How to Beat Procrastination with the You At Full Throttle
Transform fear and avoidance into the ecstasy of pouring your full potential into doing what you should
The peregrine falcon hunts by dive-bombing its prey at up to 186 miles per hour, making it the world’s fastest animal at getting sh*t done.
Nobody knows exactly what that bird is thinking on the way to its target. But that’s okay. As Rabindranath Tagore once said about flowers, it’s the human observing it who fills that part out for nature.
So let me tell you how that bird feels: Like the opposite of a procrastinator.
Like a cheetah mid-stride as it’s about to obliterate its prey.
Like an orca catching a seal in mid-air with the skill of an NFL wide receiver in the end zone.
Like a mustang galloping across the open plain. Sweat streaming. Mane flowing. Just running for the joy of soaring across endless space.
They are, all of them, doing exactly what they should be doing.
The trick for beating procrastinating is realizing that, once you finally start, this is how you will feel.
Every fiber of your being oriented towards a single task, utter concentration making you think about nothing else except the annihilation of your aim.
This is the fabled flow state.
This is the original fun.
And the greatest challenge of civilization has been finding ways to replicate this without the suffering and bloodshed it causes those on the receiving end of these majestic animals having a ball.
The morality of it all is a discussion for another time. But the fact that most people put off their work for empty pleasures is a good indicator we’re doing a piss-poor job at actually achieving this.
It makes you wonder: if doing what we should feels so good, why do we put it off?
Three main reasons:
1. Stakes
If failure carries consequences, then it’s scary to try. The horse could break its leg, the falcon could miss, the cheetah could catch a skull-shattering hoof to the face, and the orca could fumble.
Better instead to seek pleasure that gets as close to hunting without the pain and suffering of doing it wrong, right? Get a snack, turn on a video game, and go on a virtual quest. Submit to Mark Zuckerberg and his hi-fi, polished polygon Metaverse. Wrong.
Because there’s another reason we don’t do what we should, and it’s because deep down, we know that no stakes almost always comes with no…
2. Meaning
Uninspired, purposeless, mundane.
These are all words used to describe the fact that what we avoid doing doesn’t feel meaningful enough to be worth it. You can dress things up with as much dopamine and instant gratification as you want, but if it lacks fulfillment, sooner or later we are going to get depressed over our addiction.
This is why gaming, porn, and drugs make us worse off in the long run and has us mustering our willpower to quit them for good. Like booze and cheap sex, it starts off feeling good but ends in hangovers and regret.
3. Boredom
This one’s actually kind of a trick answer, because the kind of fun you want that doesn’t involve any grind or work is illusory. It’s the dopamine rush that comes without stakes and/or meaning.
If there was a real good point to what you were doing, and not failing was a big deal to you, then throwing everything you had into overcoming all the obstacles to achieve it would feel “fun”.
I know, because I used to play a lot of video games but these days the most I do is collect and obsessively watch their trailers. Instead of wanting to get lost in simulated worlds as I did when I was younger, the trailers are great at catching a zest for the product that translates into a zest for life for me.
This trailer for the latest Zelda, for example, has some ideas for bucket list things I would like to do in my real, much more meaningful and profitable, life. Surfing, hiking, rock climbing, martial arts, adventuring, etc.
Not that there’s anything wrong with people who play games in moderation. It just isn’t worth my time to get good enough to really enjoy them anymore:
So how do you overcome procrastination? First, ignore conventional strategy.
We’re generally told to Just do it.
Grit your teeth and fight through the resistance.
As with so much in our culture, this kind of thinking likely has hidden origins in the military. Specifically, the approach of the greatest Western military theorist and Napoleon fanboy ever: Carl Von Clausewitz.
I never finished Clausewitz’s On War because he’s really long and dense. And because even Clausewitz didn’t finish (he died before he completed it). Besides, if Napoleon ever returned to conquer the world again, hundreds of thousands of people would get called before I’d have to end Ol’ Boney and his global continental system.
But I’m told the whole key to his success was speed and concentration of force. This is the kind of cliche from which motivational Tumblr quotes are made. Because, like most Tumblr advice I’ve tried applying, ‘just do it fast and hard’ inevitably leads to disappointment.
You can line everything up like the perfect general and then… keep lining things up, marching around, and polishing the cannon without every taking a shot. You can do this until the sun goes down and empires fall and you will still find more excuses not to start.
In short, you will procrastinate.
Maybe, instead of beating yourself up for not following through, you consider that the reason you haven’t done so yet is that you simply don’t want to.
In other words, you procrastinate because what you say you want to do actually isn’t worth it to you.
Cues and rewards, atomic habits, GTD, Pomodoro, building a second brain… I’ve tried all the systems until I realized that the reason they didn’t work is because they’re tactics.
Meanwhile, setting out to achieve something that isn’t worth it, like dead end jobs or invading Moscow right before the Russian winter, is just bad strategy. If nobody wants to do it, then the best they can do is poorly, which means it will fail.
Instead, seek out that “in your element” feeling.
Raptors, big cats, killer whales, and mighty steeds. I chose these examples because they’ve resonated with the soul of humanity for eons. We’ve watched with awe, envy and wonder and may have even evolved empathy out of our once-pitiful monkey yearning to one day be able to feel just like these majestic monsters.
But I’m aware many today are so far removed from steppe to Serengeti that they’ve no clue what I’m talking about. So here’s an old meme with an even older cliche embedded in it that, if you actually took it seriously, would improve your life tremendously:
Look beyond the cringe and hilarity into what’s accurate about it.
The reason “the pump” feels like an orgasm to Mr. Olympia isn’t purely physical. After all, it’s still a lot easier and less painful to just have more sex than it is to keep picking things up and putting them down ad infinitum.
No, what Arnold truly loved about that feeling, what makes it feel, “better than sex” for him and just merely okay or even like “the big death” for others is the fact that Arnold is in his element when doing this.
Since he was a child, Arnold had in his mind’s eye a life he wanted to live and in those moments, whether backstage or on the bench, he’s living it.
Not every moment of our lives is high stakes and totally meaningful.
Before he could achieve undying fame on stage and screen, Arnold had a brick laying business. Now that he’s a successful multi-millionaire, his life still isn’t one infinite pump.
We all still have to wait in traffic, fill out forms, answer dumb interview questions, and sit through all the other real-life equivalents of loading screens.
Just as falcons and big cats spend a good amount of time circling, scouting, and doing the animal kingdom equivalent of “research”.
But they’d still choose that any day over having all their needs met while being forced to live in a cage.
Animals know instinctively what procrastinators suppress:
The goal of life isn’t to run away from the mundane but to have as many meaningful moments as possible.
Stop torturing yourself.
Automate or outsource what you can.
Find a way to make what you can’t worth doing.
Make time for the full expression of you at the height of all your powers.
And then enjoy the reward that comes once you finish.
Full belly. Celebratory drink.
And the afterglow of release from the soul-crushing burden of existential nothingness.