The Procrastination Equation (13 page)

1. Action Points for Success Spirals:
Think of an area of your life of real interest and then strive to improve just a little beyond your present skill set. As your confidence builds, you can also try exploring life outside your comfort zone. Consider this list (and add to it):

• Volunteer for more responsibility, either at work or in your community. If it involves hard physical work, like building houses for the homeless, all the better. Those sore muscles will remind you of your effort and your success.

• Travel to a place you've always wanted to go but thought you never would. Give yourself bonus points if you don’t speak the local language.

• Try an adventure course such as white-water rafting, mountain climbing, bungee jumping, or skydiving.

• Learn a new skill. Sign up for a class in cooking, kickboxing, photography, or music. As you advance, pay attention to the small improvements in your skills and recognize them as victories.

• Challenge yourself by pushing an old hobby to a new level. If you are a runner, train for a race; join an amateur sports league; or tackle the harder solos in
Guitar Hero.

• Break down the tasks that daunt you into smaller and smaller pieces. Keep formal track of your progress. Count your successes.

Vicarious Victory

When I was a child, zoos were made up of cages, not habitats, and animals were truly captive. My father once took me to see the elephants. A mother elephant and child were on display side by side, both of their right hind legs secured to the ground. A large and heavy chain limited the baby, but the mother only had a slender rope. “Why Daddy?” I asked. “Shouldn’t the big chain be around the big elephant?” No, he explained to me, the younger elephant needs the bigger chain because it is still struggling to become free. Eventually, it will accept that the chain won’t break and, like the mother, it will stop trying. Once the baby elephant believes that it can’t escape, the flimsy rope will be as effective as any cage.

Though I told it in the first person, this is a motivational story I've heard many times. Its implication is that we have untold strength, but that we were broken and tamed at some point and we don’t realize how easily our potential could be regained if only we tried. I find it almost impossible not to be stirred by it, longing to break my own metaphorical ropes. There are many other motivational stories with this capacity to give us vicarious victory—from King Henry’s “St. Crispin’s Day” speech to Winston Churchill’s “We Shall Fight on the Beaches.” The most powerful of these are biographies of successful people that you can relate to.

Consider the effect one such story had on entrepreneur Kaaydah Schatten. Despite being raised in profound poverty by alcoholic parents, today she is a multi-millionaire and international franchise owner, a transformation she partly attributes to early inspiration. At a young age, Schatten read the life story of Catherine the Great and, seeing a common thread with her own heritage—Kaaydah is of a royal line, being the hereditary chieftain of the Quakiutl tribe—she adopted Catherine as a role model. To reap a similar benefit, perhaps you too can find the right story, another’s life history that resonates with your own and speaks to your potential.

But people with extremely low self-confidence may need something stronger than inspirational stories to help them take their first step. Pessimists tend to put down any personal victories with a stream of negative self-talk: “Anyone could have done that,” “It was all luck,” or “It won’t happen again.”
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They need active forms of encouragement to believe that their success is due to their own effort: that when they try, good things happen. We normally absorb encouragement of this kind through social support, peer groups, and role models. From adolescence on, our peer group is a determining factor of our own development.
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Hang with the wrong crowd and they can hold us back. Hang with the right crowd and their successes can inspire us to think, “If they can do it, I can too!” Attitudes are catching, so you would be smart to hang out with groups of upbeat people. The social group we associate with helps cement our own view of what is possible and what we ourselves should strive to be. Giving up or continuing to strive—both are contagious.
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A few groups seem particularly well structured for fostering a positive spirit. Service clubs like the Elks, Masons, Rotarians, or Shriners have millions of members worldwide, all bent on doing good work for their communities, but your options don’t end there. My wife goes to a local Calgary group, the Famous Five, which holds women’s leadership luncheons. I'm indebted to Toastmasters, a club that promotes public speaking and is endlessly encouraging and welcoming. You can even start a group yourself.
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Benjamin Franklin, for example, labeled his friends the Junto or the Leather Apron Club. Every Friday night, they would have a few beers at a pub and discuss how they could help their community.

