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20 years later, you look back and say, you re an unhappy person.
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Say, I never did what I wanted to do, or I never spent enough time with my kids, and that s when you have these deathbed regrets, and I really believe so many of them come down to procrastination in situations when there is no deadline.
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This is the art of charm.
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Learn everything you need to know to crush it in business, love, and life.
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Hey, Jordan Harbinger here from the Art of Charm.
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Today we re talking with Tim Urban of the blog Wait But Why, one of my favorite blogs.
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We re gonna talk about procrastination, something he is not only very good at, but has also done a TED Talk on the subject.
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We ll also discuss different types of procrastination, such that we might see ourselves doing it even if we think we don t.
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This was me, actually.
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And starting to figure out why it works, how to fix it.
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This one, in my opinion, is a good listen and an interesting way to think about the problem.
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even if you re not a procrastinator, or you just think you aren t.
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So enjoy this one with Tim Urban, and welcome to The Art of Charm.
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I m here with producer Jason.
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As you know, The Art of Charm brings together the best thought leaders, teachers, and exceptional individuals to teach you how to be a top performer in life, love, and at work, even if you re a procrastinator.
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And if you re new to the show, we d love to send you some top episodes and or toolbox where we discuss things like body language and nonverbal communication, persuasion, networking, negotiation, and everything else we teach here at AOC.
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In the US, just text charmed, that s C-H-A-R-M-E-D, to 33444.
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Everywhere else, go to theartofcharm.com.
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We may not have all the right answers, but we definitely have all the right questions.
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Alright, here s Tim Urban.
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Tim, what do you do in one sentence?
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I think about complicated things for a long time until I m ready to write thorough blog posts, capturing the full set of ideas.
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I can vouch for this.
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One of the things I like about your blog, Wait But Why, it tracks the way that many people, including myself, think.
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And I mentioned this pre-show as well, where it s like,
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Here s what Elon Musk is doing, which by the way, your interview with Elon Musk was brilliant.
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For those of you who don t know Wait But Why, there is essentially a book in blog post form which is about Elon Musk that was done in concert with Elon Musk because he called you to do this, right?
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Yes, he got in touch after having tweeted out a few Wait But Why posts, which was really exciting at that time.
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asked if i was interested in writing kind of similarly long thorough things about the industries that he s involved in.
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Can i learn that would involve an opportunity to kind of work with him and his executives at both spacex and tesla.
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And to really kind of learn the full story about what they re doing from them and then.
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Couple that with a lot of research and dive into all that stuff, so that was an obvious no-brainer project.
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Yeah, and your head fell off, apparently, according to the drawing on your blog.
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Yeah, I don t know why I showed everyone that.
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It was very embarrassing, but yeah, really not a caller expecting to get at any point, so.
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First of all, when Elon s office calls you, are you like, who is this?
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It s gotta be like a buddy of mine messing with me.
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Yeah, it started with an email, and I just thought it was gonna be way less cool of an actual thing than it actually was.
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It was one of those, I just thought, it s too good to be true if this is actually him wanting to really work with you.
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So I didn t even consider that that s what was happening, but then that actually was what was happening.
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Yeah, I was really pleasantly surprised by the actual phone call that then ensued.
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So here s a bunch of pages on that.
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And in order to understand that, you ve got to understand why carbon and fossil fuels are bad.
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So here s a bunch of stuff on that.
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But by the way, in order to really get clear on that, we ve got to talk about space and how the solar system works and radiation and global warming.
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And then we ll come back out and talk more about electrical power, which then leads us to Tesla, which then jumps back up another notch in the hierarchy to the way that Elon Musk thinks.
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Oh, and also there s SpaceX.
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So let s talk more about space and about rockets and then physics and then go back to the way that Elon Musk thinks.
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And that s why these things get long, but it s very important because otherwise what happens is I pause one blog post and I go, I ve gotta start Googling.
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how this works because otherwise I don t have the background, but you ve kind of done that and then built it into the post, which I think is really cool because it s funny because what we re gonna talk about today, procrastination, one of the reasons that that happens is because your brain works really well in this other way in terms of going down every rabbit hole, covering it exhaustively, and then coming back up to the original topic.
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Yeah, well, what you re seeing when you see a blog post of mine doing that is you re just seeing what my mind just went through as I learned the situation.
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Because it s a disadvantage I have as a writer is that I don t know any more about the topics I m writing about than the reader when I first take the topic on.
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But an advantage that I have is because of that, when I start writing word one of a post, I just went through the process of educating myself on the whole thing.
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And that involves me saying,
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well, I don t understand this, so then I ll read about why electric cars are important, and then I ll say, well, okay, electric cars, how does that exactly work?
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And then I ll go and I ll read about how electric cars work for a while, and then I ll realize, wow, really, this is like a product of the electricity revolution, but when did that happen?
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And then I ll go and I ll start reading about the 1880s, about that, and then I ll say, well, then, why weren t there electric cars from the beginning?
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Because when cars started,
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everything cool and everything new was electricity back then.
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That was like, cars didn t start before we harnessed electricity, they started right after.
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So then I ll say, well, why that?
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And so then I ll read about that, and I ll realize, oh, because Henry Ford figured out how to make gas cars cheap first.
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Okay, well, how did he do that?
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How does a gas car work?
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And so I ll go through this, and I ll just basically be a curious and perfectionist procrastinator, because it s also procrastination when I m sometimes reading way more than I need to.
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And I ll do that for three weeks,
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And on the end of that, now I have a thorough understanding and I m assuming that every reader is basically me three weeks ago before I started researching.
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So I know exactly the questions they re gonna have.
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I want them to feel as satisfied at the end of the post as I do now having finally gotten to the bottom of every one of these why pathways to just get the full understanding that I now have.
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Okay, so what you re doing is basically what James Burke used to do in the old show connections.
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You re finding something and then taking it back and back and back and back to the point of inception and then extrapolating that out to a modern post.
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And the reason that I think that way, I used to be frustrated when, you know, I would read, I still am frustrated a lot of times when I m reading something
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It s one of these icky topics that I don t understand.
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Other people understand it, but I don t ever understand this topic.
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Someone could be talking about the Fed lowering interest rates, and I have no idea what that means, and I still don t know what that means.
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Or they ll be talking about Iraq and how there s a proxy war going on between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
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I don t get it, and when I read an article, what happens is I read it, and I still don t quite get it,
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And I assume if I keep reading articles, I ll eventually get it, but it never happens.
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What I realize is because every article is like a branch or a leaf of a tree, but I don t have a trunk.
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I can read a branch and the branch falls because it has nothing to hang on to.
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I can read a leaf and it just falls down.
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It goes in one ear, out the other.
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And so what you need to do, you have to bite the bullet once and give yourself
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The thorough education of a tree trunk foundation of knowledge and then met on suddenly not only when you read an article read a headliner here something.
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Not only do you get it but it s actually delicious and it s so interesting suddenly okay wait what happened there what is saudi arabia are they funding isis net you make sense.
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And so that s part of what I try to do, is the really long posts are an attempt to build a tree trunk for me and anyone else who reads it.
