Why you procrastinate on everything

You procrastinate because you’re smarter than everyone.

An 8 second clip of Charles Barkley’s golf swing went viral about 18 years ago.

18 years ago, it really was not easy to get 4.2M views on Youtube.

The thing that’s so amazing about the golf swing is how terrible it is.

It’s an 8 second illustration of you when you’re procrastinating. You’ve built up all this mental force telling you you need to do the task, but right when it’s time for action, you hesitate before following through. You eventually do get the task done, but only after you’ve frustrated yourself with an ample dose of pointless time wasting.

Charles Barkley’s golf swing is pretty consistent. He squares up over the ball, slowly turns into his backswing, then begins to generate force into the club as he quickly rotates his torso back to the left, then, while putting his weight on his left leg, he completely stops. After he freezes his whole body for a brief moment, he restarts the process of generating force into the clubhead and rotates his torso to finally strike the ball. The crowd politely waits for him to finish his swing before laughing at him.

Except, isn’t Charles Barkley very smart? He’s not haphazardly going with his first brash impulse, he’s taking more time to analyze and think about the golf swing. He stops for a moment to re-analyze the position of the ball and then he completes his perfectly calculated golf swing.

The funny thing is that’s exactly how I was when I did an amateur amateur boxing fight. After training for a couple months, I felt like I was going to easily wreck this lanky kid with a well-placed straight. Except when I finally stepped in the ring in front of all these lights and people, every punch was like a Charles Barkley golf swing. It was like each punch needed a brief pause, a brief double check, before I could fully extend my arm. I could hear my trainer saying “left your arms go!” Even my friend watching in the crowd was saying “throw your right!”

My clever analysis of my punches surely helped my opponent land a clean counter that wobbled me pretty bad.

After the fight, my friend who saw the livestream said I seemed really “trigger shy.”

Trigger shy. That’s a good phrase for procrastination.

There are various types of procrastination. For example you procrastinate on your taxes because you’re anticipating a very long, boring slog through receipts that you don’t want to look at, surrounded with the anxiety about getting something wrong and having to literally pay for it. (I’m not saying you should take the Homer Simpson approach)

Usually, procrastination is perfection delusion.

You delude yourself into thinking you know what perfect looks like. You don’t.

The “perfect” we see in our heads is like the woman who is stunning at a brief glance from a distance. 9 times out of 10, if you get really close to her you realize your brain had actually made a bunch of assumptions based on the limited information it took in from afar. You saw her beautiful hair and you liked her style, so you assumed she had a beautiful face and curvy body to match.

Sometimes, she is beautiful but getting yourself all the way to a “hello” might reveal that she’s the type of woman who is repulsed by someone who looks and acts like you.

Maybe your mind comes up with this amazing golf swing analogy for procrastination and doesn’t think about how that great idea that can be explained in two sentences will require plenty of mental effort to finish the remaining 90% of the article.

When it comes to building something new, you’re often subconsciously afraid that if you muster up the courage to actually start putting in the action, the materialized ideawill be no where near worth the effort.

In Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland provide a great story about the perfection trap.

In a photography class at the University of Florida, professor Jerry Uelsmann divided his class into two groups. Group A would be graded entirely on the quantity of work they produced. Group B would be graded on the quality of the work.

Group A would need to submit as many photos as possible by the end of the semester, whereas group B would need to come up with a single “perfect” photo and submit it to the teacher at the end of the semester.

Unexpectedly, the best photos all came from Group A - the quantity group. The assignment got them to immediately busy themselves with experimenting with all aspects of photography - lighting, composition, choice of subjects et cetera. This process of repeatedly testing their ideas against reality taught them how to generate better and better photos. The actual toiling in reality slowly revealed to them what direction “perfect” was in. As they progressed, they started to gain more confidence in how to move towards perfect.

Group B, the quality group, spent all this time creating in their mind a fuzzy image of what perfection should more or less look like and then tried to shoot it with a bow and arrow despite barely any actual target practice.

I recently learned of a new meme. It’s a man sitting on a chair, except the chair… is his brain.

Often we end up sitting on our ass because we trick ourselves into thinking we can make our idea better and better by just sitting on our brain for longer and longer. Except, unless you’re Nikola Tesla, you actually have to see how that idea interacts with reality to get anywhere.