The Idea: Perhaps the reason the world is in such terrible shape is
that those who have the ideas and answers on how to change it are
paralyzed by a self-inflicted and very human condition that is hugely
difficult to recognize, let alone cure. Perhaps this condition, and not
the stresses of everyday modern life, underlie much of the
psychological illness and endemic unhappiness of those that have so
much, and so much to offer, but who are doing pathetically little with
their enormous talents and skills. And they know they should and could
do more, but this condition prevents them.
I am slowly dying of a
strange and insidious disease. I learned about it last night as a
result of two serendipitous messages I received from two wonderful
readers. You should not feel sorry for me, or console me, or reassure
me. I have all the medicine needed to cure the disease quickly and
completely. I am not taking it. So it might be more accurate to say I
am slowly killing myself. I suspect my company of victims and sufferers of this disease is legion.
This disease goes by a number of names. My favourite, the one that sounds most harmless, is procrastination. I wrote about this disease once before in my article on Courage -- and another name for the disease is cowardice, defeatism, "low self-esteem",or just plain debilitating fear.
Fear of failure, certainly, but also to some extent fear of success,
fear of knowing how much of your life you have squandered. It also
masquerades as depression. Or is depression perhaps the root cause of
the disease, or the result of
the disease? For what can be more depressing, more ego- and
soul-destroying, than knowing you know what you need to do but not
being able to do it, not having what it takes.
Covey calls this disease the urgent/important paradox: That we choose,
consistently, even inevitably, to do urgent unimportant things before
non-urgent important things, often to the point that the important
things never get done. Whatever name you choose to use for the disease is a fair one. It lives up to all these names, in spades.
Let me tell you what I did yesterday, and about the two messages I
received last evening. This story will convey the horrors of this
disease much more effectively than a clinical diagnosis. You might even
discover that you have some of the symptoms yourself. If you do I don't
feel sorry for you, but I don't blame you for your inaction either. I
know better.
The night before last, Tuesday night, I worked very late (3 am)
completing two urgent work-related tasks and also clearing up some of
my backlog of long e-mails worthy of a considered response. I went
through my Getting Things Done
list, as I do at the end of each day, and checked off what I had done
and rescheduled four non-urgent but important activities that I had not
got around to, to later in the week. I 'rewarded myself' for my long
day by sleeping in (until 10 am). I got up and did a bunch of errands
around the house (my wife works in an office half an hour away, so I
try to do at least a bit of the 'house' work; I have lots of poor
excuses for not doing more). At 11 am I had a work-related conference
call. When it ended I made myself a quick lunch, fed Chelsea the dog,
and at 12:15 pm sat down and wrote yesterday's blog entry. With the
background reading, a check of some of my favourite blogs as I was
doing so, you know, the whole blogging process,
it took me until 5 pm to complete, proofread and post the article. Not
unusual. Then I walked Chelsea, stopped to chat with some of the
neighbours. At 6 pm I reviewed the day's e-mails, news digests and the
digests of the discussion forums I belong to, waiting for my wife to
get home. I got totally entranced by the new, free satellite photo
functionality of Google Maps,
and started zooming in on the aerial photos of family and friends'
houses, and e-mailing the photos to them (Warning: highly addictive:
please finish reading this article before you click that link). At 8 pm
we had dinner, watched a bit of TV and then I returned to my e-mail
backlog. Two of the e-mails took most of my attention:
The first, from innovation consultant Carolyn Allen,
asked some pointed questions about my proposal to set up a Solution
Centre/Think Tank that would engage some of the brightest minds on the
planet from diverse backgrounds to grapple with business problems, for
a fee, during the week, and larger social and environmental problems,
on a volunteer basis, on weekends. This is one of the four Second
Career options that I have been pursuing, the others being (1) a full
time writing career, including co-writing an entire section in the
Sunday paper, co-editing a magazine on personal work effectiveness, and
writing a book per year; (2) providing organizations with the training,
tools and process they need to become much more innovative, and to
redefine, differentiate and even reinvent themselves in their
industries; and (3) establishing and co-operating an 'educational'
organization (in quotes because it would be most unlike established
educational institutions) that would meet the acute need for entrepreneurial skills. Carolyn, much like my best friends Rob, Cyndy and Jon
have done, prodded me to select some first steps, something that could
be done to get the Solution Centre/Think Tank off the ground. I
responded (as I have to similar advice from Rob, Cyndy and Jon) with a
whole series of excuses for inaction -- reasons why the various
approaches she suggested either wouldn't work, or weren't what I really wanted to do. They're very clever
excuses, but they're excuses nonetheless. She wrote back to me this
morning with an understandably impatient "I just have one response:
ready, fire, aim. You're definitely ready. It's time to find ONE thing
you can implement. Then based on results, aim better. It's time to take
action. Get off the pot." She needn't have told me that -- I knew it
even as I was writing up my clever excuses.