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Because otherwise you re going down a fractal of undiscriminate knowledge that can go anywhere, anytime, and not having a foundation.
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Yeah, and then you feel like you don t like the topic, you feel like too dumb for this, or I just, I hate this topic, I m bored by it.
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No, you re not, you just don t have that tree trunk yet.
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You can actually transform the topic in people s heads from something they thought they were bored by to something they realize is fascinating.
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And then they start reading more about it, and then they actually really get to know it.
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It s a little like, if you re trying to learn the guitar, you know, you re not having fun at the beginning, because you suck at it.
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And so usually people give up, or it s just too much of a chore to practice.
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But then you hit a point when you suddenly cross over and your skills get to a point where it starts to be fun to play.
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And that s when suddenly you play all the time.
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And then you get really good, and it s a little like that.
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And once you get the three-trunk foundation, you find yourself just reading article after article, or watching something on it, or talking about it.
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And then you really get it, and you have to get over that initial hump.
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So that s kind of my way of thinking about it.
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By the way, congrats on the recent TED Talk, which was actually really good as well.
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That s an incredible experience that people who are literally twice our age are gunning for all the time.
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It s hard for people who have the same procrastination issues to visualize getting from
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wow, I have a hard time focusing on stuff, I m gonna be a huge failure, to hey, guess what, this is part of the way my brain works, it can be controlled in part, and also, might even be a strength.
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So I d love to hear your thoughts on procrastination, and really dive in the spirit of weight,
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why, dive down the rabbit hole and dive into this stuff, because what you said really resonated a lot with me.
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I m not a procrastinator, but I still see so many commonalities in the way that people think who do procrastinate, and in fact, in people that don t have similar sets of habits.
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And one thing that really struck me in reading your series on procrastination is that it is, in a large part, like depression, in that one cannot simply stop at will or try not to do it.
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There s a lot more at play here.
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What s going on when we re procrastinating?
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Where do we even start with this topic?
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Well, the first thing I ll say before I get into it is the depression analogy is valid in another way, too, in that it s much harder than just stopping, but people who don t have the problem routinely underestimate how bad the problem is.
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They also, they overestimate how much it s in your control because it s in their control.
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So depression is the classic example.
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People say, well, just go to the gym, you know, and think about all the good things in life.
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It has no chance of helping in that person because it s not understanding the problem.
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And my college roommate, I remember he said to me once,
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I was on my seventh all-nighter paper, seventh paper in a row where I was pulling just a tragic, dark, depressing all-nighter the night before, hating myself, furious at myself.
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He said to me, I think that for the next paper, right from the beginning, just don t procrastinate and you ll be fine.
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And I wanted to say, oh my God.
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Don t procrastinate and I ll be fine.
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Thank you so much.
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It s literally like telling someone who s depressed, listen, you know, be happier.
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It s like telling someone who has a weight problem, hey, just don t eat as much.
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I have the solution.
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It s that ridiculous, but I think people now have wrapped their head around the fact that that s ridiculous with depression or with a weight problem.
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more than they have in procrastination because procrastination has so many different forms and there s so many light versions of procrastination where it s not really a problem and the person just kind of, you know, oh yeah, I totally go on Facebook a few times a day at work, I m such a procrastinator.
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So it gets mixed up with cases.
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that aren t really a serious problem.
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The depression thing really is a good comparison for that reason.
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I saw it right away in that when I read about your procrastination, I was like, oh, I procrastinate sometimes too, especially in college.
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And then I read yours and I was like, no, I don t do this.
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At all.
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No, yeah, I m a pretty serious case.
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By the way, I m still not nearly at the end of the spectrum.
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I ve gotten emails from people that are far more serious cases than I am, and people whose lives have totally been ruined.
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I mean, whose marriages have been ruined, who s out of job, who turned to crime because of it.
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I mean, really, really bad situations.
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I m still somewhere in the middle, but I m pretty far down there.
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You know, to kind of answer your first question, which was what s really going on, one interesting thing I ve kind of noticed is I ve written about a bunch of other topics,
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that also involved kind of a battle in the brain.
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I ve written about why we care so much what other people think of us.
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That, to me, comes down to part of our brain that thinks it s in a tribe in 50,000 B.C.
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It has not evolved yet because civilization moves much quicker than evolution.
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So the same exact people who evolved to be perfectly suited to fit in in a tribe and to be a good tribe member
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and to follow the leader, and to be well-liked, and to care so much about being well-liked, and to be so terrified of embarrassment and shame because those feelings turn into you being ostracized from the tribe, which is your lifeline, and then you either are kind of a loser in the tribe with low status, and you never mate, and your kids end up with the same fate, or you just get kicked out and you starve to death.
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So that s an example of a whole separate battle in the brain, and I ve done this with a handful of posts in addition to procrastination, and I started to realize this is all one major problem.
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and that this is, of course, what people talk about with mindfulness.
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It s the concept that there s, on one hand, we are animals.
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We are biological, physical, living, breathing animals, and we are also tribal animals, simple, tribal, warring animals.
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And then on the other hand, unlike all other animals, we have this powerful prefrontal cortex
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which is this beacon of rationality and higher thinking and higher consciousness.
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That s what makes humans humans.
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And when we think about me, the part of us that is that inner chatter of I should do this and these are the problems I have, that s your prefrontal cortex thinking and being itself.
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And what happens is, it s like the prefrontal cortex is this beacon of higher consciousness that woke up one day in evolution and it looked around and said, oh dammit, I m an animal.
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stuck inside of an animal.
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And so now what a human is, is this unique combination of this higher consciousness battling with its animal self, its animal brain, its animal body, to try to convince the animal body that we are not in a tribe.
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And a lot of our fears are not based on real danger.
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And there s more to life than eating and sleeping and reproducing.
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that battle comes out in a lot of ways.
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And I think most of us are dealing with that battle in one way or another.
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Some people, again, they re too driven by what other people think.
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Other people, they re driven with a weight problem.
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In my case, the thing I m driven by most, the way that that same battle in the brain comes out for me is procrastination.
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And I think procrastination is just an example of the major battle that we re all dealing with.
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So that s kind of like the big picture of where procrastination fits in.
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The way that that battle is is I kind of talk about this battle as it applies specifically to procrastination as the prefrontal cortex, which I use as a cartoon stick figure called the rational decision maker.
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That s the prefrontal cortex.
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It s his struggle against the limbic system that is ancient and is deeply intertwined with our body, has perfect communication with our body.
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It s where fear lives and it s where
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you know, hunger lives, and it s where sex drive lives, and all those things, and it s the fight or flight part of our brain, and that part I refer to as the instant gratification monkey, because who wants to talk about brain structures?
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That s super boring, and it s not relatable.
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So instead, we have the rational decision maker and the instant gratification monkey in our brains at all times, and the monkey cares about the present.
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He only knows the present exists.
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To him, there is no future,
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and there is no past.
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So he thinks at all times, let s be doing what feels best right now.
1
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So if we re jogging, the rational decision maker is saying, of course we need to jog, and the monkey says, but why would we jog?
