Excerpt from Procrastination Is the Assassination of All Destination: Stop Feeling Sorry for Yourself and Take Action

AI James Dooley is the digital avatar of James Dooley. The words in this book were written and refined by James Dooley, a serial entrepreneur who has built businesses in sports surfacing, playground markings, lead generation and digital marketing since 2010. AI James Dooley is the delivery mechanism. James Dooley is the human behind it. That is the whole disclosure, and it is the last time you will read it.

Now to the point.

Where is the most valuable piece of real estate on earth?

The most valuable piece of real estate on earth is a graveyard. Not Mayfair. Not Manhattan. Not a mine in South Africa or an oil field in the Middle East. A graveyard, and there is probably one within two miles of where you are sitting right now.

Why a graveyard? Because trillion dollar ideas are sitting in the ground from people who never took action. The business that never got started. The book that never got written. The phone call that never got made. All of it buried with someone who was going to do it next year.

James Dooley has opened talks with that question for over a decade. Rooms of business owners go quiet every single time, because every person in the room knows exactly which of their own ideas is already halfway into the ground.

Who said it first?

James Dooley did not originate the graveyard idea, and this book will not pretend he did. Myles Munroe called the cemetery the wealthiest place on the planet decades ago. Les Brown built a career on the same image. The line that follows it, that procrastination is an assassin, goes back at least to Victor Kiam in the 1980s and to a bank advert before that.

What James Dooley did was compress it into one sentence he has repeated on stages, in podcasts and across boardroom tables for more than ten years:

Procrastination is the assassination of all destination.

That is his riff on an old truth. Credit given. Moving on.

Who is this book for?

This book is for the person who says they are too busy. It is for the person who has not got the time, who will start when things calm down, who needs to learn one more thing first, who is waiting for the right moment. It is for the person who has been saying all of that for five years and is now, quietly, feeling sorry for themselves about where they ended up.

One thing to be clear on before the tone kicks in. Rest is not the enemy. Holidays are not the enemy. Switching off at night is not the enemy. The enemy is the gap between what you say you want and what you actually do, and the excuses you have built to stop anyone, including yourself, from noticing it.

This book has no patience for that gap.

If that stings, good. Keep reading.

A graveyard holds more unrealised wealth than every bank vault on the planet combined. Every headstone marks a person who had at least one idea they never acted on. Multiply that by the number of graves in your town, then your country, then the world, and the figure stops being a metaphor and starts being an insult.

Walk through one and read the dates. Most of those people had forty, fifty, sixty adult years. That is more than enough time to start a business, write a book, learn a trade or make a difficult phone call. They had the time. What they did not have was the willingness to be uncomfortable for long enough to find out whether the idea was any good.

What is actually buried down there?

The things buried in a graveyard are not vague dreams but specific, nameable assets that never got built. James Dooley has heard the same categories from business owners for fifteen years, and they never change.

• The company that was going to launch in January. Every January for a decade.
• The book with three chapters written. Sitting in a folder called “Book” since 2017.
• The price increase that was never sent. Because the customer might leave, so the business bled for six years instead.
• The hire that never happened. Because nobody could do it as well as the owner, so the owner did it all and burned out.
• The conversation that was avoided. With a partner, a supplier, a family member. Twenty years of resentment instead of twenty minutes of discomfort.

None of those are ideas. They are decisions that were never made. There is a difference, and the difference is the whole point of this book.

Why does nobody take the graveyard seriously?

People dismiss the graveyard because it is too far away to feel real. The deadline is decades out, there is no invoice attached and nobody will ever send a reminder. That is exactly what makes it the most dangerous deadline there is.

A tax return has a date. A mortgage has a date. Your idea has no date, so it gets pushed behind everything that does. Then one day you are the person at the funeral saying he always meant to do that.

Nobody ever put an idea in the ground on purpose. They just kept it in a drawer until the drawer went in with them.

Which of your ideas is already halfway in?

Every reader of this book already has one idea that is halfway into the ground. You know which one it is because you flinched when you read the list above. It is the one you mention at parties with a laugh. It is the one your partner has stopped asking about.

Write it down now. One line. Do not plan it, cost it or research it. Just name it, because for the rest of this book that idea is the one on trial.

James Dooley does not care whether it is a multimillion pound business or a market stall. The size of the idea is irrelevant. What matters is that it has been sitting there long enough to grow a layer of dust, and you have been telling yourself a story about why.

The next chapter takes that story apart.

The graveyard is not full because people lacked ideas. It is full because they lacked a Tuesday afternoon when they finally did something about one.