Woolgathering #144: Pleasure, Pride, and Procrastination
Plus: the power of systems in your daily life, the trillion-dollar coach, and making music with your words
I have struggled with procrastination for as long as I can remember. As a kid, being asked to clean my minimally messy room turned into a day long project. I would go through many iterations and variations of avoiding the simple task that I was given. At 9 AM, my mother would ask me to pick things up. When she returned at noon, almost 0 progress would have been made. It was agonizing for both of us.
Fast forward to my time in college, and the situation was much the same. I was aware of deadlines for papers, but paid them no mind until the night before — when the panic would strike. The result was a whole lot of stress and self-flagellation as I forced myself to sit down and just do the work. And yet somehow, I would even find ways to procrastinate then, up until the very final minutes.
Once I settled into a career, I was frustrated to find that this still did not change all that much. I would continue to feel a sense of being behind, and letting deadlines pass, or barely meeting them by the skin of my teeth—and with thrown-together work. For the life of me, I just couldn’t overcome this tendency to put off the hard stuff, or even the not-so-hard stuff. And all of that procrastination in order to pursue…what exactly? I put off my work so many times, and for so long, but what did I have to show for it?
As I thought more, that really was the question. What was I giving up doing the important work for? Asking that question forced me to pay more attention in real time when I found myself procrastinating. What I learned, while not an immediate cure, has helped me to stave off more and more temptations to procrastinate.
Looking for something good to read?
My e-book Be, Think, Do is a collection of my best early essays—divided into 3 neat sections. Check it out, or share it with someone who might appreciate it.
My first paperback, The Wabi-Sabi Way is available all over the place. It’s an examination of an old Japanese principle that can help color your mindset, and thus your entire quality of life. Pick up a copy today.
Feed Your Mind
Podcast: Leverage Systems in Your Life
(from the Art of Manliness podcast)
This episode of the Art of Manliness podcast features an interview with author and consultant Sam Carpenter, and he’s got an interesting worldview to share. The interview is primarily about his book Work The System, but it also goes into some really cool metaphysical territory as well.
Carpenter talks about how powerful it can be to recognize and leverage systems in your approach to life. It’s a mindset as much as it is a tactic, and it’s a very interesting one. Basically, your entire life is made up of systems. The more you can recognize them, and find ways to tweak them, you can get the results you want. From there, it’s all about optimizing all the systems at work in your life and plugging into other ones at work in the wider world. Give it a listen.
Book Recommendation
Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell
by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, Alan Eagle
Think of some of the early Silicon Valley startups to see meteoric rises: Intuit, Apple, Google, etc. Chances are, a college football coach from Pennsylvania with a losing record is behind their success. Bill Campbell's story is pretty extraordinary, and it's told here quite well by people who worked with him regularly. But it's also structured as a set of principles on how to effectively coach people—which you can do whether you're officially a manager or not. So whether you’re a leader according to your job description—or you just seek to better help others—this book is a fantastic study in how to do it. It’s also just an interesting story.
Get Creative: Cut and Paste Text to Make a Song
In my travels across the internet, I stumbled upon Typatone. It’s a really cool site that allows you to type or paste a bunch of text into it, and it makes it into a song. Since the tones are based on the characters, each block of text is a different song. It’s a lot of fun. The same developer also has another site called Patatap (which is a palindrome!). It allows you to make a beat & sounds in real time by typing letters on your keyboard. You can hit the spacebar to cycle through different sound schemes.
A Question
What is your “shootaround”? How can you spend more time on it?
I’ve gotten back into basketball recently. And part of that has been watching videos of NBA plays and players. I found this amazing video of NBA start Stephen Curry sinking 105 3-point shots in a row. It’s hypnotizing to watch. But as unbelievable as it seems, it makes a lot of sense.
Curry is well-known as one of the best—if not the best—shooter in the NBA. And it’s because he can make absurd amounts of shots in a no-pressure practice situation that he is able to be so effective in the pressure of games.
The way Curry has become really good at making 3-point shots when it really matters is by doing the repetitive work of shooting thousands of them when it doesn’t. He does a shootaround every day.
We all have some version of this in our lives. There’s some shootaround we can do, where we run through things we need to be able to deliver on—but in a context of no pressure. What’s yours? What repetitive, simple exercise can you do and get really good at important stuff?
A Quote
“When two great forces oppose each other, the victory will go to the one that knows how to yield.”
- from the Tao Te Ching