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It feels much better to stop.
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Why would I go on this computer and work when I could be playing on the internet, which is much more fun?
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The monkey thinks the rational decision maker is insane.
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And then the rational decision maker, who s unlike the monkey, does see the future, does remember the past,
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does see the big picture and understands, you know, this is a big puzzle we re part of, and we need to be thinking about the whole puzzle.
1
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And he just wants to be doing whatever makes sense to be doing at any given point.
1
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So you have this one character wants to be doing what makes sense in the big picture, and the other character wants to be doing whatever s easiest and most pleasurable and most fun right at this exact instant.
1
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And that s the source of this battle.
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SPEAKER_02
This makes a lot of sense, right?
1
SPEAKER_02
Because one of the things that Jason and I were talking about is how does social media feed the monkey?
2
SPEAKER_02
It feeds the monkey, just like other things that you or I or anybody else has done to procrastinate, feeds the monkey.
2
SPEAKER_02
It s an easy one and an exciting one, but one of the things I thought you said was absolutely hilarious was you were working on something.
2
SPEAKER_02
This might have even been your PhD thesis, and I definitely want to get to that story, but you did something like, all right, I ve got to get buckled down on this PhD thing, but first I need to go to Google Earth and look at India.
2
SPEAKER_02
Tell us what happened with your PhD, because this is ridiculous.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah yeah definitely tell us what happened there because i actually started to do that after i watch your ted talk it it was fascinating so definitely please give us the back story that will first of all i have a bunch of examples of the monkey, you know the rational decision maker in the talk i said the rational decision maker wants to do this but then the monkey says ok but also actually let s do this and i can say,
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SPEAKER_01
with complete honesty that every single one of those examples is something that I ve done, word for word.
2
SPEAKER_01
There s nothing invented in that talk, so the example you re talking about is something I ve literally done exactly the way I described it, which is, at a time when I was trying to work actually on the TED Talk, I could feel the rational decision maker was
2
SPEAKER_01
unbelievably nervous about the situation because he knew that I was not an experienced public speaker.
2
SPEAKER_01
He knew what the stakes were for a TED Talk.
2
SPEAKER_01
He knew that you only get one take.
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SPEAKER_01
He knew that unlike all other talks where you can just talk through your stuff like a human, no, a TED Talk you have to memorize every single word and be economical because there s only 14 minutes and you can t go over by even one second.
2
SPEAKER_01
So he was thinking like, this is an incredibly important thing to not procrastinate on.
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We need to work on this and work on this every day until we get there.
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This is really, really something we can t do our normal thing for.
2
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But again, the monkey doesn t understand what a TED Talk is.
2
SPEAKER_01
He doesn t care what a TED Talk is.
2
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He says it is 3.21 p.m.
2
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on a Wednesday.
2
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What is currently happening in life?
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SPEAKER_01
Well, I m sitting here on a couch.
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SPEAKER_01
Oh, and there s the internet.
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SPEAKER_01
And there s an iPad.
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SPEAKER_01
And hey, you know, look at the iPad.
2
SPEAKER_01
Hey, look at Google Earth.
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Google Earth is fun.
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And the monkey, all he s thinking is literally what s in front of him.
2
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And so what I did that particular day, which is what I referenced in the talk, I could have given 20 different examples, but in this case, I opened Google Earth.
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And I found myself zooming into the tip of India.
2
SPEAKER_01
You know, India s this big triangle.
2
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And at the very bottom, like, cool, what s going on there?
2
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It s like a little city at the very tip.
2
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So I went down to the very tip.
2
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Of course, once you get too close, it doesn t look like a tip, it s just like a coastline.
2
SPEAKER_01
I zoomed in, I m kind of like, oh, because I ve never been to India.
2
SPEAKER_01
You know, I ve done a decent amount of traveling, but India s that country I m waiting because I want to go when I have like a month, you know?
2
SPEAKER_01
Which is dumb, by the way, because if India were divided into 15 countries, like, it would be thought of as going to each one of them.
2
SPEAKER_01
But instead, you know, it would be like if Africa didn t have country lines.
2
SPEAKER_01
we would all just think, oh, I need to visit Africa, I need to do my Africa trip, but I want a month to do Africa, but no one thinks that way, because it s divided into 50 countries, so we would never treat it that way, and we treat India that way.
2
SPEAKER_01
Side note, anyway, back to this, I m at the bottom, and I m looking at the shore, and I m looking at the village, and I m suddenly fascinated, I m like, oh, look, there s palm trees, and look at the architecture, and look at these little people, and so then I start scrolling up, and I m like, what happened?
2
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And I find myself two and a half hours later, hitting Nepal, and I just went to the top of India,
2
SPEAKER_01
I traveled across India.
2
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This is a time when I absolutely, absolutely had to be working.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s just classic.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s something that I would do.
2
SPEAKER_01
That could not have been more normal.
2
SPEAKER_01
And that is 100% the monkey, literally, have you seen Being John Malkovich?
2
SPEAKER_01
It s literally like that.
2
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The rational decision maker is screaming in my head, stop it.
2
SPEAKER_01
But he just ends up, not only does he stop being able to control my physical body, like the monkey s actually the one with my hand scrolling,
2
SPEAKER_01
But he actually, his voice starts being drowned out of my consciousness, where I go into this state of bizarre denial, where he goes into my subconscious, and suddenly I m just staring at India, even though in the back there s this vague yelling from the other room, screaming, pounding on it, but he s kind of locked in the other room where I can barely hear him now.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I m just going up India, even though there s a vague sense of self-loathing.
2
SPEAKER_01
and then I get to the top and I look at the time and I have dinner now in a half hour and I m just thinking, I cannot believe I just went from 3.21 to 6.30 and now I have to get ready for this dinner and I didn t do anything this afternoon.
2
SPEAKER_01
This is just like all the time for me.
2
SPEAKER_02
And not only is this something that happens to you seemingly when you have a deadline, but you can even zoom out more and see how this has affected your life.
2
SPEAKER_02
You mentioned that after college, where you had all this important work that you procrastinated, which is normal because a lot of people think, I don t really wanna do this, this is gonna be hard for your failure, you thought, alright.
2
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I spent the whole time screwing around on my piano and other things.
2
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Maybe I m supposed to be a composer.
2
SPEAKER_02
And then you go to L.A., the monkey refuses to let you pour yourself into your music career, and the rational decision maker, the voice in your head that is constantly being distracted by the monkey, is thinking, well, wait a minute.
2
SPEAKER_02
Maybe we re supposed to be chasing the monkey.
2
SPEAKER_02
Maybe the monkey s gonna help us figure out what we need to do.
2
SPEAKER_02
How did that work out for ya?
2
SPEAKER_01
Right, so that s kind of like this macro procrastination.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I didn t understand my own problem that well in college.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I just thought, look, I m not supposed to be sitting around learning stuff.
2
SPEAKER_01
I m supposed to be writing music.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s obviously what I m supposed to be doing, because I m doing it all the time.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s every time I sit down with a book in school for a class I m in theory excited about, I find myself not reading,
2
SPEAKER_01
not doing the work, and instead I m sitting on the piano, sitting on the keyboard, you know, with my headphones on for hours.
