|
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 amazed 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. This is how you put an end to
procrastination. This is how you get yourself started. This article is excerpted with permission from Jim Rohn’s monthly E-zine. |
