’ve decided you can’t do them yet
#3: Grade each reason on a scale of 1 (procrastinating) to 10 (genuinely cannot do this yet)
#4: Rank each goal as easiest to start (1–5) to hardest to start (5–10)
#5: Create to-do lists or schedule all the goals that have a 1–5 grading and get started now
#6: Create a calendar reminder for 6 months from now to look at the 5–10 graded goals to see if you can start working on them
#7: Repeat this Thought Exercise
Killing your “onces” is a great example of structured reflection — the time you take to reflect on what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, and why you’re spending time on it.
I create a free 3-Day Think Retreat for you.
Each day you get one thought exercise you’ll use alongside Claude to think better about your business.
These thought exercises come from:
- Reading 7 hours of psychology research looking at how business owners can use intuition and reasoning in their decision-making
- Going through 98 mental models to find the best applicable in most situations
- Watching hundreds of hours of entrepreneurial interviews to find the idea of the invisible games we play
→ It’s free.
→ It outsources the hard part of figuring out what to reflect on.
→ And each thought exercise is specifically written to make Claude your business strategist.