2
SPEAKER_01
Obviously this means something, I m supposed to be doing this.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then I went to LA, giddy, to start this music career.
2
SPEAKER_01
Finally, I can just do what I m supposed to be doing, I m doing the thing that I really do love, good for me.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I get out there, and totally unstructured career, you know, that pays off, like,
2
SPEAKER_01
14 years after you started.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s how those careers work.
2
SPEAKER_01
And you have to just sit there and grind for a long time.
2
SPEAKER_01
And what happens?
2
SPEAKER_01
I do nothing.
2
SPEAKER_01
Not because in general I had the decision I m not gonna do anything this year.
2
SPEAKER_01
No, I think I m doing something at all times.
2
SPEAKER_01
I just think.
2
SPEAKER_01
I m going to start it, you know, soon.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then I sit down, okay, today, I m going to do it.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, well, not right now.
2
SPEAKER_01
I ll do it later today.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then later today.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s a little late.
2
SPEAKER_01
I ll do it tomorrow.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then just happens day after day after day.
2
SPEAKER_01
So what am I doing instead?
2
SPEAKER_01
What s the new keyboard is now my side job, tutoring students after school, because that s a great way to support yourself while you re trying to be a film scorer.
2
SPEAKER_01
So I start doing that like crazy, because that s just, you know, it s procrastination from the thing I m supposed to be doing, and I end up starting an entire tutoring company that derails me off my creative stuff for seven years.
2
SPEAKER_01
And by the way, while that was happening, I start procrastinating on that by going back to some of the creative stuff.
2
SPEAKER_01
Now, ironically, the thing that I find myself doing now is back to basically what I was doing in school, which is learning.
2
SPEAKER_01
I m back to that and so it s the same i realized i m on point one the monkeys on point you so i don t point you that s clearly what i want to do but then the monkey doesn t want to be there anymore he wanted to be there when the stakes were low and it didn t matter when it was avoiding the thing i had to do that someone else was making me do that i was supposed to do i want i m actually there and now i suppose to do the fun thing.
2
SPEAKER_01
well now it s the rational decision maker wants me to do it and he doesn t want to do it anymore now he ll just avoid it and so he s just kind of this force of self-defeating resistance in a lot of ways so there s some dark thing going on i still haven t quite figured out this part of the psychology but it s not just that the monkey
2
SPEAKER_01
wants to do whatever s fun is also some other darker thing where it s like, he doesn t want to go for it.
2
SPEAKER_01
Anything that will make me really happy because the stakes are too high, his fear, the limbic system fear kicks in maybe that what if you re risking being really unhappy, if this doesn t work, let s just not do anything.
2
SPEAKER_01
There s something going on there, but yeah, I found myself kind of, whenever I was somewhere and I jumped where the monkey was, he wasn t there anymore, he was somewhere else now, and that really took over my whole 20s.
2
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I had a good decade, I still had a lot of fun, I still learned a lot of stuff,
2
SPEAKER_01
mulled over a lot of things, but I was never being really fulfilled at work because of this problem.
2
SPEAKER_02
And this becomes a huge issue because it s reinforcing, I would imagine, where you start to build this as a habit, you also start to make it.
2
SPEAKER_02
Jason brought up a good point as well.
2
SPEAKER_02
You don t really hear about people who procrastinate that don t make it.
2
SPEAKER_02
They live silently and suffer through and some of them are listening right now and they re like, I know that this is screwing up my whole life and I can t really stop.
2
SPEAKER_02
We hear about it from people like you and friends of mine that are like, oh, I procrastinate so much, thank goodness dot dot dot I was able to start a company or figure out.
2
SPEAKER_02
how to sort of cope with it even though it still makes you miserable sometimes and creates all this undue stress and shortens your lifespan literally because you ve gotta stay up all night to create things that you had months and months and months to create.
2
SPEAKER_02
And there are other problems associated with this, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
I mean, actually, let s talk about this.
2
SPEAKER_02
Not only are you doing lifespan shortening all-nighters and dealing with all this stress, but there s other effects that procrastination has on the quality of work that you do.
2
SPEAKER_02
Would you speak to that a little bit?
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, well, I find that it doesn t let you be present in the work you re doing, and it doesn t let you give your all.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then if you re a perfectionist like me, then you want to give none.
2
SPEAKER_01
Because the worst thing, I certainly don t want to give 60% effort to something and then show the world, this is what I can do.
2
SPEAKER_01
If it s not going to be 100% of my effort, I don t want to do anything.
2
SPEAKER_01
Perfectionist plus procrastinator quickly turns into not trying at all, not doing anything, because the perfectionist in you is so frustrated with the procrastinator in you for not giving this a chance to be perfect, and then he puts his foot down.
2
SPEAKER_01
So there s a couple of reasons why it is confused as a light and funny topic.
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, because there s another character in the brain called the panic monster.
3
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And that s a very important character for the procrastinator.
3
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And what happens is, you know, the being John Malkovich situation, the monkey will be taking over your body and holding the wheel in your brain.
3
SPEAKER_01
The rational decision maker really can never grab the wheel, not when it really matters.
3
SPEAKER_01
He can grab the wheel to go to the bank.
3
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and grab the wheel to go meet up with a friend when you grab the wheel to get something done but you can t take the wheel to do that hard work on stuff that s gonna pay off in the far future so it s this thing that seems like it ll never end and then the panic monster eventually comes roaring into the room because suddenly,
3
SPEAKER_01
there is a deadline that is now outrageously close.
3
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Or you realize you re about to be seriously embarrassed at this wedding because you don t have your speech ready.
3
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On the far end of the procrastination spectrum, their panic monster doesn t even work anymore.
3
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Those people I really feel for, their whole life can fall apart.
3
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But even people like me, the panic monster can save most procrastinators.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so the panic monster will come roaring into the room, and that is when the rational decision maker, you know, the monkey s terrified of the panic monster.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s like the rational decision maker freaks out suddenly because of the panic monster, and he jumps on the wheel, forcefully takes it, and that s when something gets done.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that s fine for situations when there are deadlines.
3
SPEAKER_01
There is a thing to bring out the panic monster, like school has papers due and exams.
3
SPEAKER_01
and a lot of jobs have deadlines and assignments you have to finish, and bosses who are gonna be asking for something.
3
SPEAKER_01
So in those cases, even a bad procrastinator, they usually get by because the panic monster saves them.
3
SPEAKER_01
Now, even in those cases, it can ruin your life in that instead of spending time with your family, you re wasting, you re spending that time getting stuff you should have gotten done at work, but you didn t, and now you have to get it done then.
3
SPEAKER_01
So it can hurt your family life, it can hurt your ability to see your friends.
3
SPEAKER_01
Procrastinators often never find themselves doing things like reading books, even though they love reading.
3
SPEAKER_01
They find themselves never picking up that guitar or that surfboard or that tennis racket or other things that actually bring them a lot of joy because they wasted too much time when they were supposed to be working that now it invades their leisure time and it can destroy their life, you know, work-life balance and just really destroy their lifestyle.
