"There are two kinds of people in the world: dreamers and doers, dreamers talk about, think about, dream about, hope for, even plan on doing extraordinary things; doers do them!" -- Page 4, The power of habit.
I think this quote described the problem deeply. Dreamers are always tagged by "perfectionism" and "procrastination"; In most cases, dreamers are ambitious, sensitive and wishing to make a difference in their lives, however, goals they wrote in their to-do list are seldom accomplished. In this book, the author gave an answer to this problem: It's the HABIT keeping dreamers from their goals.
People always make predictions about the future and calculate in their brain what actions are needed to accomplish their personal needs/goals. This is the basic survival skill developed through evolution. However, the evolution didn't make the brain circuit a perfect system. Dopamine, a neurotransmitter in the brain, is the essential chemical for rewarding, in another way, it's regulating our motivation by generating a "right feeling". During the activities such as predicting the future events, dopamine is released in the brain, and give us sense of safety or happiness. This is the essential motivation for us to do something: either it's saving money to buy a new car or preparing an important speech. Dopamine makes our life running well, as long as it's working normally. In some cases, people can also get addicted to planning and making prediction in which case planning becomes "dreaming". This type of addiction has the same nature as the other ones such as porn addiction, internet addiction and drug addiction. All these addiction follow one same pattern: The OCD cycle. Dreamers addicted to dreaming and failed to execute, therefore, got unsatisfying results which will lead to depression. The feeling of strong depression will urge dreamers to find anyway which will help them get rid of those bad feelings, so they start to dream again to get temporary satisfaction. However, make themselves happy for a moment cannot solve the problem, thus, they will experience the "dreaming->bad results->depression->dreaming" process again and again. Since the human brain is plastic, the behavior pattern will be eventually written in the long term memory of the brain, and makes it hard to change. This is process of the formation of the bad habit--dreaming.
To be more productive, dreamers need to jump out of their OCD cycle and replace it with good habits, and try their best to keep the habits. On Page 16 of this book,The author made clear definitions of habit and addiction and indicated that the book was mainly focused on habit not addiction, however, I would say, it's still a challenge in the brain and behavioral research to differentiate habit and addiction very well, and the two terms might have some functional overlap in the brain. Thus, I think the transition from a dreamer to a doer is actually a process of quitting addiction. The main point in this transition involves a very popular term in many self-help books: Deferred gratification (DG). DG means to hold one's desires in order to fulfill some bigger goal in the future. To replace OCD cycle with a good habit, dreamers must learn to hold the desire of dreaming and BE SPECIFIC of what they want. Stop dreaming does not necessarily mean to stop thinking about the future, it means do not be obsessive and perfectionism.
To get started, Just write a list of goal that are you going to achieve in your life. Then subdivide them into different categories with higher or lower importance. After doing this, it's the time to form good habits: choose the most important goals and try to keep going toward them day by day until you form a routine of doing it. Then, year after year, the goals you are dreaming for will be accomplished.
I highly recommend this book, and I suggest read this book in combination with Eat the frog by Brian Tracy and Talent Is Overrated by Geoff Colvin. Eat the frog gives a very good advice on how to get the most important thing done first, and Talent Is Overrated discussed the most effective way to improve: Deliberate practice.
In all, habit formation involves too many undetermined details of how the brain works, but based on what we can learn, at least empirically, habit can be formed efficiently only by persistent, careful, and highly repeated effort, and a strong will to prevent us from relapsing.
(Sorry for the writing since English is not my first language, and welcome to any discussions and comments :))
