I was recently listening to a TED Talk presentation given by Mr. Tim Urban entitled; “Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator”. He explains in his ultraistic speaking style that every human being to one degree or another is subconsciously a procrastinator. Be it a project we are working on, purchasing those new tablecloths we told ourselves we will going to buy or answering those gosh long emails, we will subconsciously tell ourselves; “we will take care of it tomorrow or sometime in the future”.
It’s not that we are incapable of doing the above tasks. It’s that we are simply nonchalant about completing them.
To hammer his point home, Tim provides the following example; A college student has a term paper due at the end of his semester but doesn’t do anything about it until the very last day. He pushes it off the entire semester yet wakes up right before the paper is due, buys a 6 pack of red bull, runs to the library and makes the slow-motion movie-style dive to submit the paper 11 seconds before its due.
Now where, Mr. Urban asks, did somebody with no energy to write his paper the entire semester suddenly find the bullish stamina to work for 14 hours straight? The answer is, that he really had the strength the entire semester to write his paper. But what’s different in those final 14 hours is his realization of an impending deadline. And it’s this time sensitive deadline that pushes him over the edge to spend an all-nighter. His laziness and nonchalant attitude are replaced with the anxieties of his upcoming deadline.
This passive attitude that our students has, have same negative effects as other things in his life that he procrastinates on. Since there are no hard deadlines, he finds it very easy to put his chores on the back burner for later. As an aside, I believe that’s why so many startups end up in failure. It’s not that the ideas or concept the startup provides for are inferior; if anything, startups provide visionary futuristic ideas. Yet since a startup by definition is “the action or process of setting up something in motion” they aren’t conceptually pressed into achieving near term profitability and push it off to focus on growth.
Yet since investors are exclusively interested in profits and the startup procrastinates on that, investors quickly lose interest in the company causing the startup to lose its funding and the venture subsequently fails. Mr. Urban concludes his Ted Talks presentation by emphasizing our “subconscious procrastination bias” and that we therefore must self-impose deadlines in order to accomplish our set goals.
Throughout life, small doses of inspiration for positive spiritual change hits us. We are inspired about a new religious class opening up in our neighborhood, inspired about a new Tzedakah (charity) project, inspired to learn a bit more Torah every day or inspired to help a community member in need.
Yet it’s at the exact time that this inspiration hits us that our “subconscious procrastination machine” kicks in at its finest and convinces us that there is always next time or next year to work on these projects. After all, we are so young and have so much more time left. We simply kick the can down the road and continue along blissfully with our lives. But here’s why that is flawed thinking……
Although we may look, act, and believe that we are in the best of health (and we should, please God, continue to be so), it’s kinda obvious that we won’t live forever.
Let’s hypothetically draw a “life calendar” with 120 boxes in it, with one box corresponding to a single year of our life. If we were to cross off the 20 or 30 or 40 years that is already gone, we very quickly realize that there aren’t that many boxes left.
And as we roll around to Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) we once again check off another box in our life calendar.
This I believe, is God’s gift to us in the form of the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur holiday. It’s our yearly reminder and wake up call. The realization that our time on this earth is not infinite and that our hypothetical “life calendar” is filling up.
With this information in mind, this upcoming year MUST be the year we where we enact some sort of change. And unlike the student in the story who knew when the deadline was and waited until the last second, we don’t know when our “life deadline” is.
But what we do know is that when Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur rolls around we are one year closer.
Therefore, let us commit TODAY to enact some sort of positive change in our lives, or better yet, don’t even procrastinate that long and commit RIGHT NOW!
To quote Dr. Robert Kelso from the hit TV sitcom Scrubs: “Nothing in life that’s worth having comes easy, so get off your keister and do the work”.
Shana Tova to everyone. May the upcoming year be one full of health, wealth and all the possible blessings,
L’chaim !
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