3
SPEAKER_01
So it s not good, it s bad, but at least...
3
SPEAKER_01
On paper, look, the person s still bringing in a paycheck, the person s still showing up at work, the person still seems like they have it together, even if they re driving their family crazy and people are mad at them without understanding the reasons that they re doing this.
3
SPEAKER_01
But there s also a much darker situation.
3
SPEAKER_01
on top of that.
3
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The point of the first thing is that people look at that and they laugh at that person.
3
SPEAKER_01
They say, oh, of course you re pulling an all-nighter.
3
SPEAKER_01
Like me in college, my friend thought it was funny, and it was funny.
3
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It was funny to me.
3
SPEAKER_01
I still got a done.
3
SPEAKER_01
I didn t get kicked out of the school.
3
SPEAKER_01
I did okay.
3
SPEAKER_01
I underachieved and I hated myself.
3
SPEAKER_01
People weren t worried about me.
3
SPEAKER_01
They just thought this is Tim being Tim.
3
SPEAKER_01
And we can treat procrastination like a funny thing.
3
SPEAKER_01
But then you think about all the situations in life where there s no deadlines.
3
SPEAKER_01
There s no reason for the panic monster to show up.
3
SPEAKER_01
which is so many things like, for example, spending time with your family.
3
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That s the thing that continues to get pushed away for someone who ends up being kind of a, quote, workaholic, even though they re not actually working harder than someone else.
3
SPEAKER_01
They just procrastinate on that, which invades their family time.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then the panic monster makes sure they get the work done, but it doesn t make sure they spend time with their kids.
3
SPEAKER_01
Because there s, even though you might feel a real urge to do that, you re not in a
3
SPEAKER_01
Panic about it.
3
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And you need that full emotion of panic in order to really do something if you re a procrastinator.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s one example.
3
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Another is just a lot of people want to quit their job.
3
SPEAKER_01
or get divorced or go for a girl that they ve always had feelings for.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that s to say, yeah, I ll do that tomorrow because the monkey doesn t want to do that because that s hard and icky and stressful.
3
SPEAKER_01
And the tribal person in you is super not into going on that kind of social risk or whatever.
3
SPEAKER_01
The monkey very much doesn t want to do it for that reason.
3
SPEAKER_01
The rational decision maker has no power and the panic monster isn t going to show up because there s no deadlines.
3
SPEAKER_01
You never do it.
3
SPEAKER_01
A lot of times people want to start a certain career like me with film scoring.
3
SPEAKER_01
They want to start a career in the arts or an entrepreneurial career.
3
SPEAKER_01
I want to start that business.
3
SPEAKER_01
I want to write that book.
3
SPEAKER_01
I really want to record my album.
3
SPEAKER_01
I want to get a band together.
3
SPEAKER_01
People have these dreams and so often the kind of people that can do those are ones that have this situation under control.
3
SPEAKER_01
The rational decision maker can go out and work on something that is far away with no deadline because it s the right thing to do.
3
SPEAKER_01
Procrastinators, the monkey s too powerful and there s no panic monster because there s no deadlines on those things yet until you ve actually gotten started and actually built up
3
SPEAKER_01
some real world momentum, which is when deadlines start happening.
3
SPEAKER_01
And before you ve done that, there s no panic monster and therefore the procrastination just extends outward forever.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s not contained like it is when you re in school, or when you have deadlines at work.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s not contained, so it just, it can really, you know, 20 years later, you look back and say, you re an unhappy person.
3
SPEAKER_01
Say, I never did what I wanted to do, or I never spent enough time with my kids, and that s when you have these deathbed regrets, and I really believe so many of them come down to procrastination in situations when there is no deadline.
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, it s a serious problem that should be treated like these other serious problems, and it s not enough.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I think that the quality of life, the quality of work, those concerns are often ignored by people who procrastinate because they re more concerned with the immediate stress, which is what the panic monster is actually responding to, or even what the panic monster is actually causing.
3
SPEAKER_00
There s also, you re not even enjoying the things that you re doing when you procrastinate, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
You have self-loathing, there s guilt involved, you re on the dark playground.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s the term that I use for that place that every procrastinator knows, which is when you re on things like I mentioned when I m going up Google Earth.
3
SPEAKER_01
By the way, my rational decision maker agrees to that, meaning I m supposed to be doing leisure time, I m supposed to be playing on my iPad.
3
SPEAKER_01
In that case, I love that activity.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s really interesting for me.
3
SPEAKER_01
I was genuinely interested in looking at India all the way to the top.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s me.
3
SPEAKER_01
I love doing that kind of stuff.
3
SPEAKER_01
but I was having no fun.
3
SPEAKER_01
I m not actually happy at all, and I m not enjoying it at all.
3
SPEAKER_01
I m miserable, and I m full of anxiety and dread and self-hatred, and that is this very familiar feeling that procrastinators feel, and I call that being in the dark playground.
3
SPEAKER_01
You re doing things that are, you re on Facebook.
3
SPEAKER_01
or you re eating something, or you re hanging out with your girlfriend, or you re doing something that s fun, and you know this is not the time to be doing this, I have to do my work now so I can do this stuff later, but you can t help it and you re doing it anyway, that s being in the dark playground.
3
SPEAKER_00
Right, so this isn t actual leisure time.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s sort of disguised as such, although it s not enjoyed.
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, yeah, and the irony is that if you have, let s just say, 10 hours of time, and you have seven hours of work to do, or six hours of work to do, if you just did your six hours of work,
3
SPEAKER_01
and then your four hours of leisure time, you re happy the whole time, even when you re working.
3
SPEAKER_01
If you re working, you re supposed to be working, you may not be fully happy, but you re content, you feel positive about yourself, your self-esteem is high, you re happy you re doing it, and then you feel great when it s done, and you have this amazing four hours of leisure time.
3
SPEAKER_01
What the procrastinator does is he spends the six hours, or too many of the six hours, not doing work.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s not like he s getting his happiness in a different, he s not happy at all during that time, he s really miserable.
3
SPEAKER_01
Then after work, either he s on the leisure time that s not earned and he s mad at himself and he doesn t feel good to be leisurely when you didn t get your stuff done, or he s not even enjoying that at all because he s now having to do the work then.
3
SPEAKER_01
Again, it s completely irrational.
3
SPEAKER_01
There s no argument for it.
3
SPEAKER_01
There s no good logic for it.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s totally an irrational, self-defeating thing.
3
SPEAKER_00
I think that what you created in terms of creating the procrastinator matrix, which is the Eisenhower matrix on your blog for procrastinators is super sharp and fascinating, very astute actually as well, because you ve got the quadrants where things are urgent, important, not urgent, not important, and you have surmised and very clearly pointed out that
3
SPEAKER_00
although people who procrastinate live in Q4, kind of just farting around, Q1 and Q3 are crazy, the panic monster s going nuts, and Q2, which is where all the great stuff happens, it s narnia, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
There s no urgency, there s no ability to plan, and unfortunately, great work, deep work, things like that, a la Cal Newport,
3
SPEAKER_00
That s what happens in Q2.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s where you thrive, it s where you blossom, it s where your business takes shape, it s where you quote-unquote build your dreams, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
How do you get deep work done?
