The Most Dangerous Place To Live Is 'Not Yet

Every day you spend maintaining the persona of someone who is about to do something great, is another day your gift doesn't exist in the world. Let's drop into this..

Someone with undeniable talent, learns fast, has unique ideas nobody else has seen. Yet years pass and someone far less talented can build, write and create. The greatest battle for this person isn't what's happening in the outside world. It's happening inside their psyche.

Jung called this: Identification with potential. A psychological state where your relationship with what you could do becomes more satisfying than what you actually do.

As long as the book isn't written, it's still the best book you'll ever write. As long as the business isn't launched. It can still change everything. Potential cannot fail but reality can.

So the mind creates an invisible prison where you keep preparing, planning, researching, learning and talking about it.. always standing one step away from your own life. Where the realm of 'almost ready' feels safer than actively participating in life.

Your mind rarely experiences this as fear. That's what makes the trap so convincing.

Many talented people develop a persona. The identity of someone who is about to do something great. Not someone who has. Because the mask of potential looks almost identical to ambition.

Individuation asks something much harder. Not... 'What is the idea of who could I become?' That's cool, but... 'Am I willing to become an active participant in what I'm capable of?

The greatest risk is carrying the weight of everything you could have created without ever giving it to the world.

Alan Watts discussing recontextualization - I remembered this little old diamond as I was watching Leo's video on recontextualization, and I've just found it again.
I understand that people often ask what practicality these kinds of topics have... There is of course the deep practicality of training yourself to alter your perception of reality, and how that alters your experience of reality and your ability to become more conscious of Infinity...
But here I think Alan Watts gives you a quick win in the sense that he gives your ego another way of transcending pain through recontextualization, which you can begin practicing the next time you feel pain.
My suggestion is practicing this whenever you feel pain or other negative emotions, and you will find yourself becoming more and more conscious.
Here's a direct quote (the emphasis is not added by myself):
 
Play from 5:32 to listen from when he really starts talking about recontextualization.
 

If you can learn how to plan, you'll be surprised just how much you can get done.
If you can learn how to train yourself to plan at a more sophisticated level, you'll be less surprised by the results while feeling more rewarded from them.
Literally no body trains to plan at a more sophisticated level, so ignore most people on the subject outside of observing actions. 
Literally no one teaches how to train how to plan at a sophisticated level, so ignore most teachers.
The most important mechanism when it comes to planning, is pairing.
We pair mental phenomena to the mental construct of time and then our predictive brains reorganise their theories of what to anticipate in not just the world around them, but their sense of self relative to those plans. 
The reason why our sense of self becomes so integral to the process of planning is because what's the most common characteristic most associate with the lack of executing on a plan? Procrastination. 
This means, in as much as you need to learn to pair the association between mental phenomena and time you need to learn how to anticipate your own emotional reactions in time, and pre-plan how you are going to work through them. Procrastination is only a virus in as much as the software is not self-aware of its own power thresholds. When the power thresholds, like the relationship between our consciousness and emotions, become out of balance, so too does our behaviour in as much as their is not concordance between our awareness and its reorganisation. Making that leap to and from awareness and reorganisation comes down to where the sensitisation to our bodily experiences meets the will to challenge. It's opposite to the contrary, procrastination, is the compounding result of dissociation x disorganised attention meets increasingly lower consciousness. These are not perfect lines, but they are proportional. 
Get out a timer now and imagine you are going to practice doing activities for the next ten minutes. 
You are not going to write a list down.
You are going to come up with 10 activities, mentally imagine each activity being paired to its respective minute and you are going to do all of those activities in precise order, not missing a beat.
Then you are going to come up with 5 activities, 2 minutes each over 10 minutes.
Then you will come up with 2 activities, 5 minutes each over 10 minutes.
Then you are going to come up with 3 activities, 10 minutes each over 30 minutes.
Then you are... You get the picture. 
It's absolutely vital to take the pairing between mental phenomenon and time, as it is pivotal to the learning process of planning itself. 
Now, when it comes to strategizing that's a different subject but I will give you the first shoelaces here.
After the above has been practiced, simply come up with 3 competing hypotheses each time before executing each 10 minute, 30 minute or whatever time slot you choose, in deciding what the (1) shortest path is between their achievement, the (2) most effective path and (3) the most value aligned. Ideally, you want to align all three of these, and feel free to come up with your own further metrics. 
Good luck, that'll get you started, you'll be surprised just how effective simple training like this can be. And, don't forget to remind yourself of the feedback you learned on each next execution to both encourage and advance your approach, however subtle the reformulation.