Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator
Welcome back, incredible BookDuck fans. Today we're going to listen to a story about a man who procrastinates until the last possible moment. Tim Urban is the speaker, and he started his Ted Talks speech by sharing the story of how he wrote his college thesis.
Let’s try to get into that story!
Tim had a whole year to write a 90-page thesis. He planned everything, but months passed, and he wrote nothing. One day he woke up and realized that he had only 3 days left before the deadline. He didn't even have one finished page. And what did he do? He wrote 90 pages in 72 hours. He didn’t sleep for 2 nights, and this isn’t acceptable for the human body.
He thought everyone would be excited about his thesis, but he got a call from the college saying it was the worst thesis they'd read.
Anyway, today Tim Urban is a writer-blogger guy. He writes the blog Wait But Why.
And a couple of years ago, he decided to write about procrastination.
The behavior has always perplexed the non-procrastinators around him,
and Tim wanted to explain to the non-procrastinators of the world
what goes on in the heads of procrastinators, and why they are the way they are.
He had a hypothesis that the brains of procrastinators were actually different from the brains of other people.
And to test this, he scanned both his brain and the brain of a proven non-procrastinator, so he could compare them.
He showed pictures where both brains had a Rational Decision-Maker in them, but the procrastinator's brain also had an Instant Gratification Monkey.
What does this mean? It means everything's fine until this happens.
So the Rational Decision-Maker will always make the reasonable choice to do something productive, but the Monkey doesn't like that plan, so he actually takes the wheel, and he wants to scroll the internet.
The monkey doesn't want to solve the problems here and now. Why do a job now if there's still time? He needs fun.
In the animal world, that works fine. But we're in an advanced civilization, and the Monkey does not know what that is.
This is why we have another guy in our brain, the Rational Decision-Maker, who gives us the ability to do things no other animal can do. We can visualize the future. We can see the bigger picture. We can make long-term plans. And he wants to take all of that into account. And he wants to just have us do whatever makes sense to be doing right now.
You will have a question, what to do if the Monkey doesn’t want to give up, and the deadline is already close? Nothing, because at that moment a monkey's nightmare will come. Meet this guy, his name is Panic Monster.
He is the procrastinator’s guardian angel, someone who's always looking down on him and watching over him in his darkest moments. The Panic Monster is dormant most of the time, but he suddenly wakes up anytime a deadline gets too close or there's a danger of public embarrassment, a career disaster, or some other scary consequence.
Now you listen to Tim's speech on Ted talk, and you think that he was preparing hard for this day. But no. Tim was invited 6 months before this performance. And how do you think who won in his head first? Yes, you guessed it, the "funny" monkey. He just opened Google Earth and zoomed in to the bottom of India, like 200 feet above the ground, and scrolled up for two and a half hours till he got to the top of the country.
As six months turned into four and then two and then one, the people of TED decided to release the speakers. And Tim opened up the website, and there was his face staring right back at him.
The Panic Monster starts losing his mind, and a few seconds later, the whole system's in mayhem.
And the Monkey remembers, he's terrified of the Panic Monster – boom, he's up the tree! And finally, the Rational Decision-Maker can take the wheel and I can start working on the talk.
Now, the Panic Monster explains all kinds of pretty insane procrastinator behavior, like how someone like Tim could spend two weeks unable to start the opening sentence of a paper, and then miraculously find the unbelievable work ethic to stay up all night and write eight pages. And this entire situation, with the three characters, is the procrastinator's system. It's not pretty, but in the end, it works.
To sum up, remember that the Monkey is funny only at first sight. It is your laziness, your excuses, and your enemy. Get rid of it, find your willpower, and get things done long before the deadline, and don't make the Panic Monster wake up and take matters into your own hands.