2. Action Points for Vicarious Victory:
Seek inspiration from stories or, better yet, from social groups. It is easier to believe in yourself if you are surrounded by others who believe in themselves—or you. Here are some suggestions:

• Watch inspirational movies. Here are a few I've seen:
Men of Honor,
My Left Foot,
Apollo 13,
Invictus,
and
Hotel Rwanda.

• Read inspirational biographies or autobiographies. The most effective will resonate with your own background, so use the bookstore staff to help you find an appropriate book. For example, if you are a chef, read
Humble Pie
by Gordon Ramsey, in which he speaks of his hard upbringing.

• Listen to inspirational speakers. Great athletes, heroes, and entrepreneurs regularly speak about their experiences. Seek them out.

• Join a community, service, or professional association. By hanging out with people who are trying to better themselves or the world around them, you will be infused with optimism.

• Start your own support group. As long as it contains a circle of mutually encouraging friends, it can be your running clique, your religious study group, or in the case of Ben Franklin, your drinking buddies.

WISH FULFILLMENT

Professional athletes often use visualization to achieve their goals. Before going to sleep every night, they imagine the perfect golf swing or triple axel landing. The detailed mental recreation of a performance engages mirror neurons that engrave the act in your brain almost as deeply as if you were actually practicing it.
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Visualization can also combat procrastination through the technique of
mental contrasting.

The expert on mental contrasting is Gabriele Oettingen from New York University, who has made this technique a cornerstone of her psychology career.
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Begin by imagining what you want to achieve. If it is a car, visualize yourself behind the wheel, cruising for all to see. If it is a job, see yourself in that dream career. Have you got a good mental picture? Good.

Now here’s the all-important second step. Contrast where you want to be with where you are now. Visualize that dinged-up rust-bucket you drive or your dumbed-down joke of a job with its paltry paycheck. The result will be that your present situation becomes framed as an obstacle standing in the way of your dreams. Mental contrasting doesn’t create optimism but it maximizes optimism’s motivational benefits, creating energy and effort as well as jumpstarting planning. People who practice mental contrasting almost immediately start pursuing their dreams, putting a crimp in procrastination.

What happens if you forgo the second step and just focus on the positive fantasies alone?
Creative visualization
advocates just that. It involves creating vivid and compelling pictures of your heart’s desire, with the aim of drawing this vision toward you. But Oettingen, who has researched this for twenty years, finds that such fantasies tend to have the
opposite
effect than advertised; they sap motivational energy.
^7c
The only wealth created by creative visualization is a rich fantasy life. Whether the task is preparing for exams, getting a job, recovering from surgery, smoking less, dating an attractive stranger, or improving personal relationships, she found that the worst-performing group used positive fantasies alone. You are better off not using the technique at all.
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3. Action Points for Wish Fulfillment:
Fans of creative visualization don’t have to stop what they are doing; they just need to add to it. Keep with the affirmations, the personal mission statements, but afterward reflect on where you really are. Here is a step-by-step walkthrough to make wish fulfillment work for you:

• Sit down in a quiet place and clear your mind. Think about the life you want for yourself.

• Break off a manageable piece of this future by focusing on just one aspect you desire. It may be a relationship, a job, a home, or a healthy body.

• Elaborate on all that makes this mental picture attractive to you. You can use a daily diary, create a collage of images, or just spend some quiet time concentrating on it.

• Then
mentally contrast
this future with where you are now. Focus on the gap. Put the same emphasis on vividly reflecting on this discrepancy as you did on imagining your idealized future.

• If, after mentally contrasting, you remain optimistic about realizing this ideal future, you will find more motivation to pursue your goal. Procrastination will disappear as you start actively closing the gap between where you are now and where you want to be. You know what to do and have the drive to do it.

