Procrastinate Your Way to Greatness

You decide you're finally going to write The Great American Novel you've been dreaming of writing since college. For three straight weeks, you sit by your desk every day at 10pm and write for an hour. It’s not The Great American Novel yet, but hey, you're writing. But then you get sick, and then you have to work late, and then you don’t feel inspired, and before you know it you've procrastinated on your writing for two months.

When we want to do something creative, we think it’s because we’ll enjoy the process and might even achieve the outcome. The less obvious part is that we see the person who does what we want to do as a better version of ourselves—and want to become that version. The more we procrastinate, the more distant we feel from that version, because we tried to get to it and failed. James Joyce clearly didn’t procrastinate, and J. K. Rowling was writing novels in her head when she didn’t have pen and paper available.

Self-recrimination grows to the point where it feels easier to give up—that couldn’t possibly make us bigger losers than we already are. Besides, it wasn’t that much fun / we don’t have time for it / writers don’t make any money / we’ll never be good at it / it was a silly dream anyway.

As I obsessively tracked creative and successful people of all kinds these past few years, I realized that while we see their brilliance after years of work, we never see that on August 14, 2014, they didn’t want to get out of bed. We don’t see that for two weeks straight they were too unmotivated to write, train, make cold calls, or whatever it was they were supposed to do. We don’t see that this followed a month of mediocre output they were unhappy with, or that they felt like losers the entire year prior. 

The big difference between people who realize their dreams and those who don’t is that the former pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and keep going despite a period of procrastination, self-doubt, dismal output, or all the above. They don’t let their past performance dictate their future performance—or outcomes. They realize that even at a low productivity level, they still produce something.

That better version of yourself is only a few big, brilliant, ultra-productive steps away—or a collection of many small, far-less-stellar somethings.

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