Perseverance
is about as important to achievement as gasoline is to driving a
car. Sure, there will be times when you feel like you're
spinning your wheels, but you'll always get out of the rut with
genuine perseverance. Without it, you won't even be able to
start your engine.
The opposite of perseverance is
procrastination. Perseverance means you never quit.
Procrastination usually means you never get started, although
the inability to finish something is also a form of
procrastination.
Ask people why they procrastinate
and you'll often hear something like this, I'm a perfectionist.
Everything has to be just right before I can get down to work.
No distractions, not too much noise, no telephone calls
interrupting me, and of course I have to be feeling well
physically, too. I can't work when I have a headache." The other
end of procrastination - being unable to finish - also has a
perfectionist explanation: "I'm just never satisfied. I'm my own
harshest critic. If all the i's aren't dotted and all the t's
aren't crossed, I just can't consider that I'm done. That's
just the way I am, and I'll probably never change."
Do you see what's going on here?
A fault is being turned into a virtue. The perfectionist is
saying that his standards are just too high for this world. This
fault-into-virtue syndrome is a common defense when people are
called upon to discuss their weaknesses, but in the end it's
just a very pious kind of excuse making. It certainly doesn't
have anything to do with what's really behind procrastination.
Remember, the basis of
procrastination could be fear of failure. That's what
perfectionism really is, once you take a hard look at it. What's
the difference whether you're afraid of being less than perfect
or afraid of anything else? You're still paralyzed by fear.
What's the difference whether you never start or never finish?
You're still stuck. You're still going nowhere. You're still
overwhelmed by whatever task is before you. You´re still
allowing yourself to be dominated by a negative vision of the
future in which you see yourself being criticized, laughed at,
punished, or ridden out of town on a rail. Of course, this
negative vision of the future is really a mechanism that allows
you to do nothing. It's a very convenient mental tool.
I'm going to tell you how to
overcome procrastination. I'm going to show you how to turn
procrastination into perseverance, and if you do what I suggest,
the process will be virtually painless. It involves using two
very powerful principles that foster productivity and
perseverance instead of passivity and procrastination.
The first principle is: break it
down.
No matter what you're trying to
accomplish, whether it's writing a book, climbing a mountain, or
painting a house the key to achievement is your ability to break
down the task into manageable pieces and knock them off one at
one time. Focus on accomplishing what's right in front of you
at this moment. Ignore what's off in the distance someplace.
Substitute real-time positive thinking for negative future
visualization. That's the first all- important technique for
bringing an end to procrastination.
Suppose I were to ask you if you
could write a four hundred-page novel. If you're like most
people, that would sound like an impossible task. But suppose I
ask you a different question. Suppose I ask if you can write a
page and a quarter a day for one year. Do you think you could do
it? Now the task is starting to seem more manageable. We're
breaking down the four-hundred-page book into bite-size pieces.
Even so, I suspect many people would still find the prospect
intimidating. Do you know why? Writing a page and a quarter may
not seem so bad, but you're being asked to look ahead one whole
year. When people start to do look that far ahead, many of them
automatically go into a negative mode. So let me formulate the
idea of writing a book in yet another way. Let me break it down
even more.
Suppose I was to ask you: can you
fill up a page and a quarter with words-not for a year, not for
a month, not even for a week, but just today? Don't look any
further ahead than that. I believe most people would confidently
declare that they could accomplish that. Of course, these would
be the same people who feel totally incapable of writing a whole
book.
If I said the same thing to those
people tomorrow - if I told them, I don't want you to look back,
and I don't want you to look ahead, I just want you to fill up a
page and a quarter this very day - do you think they could do
it?
One day at a time. We've all
heard that phrase. That's what we're doing here. We're breaking
down the time required for a major task into one-day segments,
and we're breaking down the work involved in writing a four
hundred-page book into page-and-a-quarter increments.
Keep this up for one year, and
you'll write the book. Discipline yourself to look neither
forward nor backward, and you can accomplish things you never
thought you could possibly do. And it all begins with those
three words: break it down.
My second technique for defeating
procrastination is also only three words long. The three words
are: write it down. We know how important writing is to goal
setting. The writing you'll do for beating procrastination is
very similar. Instead of focusing on the future, however,
you're now going to be writing about the present just as you
experience it every day. Instead of describing the things you
want to do or the places you want to go, you're going to
describe what you actually do with your time, and you're going
to keep a written record of the places you actually go.
In other words, you're going to
keep a diary of your activities. And you're going to be
surprised by the distractions, detours, and downright wastes of
time you engage in during the course of a day. All of these get
in the way of achieving your goals. For many people, it's almost
like they planned it that way, and maybe at some unconscious
level they did. The great thing about keeping a time diary is
that it brings all this out in the open. It forces you to see
what you're actually doing... and what you're not doing.
The time diary doesn't have to be
anything elaborate. Just buy a little spiral notebook that you
can easily carry in your pocket. When you go to lunch, when you
drive across town, when you go to the dry cleaners, when you
spend some time shooting the breeze at the copying machine, make
a quick note of the time you began the activity and the time it
ends. Try to make this notation as soon as possible; if it's
inconvenient to do it immediately, you can do it later. But you
should make an entry in your time diary at least once every
thirty minutes, and you should keep this up for at least a week.
Break it down. Write it down.
These two techniques are very straightforward. But don't let
that fool you: these are powerful and effective productivity
techniques that allow you put an end to procrastination and help
you get started to achieving your goals.
To
Your Success,
Jim Rohn