Fantasy Land

Overconfidence is just as problematic as under-confidence. Forty-one days before the start of the Iraq war, the U.S. defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, estimated that it could “last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.” The allied troops would surely be greeted as liberators. The cost? It was supposed to be fifty to sixty billion dollars, not almost a trillion. Regrettably, military overconfidence leading to lengthy and unprofitable wars is quite common.
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In the business world, overconfidence creates a host of similar problems: mergers aren’t usually finished within time or on budget.
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Overconfidence, for example, contributed to the Concorde fiasco; despite mounting evidence that it wouldn’t be profitable, Air France and British Airways continued to pursue its development.
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Entrepreneurs often exemplify this point, reflecting Jeffrey Vancouver’s observation that optimism has a sweet spot (see the graph on page 118).
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Confidence is definitely needed to start a business, and entrepreneurs tend to have more of it than the rest of us. Just as the graph predicts, however, overly confident entrepreneurs tend to fail. When confidence becomes supersized and unearned, it fuels procrastination because the overconfident tend to discount serious problems and subsequently delay responding to them.
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Certain philosophies, such as the philosophy of Pangloss, a character created by Voltaire to epitomize naive and unrestrained optimism, exacerbate the problem of overconfidence. Over the last few centuries, unbounded positive belief has formed the basis of several success systems, such as Phineas Quimby’s
New Thought Movement
or Norman Vincent Peale’s
Power of Positive Thinking.
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The best modern example of Panglossian thinking is
The Secret,
a book (and movie) developed by Australian television executive Rhonda Byrne. According to Byrne, thoughts have magnetic energy that draws like to like by a Law of Attraction—think positive and the positive will come toward you. There are millions of followers of this philosophy but I am not one of them.
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The Law of Attraction separates positive belief from action, leaving belief free-floating and unconnected. It changes the story of the
Little Engine That Could
from “I think I can” to “I think it will.” That’s a big difference.
^7d

To prevent ourselves from falling into over-optimism, we need a teaspoon of pessimism. As Freud put it, we need to activate the
reality principle:
to confront the reality of the situation when we are seeking the best way to achieve our goals. Invoking the reality principle is a sign that we have outgrown our childish and impulsive ways and can acknowledge the price we must realistically pay for our dreams. This entails imagining what could go wrong and how you would prevent or mitigate potential pitfalls. Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, used this principle during his lunar escapades. “Well,” he would say, “I think we tried very hard not to be overconfident, because when you get overconfident, that’s when something snaps up and bites you.”

In business, this reality check is a standard step of
crisis management.
Adages to this effect are well worn: “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail,” or “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
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We can apply this principle to procrastination in two ways: Plan for the Worst, Hope for the Best, and Accept That You're Addicted to Delay.

PLAN FOR THE WORST, HOPE FOR THE BEST

Very few succeed in major life reforms on the first try; most of us need multiple attempts. Take New Year’s resolutions, for example: it often takes five attempts before vows last for more than six months.
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I myself sweated out several attempts to quit smoking before I successfully put cigarettes aside. For more serious alcohol or drug problems, the same need for repetition applies. Whatever you do, don’t wallpaper over this painful and repetitive process; wishful thinking will only increase your procrastination.

Psychologists Janet Polivy and Peter Herman describe such dysfunctional over-optimism as the
False Hope Syndrome.
Overconfidence about the size, speed, and ease of major life changes is associated with lower success rates. If people have unrealistic, supersized expectations, they discount modest achieve-ments. They
only
lost ten pounds. They smoked at a party. They skipped the gym for a week. They see these as “failures” and they lose momentum—they are more likely to give up and feel worse than before they made the resolution to change. This disillusionment is common, as the self-help industry instills incredibly high expectations and promises. If you are in the vast majority who don’t transform as quickly as advertised, you feel that your failing is personal rather than a failure of the program.