The second was a link from Avi Solomon, pointing me to a new book called The War of Art
by fiction writer Steven Pressfield, about procrastination. Pressfield
calls it Resistance, the insidious disease or character 'flaw', that
causes us to hold ourselves back, to not "get off the pot". He writes:
Have you ever brought home a
treadmill and let it gather dust in the attic? Ever resolved on a diet,
a course of yoga, a meditation practice? Have you ever felt a call to
embark upon a spiritual practice, dedicate yourself to a humanitarian
calling, commit your life to the service of others? Have you ever
wanted to be a mother, a doctor, an advocate for the weak and helpless;
to run for office, crusade for the planet, campaign for world peace or
to preserve the environment? Late at night have you experienced a
vision of the person you might become, the work you could accomplish,
the realized being you were meant to be? Are you a writer who doesn't
write, a painter who doesn't paint, an entrepreneur who never starts a
venture? Then you know what Resistance is.
Resistance is the most toxic force on the
planet. It is the root of
more unhappiness than poverty, disease and erectile dysfunction. To
yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less
than we are and were born to be. From age twenty-four to thirty-two,
Resistance kicked my ass from East Coast to West and back again
thirteen times and I never even knew it existed. I looked everywhere
for the enemy and failed to see it right in front of my face.
Do we have to stare death in the face to make us stand up and confront
Resistance? Does Resistance have to cripple and disfigure our lives
before we awake to its existence? How many of us have become drunks and
drug addicts, developed tumors and neuroses, succumbed to painkillers,
gossip and compulsive cell-phone use, simply because we don't do that
thing that our hearts, our inner genius, is telling us to? Resistance
defeats us. If tomorrow morning by some stroke of magic every dazed and
benighted soul woke up with the power to take the first step toward
pursuing his or her dreams, overnight every shrink in the directory
would be out of business. Prisons would stand empty. The alcohol and
tobacco industries would collapse, along with the junk food, cosmetic
surgery, and infotainment businesses, not to mention pharmaceutical
companies, hospitals and the medical profession from top to bottom.
Domestic abuse would become extinct, as would addiction, obesity,
migraine headaches, road rage and dandruff.
Look in your own heart. Unless I'm crazy, right now a still small voice
is piping up, telling you as it has ten thousand times, the calling
that is yours and yours alone. You know it. No one has to tell you. And
unless I'm crazy, you're no closer to taking action on it than you were
yesterday or will be tomorrow. You think Resistance isn't real?
Resistance will bury you.
 I listened to a 30-minute interview
with Pressfield. (If you listen to this recording, ignore the new-age
preachiness of the interviewer and fast-forward through the 3-minute
commercial blocks). He describes it more as an addiction than a
disease. And like breaking a deadly and life-sapping addiction,
procrastination/ resistance manifests itself in the clever excuses we
make for ourselves, and in our craving for more, for the 'high' we get
from doing things just when we have to, just in time, and only
doing things when we have to. And also like addiction, it takes, he
says, enormous inner strength and will to break it. One step at a time,
knowing for the rest of your life you will be vulnerable to relapses,
and will have to start the agonizing process to kick the habit all over
again. No excuses, no sympathy, no yielding to the temptation even once
-- the fight of your life, for the rest of your life.
I looked back at my list of Getting Things Done "to do's". The
important ones, most of which relate to my four Second Career options,
have been sliding consistently down the priority list for weeks,
months, since I started keeping the list in December. The Getting
Things Done list has been perfect for getting urgent
things done. They no longer get done last-minute, and I have not missed
a deadline or found myself in a panic since I started the list.
Furthermore, I have broken up the important jobs -- those that I hope
to be remembered for when I'm gone, and which I hope to devote most of
the rest of my life to doing -- into manageable, short steps, so the
'next action' on each of these is not imposing. I've winnowed the
Second Career options down from an unmanageable fourteen to the four
described above, and I have a concrete action plan for doing each of
the four. But still, the urgent tasks creep up and steal each day away,
and with it my resolve to move the important projects forward. Just one more hit, the addict says, tomorrow I'll quit, I promise.