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, obviously, you ve figured out how to do some of this while procrastinating because you re the exact opposite of Cal Newport, as we said pre-show, but you couldn t write the posts without getting to the point where deep work actually takes over and you get shit done.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, right, I mean, it s like you said, Q2, which is the quadrant which is important, but it s not urgent.
3
SPEAKER_01
That stuff, which is so much of what really matters in life, that s where procrastinators fail.
3
SPEAKER_01
They do stuff that s important and urgent, because it s urgent.
3
SPEAKER_01
The panic monster cares about urgent stuff.
3
SPEAKER_01
And they do a lot of stuff that s not important but urgent, like emails and errands.
3
SPEAKER_01
They do it in meetings, they do a ton of those things because it s easy, so the monkey has less of a problem with it, and the panic monster needs you to get it done.
3
SPEAKER_01
So you can feel busy, you can feel productive when you re doing that, but you re not actually, and that s the epiphany a lot of procrastinators need to have, that I actually have a word for these people, it s an impostinator, because you re like,
3
SPEAKER_01
you re a procrastinator in disguise, where you seem like, oh yeah, this person s so productive, they re all over the place, they re doing all this stuff, they re always busy, they re always too busy for everyone.
3
SPEAKER_01
And yet, they re not really working on the important stuff, and I would define important, or someone else defined important like this, and I think I stole it from them, which is things that contribute to your long-term goals, values, and mission.
4
SPEAKER_02
A lot of like that, a lot of people who seem super productive are actually these grand procrastinators.
4
SPEAKER_02
So that s spending too much time in quadrant three.
4
SPEAKER_02
And then of course, a lot of the time in the dark playground is quadrant four, stuff that s not important and not urgent.
4
SPEAKER_02
which can be the best place to spend time if you ve already gotten your work done, but procrastinators are there in the dark playground before they should be there, and that s the problem.
4
SPEAKER_02
But anyway, to your question about how I managed to ever do anything, so you know, starting Waypoint Y was a hard thing.
4
SPEAKER_02
It was a full Q2 task, because there was no panic monster yet, because there were no deadlines.
4
SPEAKER_02
It was a new blog, no one cared, no one knew about it.
4
SPEAKER_02
And this is where I would just say I m bad, but I m not so bad that I m utterly permanently 100% crippled.
4
SPEAKER_02
I m like 90% crippled.
4
SPEAKER_02
And what happened was, it took me a year.
4
SPEAKER_02
So my business partner, I started that tutoring company in LA.
4
SPEAKER_02
I did that with an old friend and business partner, Andrew.
4
SPEAKER_02
And this was kind of our idea that I was going to go start this
4
SPEAKER_02
creative project that I was excited about that also could be an interesting business.
4
SPEAKER_02
So it was a good project for everyone, and he would kind of continue running the company, I would go start this.
4
SPEAKER_02
So one thing that helped is that I had someone else who was counting on me.
4
SPEAKER_02
Someone else, and there was some guilt that built up.
4
SPEAKER_02
I m like, wow, he s working on our other thing.
4
SPEAKER_02
To make this fair, I need to be starting this thing.
4
SPEAKER_02
I can t not do anything.
4
SPEAKER_02
So that was one nice point of pressure.
4
SPEAKER_02
And then it took me a year after we had the first initial discussion to actually start it.
4
SPEAKER_02
I wanted to write some initial posts, which is really hard to sit down and write a good post when there s nowhere to even put it yet.
4
SPEAKER_02
And no guarantee that anyone will read it.
4
SPEAKER_02
So that took me a long time.
4
SPEAKER_02
And I think he was pretty mad at me for some of that year, you know?
4
SPEAKER_02
I mean, it was hard.
4
SPEAKER_02
And then I also had to start, is this gonna be on Blogger?
4
SPEAKER_02
Is this gonna be on WordPress or Squarespace?
4
SPEAKER_02
And how do I get the social buttons up?
4
SPEAKER_02
And do I get MailChimp or something?
4
SPEAKER_02
Do I have to get people to sign up?
4
SPEAKER_02
So I had to figure all that out, and I would always expect to do it that week, and then it would wait till the next week.
4
SPEAKER_02
And it only took a year, but, because again, I m not 100% unable to do this stuff.
4
SPEAKER_02
Eventually, I can make things happen, especially if there s some external pressure.
4
SPEAKER_00
I do think that one year for a single blog post, that might be a record.
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I have to give you credit for that.
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I had written a handful of posts.
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I actually only posted one of them because the blog quickly became something that was different than I kind of thought it was going to be.
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So the other ones didn t make sense anymore.
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But yeah, no, I was really bad.
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You know, I was still working on our other company a decent amount.
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I was doing some other stuff.
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I wasn t totally sitting around, but I really, you know, I went really slowly.
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I moved really slowly.
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And of course, I procrastinated on Wait But Why.
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by continuing to work on the tutoring company, which I wasn t supposed to be doing anymore, but that suddenly was much easier than starting this new thing.
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And then what happened was, then I got a huge amount of assistance for my problem, because the blog very early, thank God for my own issues, very early got an audience.
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And a couple early posts went very viral, which was huge, because if that hadn t happened, I don t know if I could have kept up the productivity, but suddenly there was an audience.
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And that is, in its own way, a panic monster.
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And I suddenly had people who were here, who liked it, who were counting on me to write more things, and if I didn t, they were gonna go away.
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So I actually ended up with a panic monster pretty soon.
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And that s part of why I was then able to continue the productivity.
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And then I ended up, it took me a year to write that first post.
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I ended up writing the equivalent of three or four full-length books over the next year, year and a half.
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I just ended up producing a ton because this audience then motivated me to and scared me into doing it so they wouldn t leave.
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It s amazing how an audience can actually spur you to productivity when you know that somebody s listening.
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Oh my God, yeah, well, and not just listening, but someone s gonna stop listening if you don t get your damn thing out.
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And so it was a lot of pressure for that reason, and it was, suddenly I d be lying in bed at night, and all day I will have wasted too much time, and then I ll be in bed thinking like, oh my God, there s people on the site right now, and you haven t put something on the site, you have to work on your thing.
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So that is this panic monster present in my life all the time, which is very, very important for my productivity.
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You talk about different types of procrastinators, which I found fascinating because a lot of people go, well, I don t procrastinate, but I have friends who do.
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And other people go, I procrastinate and it s a huge disaster.
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How come I can t get over it and other people can?
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I d love to go through the four types because.
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When I was reading this, I thought, I don t really procrastinate that much, and then when I read the four types, I went, oh, I ve done a lot of these, and sometimes I fall into one of these categories, and I know a lot of entrepreneurs and successful people that fall into one or sometimes even more of these different categories as well.
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Yeah, I think the 20% of people, I read some stat, the 20% of people that suffer from chronic procrastination, okay, and so those people are people who are procrastinating on their short-term deadlines.
