On the path to greatness, there will be 100 overcomings.
I will chronicle my attempts to overcome procrastination. My technique is to start small, really small.
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The human mind hates assigned tasks, even they are assigned for perfectly good reasons. Even if they are assigned by yourself for perfectly good reasons.
I absolutely agree with Nassim Taleb that
Procrastination is the soul rebelling against entrapment.
Somehow I managed to turn reading one of the finest books in human literature, War and Peace, into a chore, and so I put it off for nearly whole summer, only picking it up again in late August. The way I got around this block was a rather odd one, and not at all by design . . .
It started with Heinlein's book Starship Troopers. I hadn't been reading much of anything lately besides blogs. But I started trying to go to bed at a more normal time, and so I started a habit of not looking at computer screens after 9:00. One night, I had insomnia, but I knew going online or playing a game on the computer would make the situation worse, so I went to my book shelve, and grabbed Heinlein's book.
Reading it activated some interest in matters military and the sweep of force in history. It was all tied together in an idle moment, when I flipped through War and Peace and came to Book 14. It had one of those long reflections on history that I had heard about, mostly by literary people bemoaning them taking away from the novel. But I found myself enthralled by it.. I see just from that how the book can be said to "capture the Russian soul." Furthermore, the passage is far removed from what came off on my first reading as tedious elitism in Book 1.
There are two types of people: those who have read War and Peace and those who haven't. I now have the motivation to be someone who will.