The monthly cheque-writing and banking has to be done or I'll have to
pay late fees and interest charges. My blog Table of Contents, which
many people rely on, is now more than a month out of date. My blogroll
urgently needs updating for some blogs that have now become essential
reading for me, and several of the blogroll links have changed and need
updating as well. There are a whole bunch of things that need to be
done around the house that I've been putting off. There are at least a
dozen things that are urgent but not important that I haven't even had
the heart to put on the
Getting Things Done list because I don't want the important things to
slip any further. My blog itself is, perhaps, the ultimate excuse --
it's important (almost as important as my Second Career), and
it's urgent. It's also good writing practice, a good way to "think out
loud" and clarify and organize my own thoughts and ideas. My wife
describes my blogging as an addiction. Perhaps for me it is. Or perhaps
it's the procrastinator's methadone -- much less harmful than the
'real' drug, but still addictive and debilitating, preventing you from
getting on with your 'real' life.
So the important things to do are staring me in the face -- I know
they're the most important things, the only things that, at the moment
of my death, I will regret not having done if I haven't done them. For
each of the important projects on the list I have done the easy part --
the business plan, the design, the big-picture thinking, the breaking
them down into manageable tasks. I know precisely what the Next Action
is for each. But these Next Actions are not getting done. Even when
they do get done, any sign of adversity causes me to retreat -- the
sponsor or agent or publisher I was looking for didn't return my call
or e-mail, or expressed reservations about my proposal. Whew! Good
thing I have four Second
Career options -- now the one with the minor roadblock can be relegated
to #4 and I can go back to the distraction of the urgent, easy tasks
before I need to screw up my courage and start another
important Next Action. With the number of urgent tasks on the list that
could be weeks away. But I got seven urgent tasks done today, so I'm
going to reward myself tomorrow by not doing anything urgent -- I'm going to take a day off (except for the blog) and dig into my huge reading backlog. Another methadone?
What does it take to cure oneself of this disease, this addiction? I
crisis would do it -- learning you only have six months to live, for
example, would propel you to drop all the 'urgent' tasks and do only,
relentlessly, the important ones. But that's not really a cure either:
Such a crisis merely makes all the
things you need to do urgent, so it is then simply logical that you'd
do the urgent important things and forget about the urgent unimportant
ones. Same thing if the crisis is social or financial rather than
medical -- if your spouse walks out on you (no doubt fed up with your
procrastination), or you get fired, or you lose your life savings or
your house and you're uninsured. That either throws new urgent tasks at
you, or (if you decide this crisis was as much a blessing as a curse)
could even remove some of the urgent tasks that preoccupied you -- but
there is no guarantee that this will in any way increase the likelihood
of you doing what's important (it's more likely to do the opposite).
A colleague of mine is reading a book that describes how to 'push past'
the urgent and make time, and room, for the important. I'm going to
read it (and I'll report back here) but somehow I don't think that's
the cure. You can't think your way out of an addiction, you have to
fight your way out. It's an emotional process, not an intellectual one.
The tendency to procrastinate is natural, human nature. Our
psychological addiction to it is almost certainly reinforced, as with
all addictions, by a physical, chemical addiction, that euphoria we get
from crossing urgent things off the "to do" list. We do not yet
understand the chemistry behind addiction, but it must be exploiting
something that, for millions of years, was a positive reinforcement --
allowed our species to survive and thrive better. It might help if we
find out what this chemistry is and how it has been perverted into our
modern addictions, including our addiction to procrastination, to the
urgent over the important, to Resistance.
There is also a discipline called Cognitive Therapy that 'teaches' you
how to alter your thinking so that your decisions on what to 'do next'
are not biased in favour of the urgent over the important. Colour me
dubious. Anything is possible, of course, including being able to
'think yourself well', but the addiction metaphor, and the resultant
treatment, make more sense to me.
In the meantime those of us afflicted need to acknowledge the disease,
the addiction, for what it is, and start to work on healing ourselves.
They say acknowledging the addiction is half the battle, though I doubt
that. For other addictions, the 'buddy system' seems to work, and
perhaps it's no coincidence that the buddy system is one of the most
effective methods of getting exercise and diet procrastinators back 'on
the wagon'. I'm going to start by committing to complete one of the
Next Actions on my important not-urgent list every day, and I'll report
to my "get off the pot" friends and colleagues on my progress. I might
even bore you with my progress here on the blog.
I'm still sitting here. But somehow I feel as if something has changed.
I'm still unhappy with myself, but I'm beginning to understand why.
Less shame and more impatience. It's a start.
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