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and they re pulling all-nighters, and they re cramming at the last second, and they re finishing their work on the drive to work.
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And that s the very visible kind of procrastination we all see.
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And we think that s it, 20% of people, and it s a pretty big problem.
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But what I suspect is that really almost everyone, not everyone, but most people, are procrastinators in one form or another.
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So another form is the kind I mentioned where you re busy all the time, you re doing all this stuff,
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But you re not actually working on the important things that contribute to your long-term mission goals and values very often at all you re spending actually a two hours of your week on that stuff and fifty hours of your week what s important like are you working on something.
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that has a chance to be on your epitaph, that has a chance to be written on your gravestone as the thing you did.
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And most of the time, you re not, you re working on stuff that no one s gonna care about in a week.
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And so that s a procrastinator, even though they feel, oh, I m getting all my stuff done, I m responsive on email, I never miss a deadline.
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And yet, if you ask them, take a big step back, look at your whole life, are you working on important stuff?
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Very often they ll say no, and I think that is also a complete and utter procrastinator.
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And then there s people like, at least that person, maybe that their career has that important epitaph worthy stuff in it, and they re just not focusing on that part.
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But then there s the even broader procrastinators of people who are spending 10 or 20 years working on a mission that is not really the thing that they care about.
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And that s the broadest, most macro procrastinator.
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And those people develop, I think, very often a deep depression as life goes on that no one else knows about.
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And sometimes they don t even understand why it s there.
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And it s this quiet, kind of sad part of their life that they don t really talk about.
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I felt myself kind of being in that zone when I was doing all these things one at a time that never felt like the thing I wanted to be doing.
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I think that when you start including those kinds of procrastinators, and those people aren t gonna be identified as chronic procrastinators, they might not even think of themselves as procrastinators, they probably don t.
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But that is what s happening.
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In a very broad sense, they are procrastinating on their whole life mission, on what it should be.
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Maybe they don t know what their life mission is, and they re not spending, the most important thing for them to be doing is figuring it out.
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And they re procrastinating on really, whether it s therapy, a journal, or whatever it is, or trying new things and quitting their job, they re procrastinating on finding their calling.
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So, because it s hard, I mean, who wants to do that on a random Wednesday?
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I ll do that next month, next year.
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I have kids now, I m just starting this other thing, or work got really busy, or I, you know, this isn t the time, I need money now.
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There s always something, you can always put it off, and that s the monkey being sneaky in the background.
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The monkey s not being obvious, that s a very clever monkey who is kind of convinced the rational decision maker, you know, that, oh, I know, you re doing the important stuff, and the rational decision maker feels good about it, and the monkey s snickering in the back, saying, ha, you think, you fell for it, and, you know, you realize that 20 years later.
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I see this in a lot of entrepreneurs.
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I mean, you ve got the four types, the disastinator, someone who never accomplishes anything because there s no urgency and they re able to continue procrastinating.
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The impostinator, who you mentioned earlier, where busy work and bullshit rule the day.
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They look busy, they accomplish nothing, and busy does not equal productive.
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We know that, and often entrepreneurs learn that the hard way.
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And entrepreneurs also fall into the successinator.
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I know lots of these people now.
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They work successfully, but there s no balance.
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It s better than the rest,
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you re still limited in your professional possibilities.
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You can do this great work, often it ends up maintaining your business instead of really diving deep and building your business, working on the business instead of working in the business.
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And this whole spiral, this whole phenomenon has to stop because it s unpleasant, you sell yourself short in terms of what you can get done, the epitaph work, the deep work, and you only end up doing what you have to do and not what you want to do.
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And of course that affects you, it affects your family,
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It s the result of having a little bit of a low confidence when it comes to whatever part of your life you re trying to work on.
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It kind of allows you to become self-defeating, and then of course it s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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What can we do to start to get out of this?
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I mean, you said yourself,
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during and pre-show, look, I m by no means somebody who s defeated procrastination.
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However, I think it makes sense to teach or to start telling people who are listening, who are going, this is me, what do I do?
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How do we start to recover?
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I mean, how do we start to prove to ourselves that we can do the work?
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I like what you just said, working in your business versus working on it.
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That is the kind of thing that happens.
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And I also like your interview with Cal Newport when he said that fewer people are doing deep work now than ever before because there s so many distractions and other things.
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And it s also the most important time to be doing it.
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You get more out of deep work than you ever did before.
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And I think that the internet and other potential distractions have actually really given the monkey a lot more power.
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It has really
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made it harder to do that Q2 work, which I think is what Cal Newport s talking about when he says, you know, deep work.
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That s stuff that is super important and you need to just have this incredible discipline to sit there and do it and dig in and not let yourself get distracted because it s, when you re doing a lot of the important work, you re inventing new thoughts.
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You re inventing new strategies.
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You re not just going through the motions on something you know how to do.
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It s hard and it takes a ton of mental energy
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The challenge is to figure out how to get there.
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Again, I spent a lot of time not there.
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Now, each post for me is a huge struggle.
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But I do find myself, because I keep putting out posts, even if they take a while, each post involves a lot of deep work.
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And it feels incredible to get there, to do that deep work.
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And it s good for your self-esteem.
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It s like you said, it s a confidence thing.
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Then your self-fulfilling prophecy starts to change.
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We all have a storyline about ourselves.
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in our own heads, and it does play out.
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And to change it, I compare it to a basketball player on a cold street.
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He can t just decide to start hitting shots.
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Physically hitting a shot does something to you.
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It changes your storyline.
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You will actually start to believe that that is who you are, someone who can hit shots.
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Even if you know you could be the kind of person, if you re not hitting shots, you think, well, I could be, but your storyline just looks at the reality and says, but I won t, because I don t normally.
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And then once you do,
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Once things start to go well, once you find yourself able to kind of take the reins from the monkey by will, not because of the panic monster, if you actually do it, that changes your storyline.
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Now the storyline says, well, the truth is that we don t normally do it, but we did it last time.
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So now, you re not even sure what, you know, if you were betting on your own storyline, you re not even sure, because now it s interesting.
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It got interesting suddenly.
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Now, if the next day you do it again, and you win again, now the storyline starts to be like, you know, I didn t used to do it, but now I ve done it twice.
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I think I ve actually learned how to, and now your confidence is in a different place.
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So you have to actually get over that hump to kind of overpower your storyline in order to change it.
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Overpower your bad habits, which takes a tremendous amount of willpower,
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in order to change those habits, and once they re changed, it doesn t take willpower anymore, because your habits just make it easy.
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So it s like, it s the hardest thing in the world is the initial adjustment, the starting of something.
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You know, I could have spent 20 years starting WayputtWhy instead of one.
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That easily could have happened, and I just never would have done it.
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That s how a lot of things happen.
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And for me, I happened to be able to get it going, partially because I had a business partner.
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So I d spent 10 years not doing something creative full-time, and I just willed myself to kind of start it as well.
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It s not a very satisfying answer to say, eventually you just have to will yourself to kind of change the storyline, to get out of the deep grooves that you re in, do something different, because that s when suddenly the groove starts to change.
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And then you find yourself, the new place you ve gotten yourself, that starts to become a groove of its own.
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That s a good habit.
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And I think that the challenge to everyone is how do I do it?
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This is not ever going to be easy.
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I m going to have to get myself out of a deep groove and to a place that doesn t have a groove yet so that a new groove can form in a healthier place and in a more empowered place.
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And I think that s a personal challenge for everyone.
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You have to know how your inner psychology works and figure out what is going to make you change your deeply ingrained
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behavior, and maybe that s telling a bunch of people.
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Maybe it s not telling anyone.
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Maybe, you know, one thing, my inbox was totally out of control.
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Classic procrastinator thing, of course.
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You know, imperfectionist.
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My inbox is either at zero and I keep it at zero, or I fall off the wagon, and suddenly it s at an 80, and then it s at 160, and then it s at 900, and I just want to die.
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That kept happening, and I found myself being at zero in the minority of the time, and most of the time being at 900.
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So, I got a recommendation to do something called Yesterbox.
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which is every day you answer every email from yesterday, and you don t let yourself answer anything today unless it s urgent.
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Then you actually, you know, you do it in the morning, you get up to midnight the day before, and then you actually close Gmail for the day, you take the email off your phone, you can t look at it the rest of the day.
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So it doesn t just, A, build up, and B, it doesn t just sit there and continue to invade your time, and just be a tool for the monkey to go check something.
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I ve done so many things like that.
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You know, they have the tomato timer, and they have every possible technique in the world, but it s too simplistic to say they don t work, because you know what?
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Yesterbox worked for me, and it worked for my weird brain.
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It might not work for someone else s, but it s like finding the particular techniques and strategies that happen to work for your weird brain,
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And when you find them, then that can be a game changer.
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So it s just about experimentation and not giving up on this and being like, I will figure out how to do this.
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It s important enough.
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And I m not going to stop trying things.
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And also understanding that it s okay that you re probably going to fail for a while at this mission.
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That doesn t mean I ll never do it.
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It means, of course I m going to fail for a while at trying to change my behavior, because I ve been doing this for years, and it s like how I grew up.
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It probably goes back to the way you were raised when you were five years old.
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Of course I m going to fail for a while.
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I had a little success this week.
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That s huge, instead of thinking, oh my God, of course, I had a little success and I couldn t replicate it.
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It s that kind of self-defeating thing that has to be changed as well in order to make this work.
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It s a set of habits like most things.
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It happens bit by bit.
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It s a set of bad habits that need to be changed.
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The important concept is that it s not some innate personality trait that you can t change.
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It s not like your height.
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It s not your metabolism, which you can also, of course, take steps to change.
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This is something that probably got built in over time.
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It s a result of mental processes that can also be defeated.
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and yes, there s accountability and support like that, you can create your own panic monster, you can force regular posting because you have an audience, timers, notes, deep work rules like airplane mode for your phone and everything, but you ve really gotta aim for slow and steady progress and rewrite that storyline and realize, look, this is something that can be changed, because I think a lot of people who procrastinate really think, look, this is just the way that I am, and that is a defeatist mindset
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They said, use me as an example, because I was as bad as it gets.
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I did my thesis in the last three days.
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I spent 10 years not doing what I wanted to in life.
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I actually did not believe I ever could just fully dive into a project in the arts, something I was really, really passionate about, and do it.
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And now I m doing that.
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I mean, it s like, it makes me realize that I should never be daunted by this stuff.
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I m like, I figured out how to write a bunch of blog posts.
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produce a ton of writing when I never ever thought I was sure that I just totally almost given up on you know there was some part of me that didn t give up and a lot of creatives who have found success will say the same thing will say that I had a huge problem to be a long time to get to what I wanted to do.
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But the fact is, a lot of entrepreneurial or creative people, those kind of bold people with a lot of originality and a lot of natural ability, very often the same people that there s a part of themselves in their brain that doesn t let them go for what they want and is holding them back, and that s normal.
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That s really part of being that person.
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So the other part of being that person is figuring out how to overcome it, or you end up being the other kind of person, which is the person who never ever ends up doing it.
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But I think that the starting place for a lot of this is just simple awareness.
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taking a step back and seriously reflecting, whether with a therapist or in a journal or alone.
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just on what is important, things that contribute to your long-term mission, values, and goals, things that you want on your epitaph.
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The first step is just, what are those things?
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Are we even clear on what the end point I m trying to get to is?
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Or maybe the end point I m trying to get to right now is to find what those things are, and then that s the mission.
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So I think that a lot of times what holds people back, they don t realize until years later what those things even are, because they never thought about it that hard, or they let their mother s values
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infiltrate their value system, and that became their values, or society s values, or their friends, or financial pressure, and they lost touch with their inner self, and what that inner voice actually cares about.
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Tim, thank you very, very much, man, for your time.
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Yeah, thank you.
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Thanks for having me on.
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Really interesting stuff, interesting guy, super sharp.
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I mean, look, when you start blogging and then suddenly Elon Musk is calling you because he loves your blog and he wants a feature in there, I highly recommend, look, if you have the patience to read, which is something that s tough for me, as everyone knows, Wait But Why, such a cool place to find info on AI, and his sort of ADD procrastinator brain works just like mine does, and I think if you re one of those people
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saying, well, I can t read because I find myself Googling things and looking things up.
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Wait, but why is the blog for you?
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And yeah, you can always do it now or you can just do it later if you re a procrastinator and instead do something else.
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If you enjoyed this one, don t forget to thank Tim on Twitter.
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We ll have that linked in the show notes as well as all the other resources mentioned on the show.
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You can tap our album art.
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and most mobile podcast players.
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You know, that app you use on your phone to listen.
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You ll see the cheat sheet for this episode.
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We ll link to the show notes right on your phone.
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They ll be right there in your face.
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I m also on Twitter, at The Art of Charm.
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I ve got a lot of engagement there and articles and other things like that that I like that I don t laundry list mention on the show.
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And we ve got our social capital, Challenge, at theartofcharm.com, slash challenge, or text charmed.
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That s C-H-A-R-M-E-D to 33444.
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That works in the US.
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Everybody else, go to the website at theartofcharm.com.
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The challenge is about improving your networking and connection skills and inspiring those around you to develop a personal and professional relationship with you.
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We ll also email you our Fundamentals Toolbox that I mentioned earlier on the show, and I ve got a bunch of videos there with drills and exercises to help you move forward
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it ll make you a better networker, it ll make you a better connector, and it will definitely make you a better thinker.
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That s theartofcharm.com slash challenge or text charmed in the US to 33444.
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This episode of The Art of Charm was produced by Jason DeFilippo.
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Jason Sanderson is our audio engineer and editor.
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Show notes on the website are by Robert Fogerty.
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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Go ahead and tell your friends, because the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to someone else, either in person or shared on the web.
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Now stay charming and leave everything and everyone better than you found them.
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Thanks for listening to The Art of Charm.
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Get more confidence, relationship skills, life hacks, and more at theartofcharmpodcast.com.