Moment 177: You're NOT Lazy! This Is The REAL Reason You Procrastinate: The Performance Doctor

0:03I get a lot of messages from people saying, Steve, I'm procrastinating so much. How do you not procrastinate? and I always look at that and say look I'm not the guy to tell you how to do that because procrastination in my mind is a bit of a tool um as you said there's different types of procrastination that I notice myself doing one of them is when I get stuck on something and I find myself picking up my phone as if I'm a man possessed I literally what I'll do is I'll be in the middle of work and then the next thing I'm on Instagram and I'm like how did that happen And oh, yeah, because the part in this piece of work you got to is psychologically difficult for some reason.

0:38I don't feel prepared or whatever. And then the other thing I notice myself procrastinating on is just when I'm thinking through something, I'll end up just walking around the house. I'll end up cleaning, doing the dishes or whatever, and then coming back to the piece of work later. But I would say that I'm definitely a procrastinator. That's so interesting. And I think, let's be clear, I'm not encouraging people to procrastinate more. That's not the goal here. The goal is just to normalize procrastination and say it's a natural part of the creative process. Everybody does it sometimes. And even though you expect it to be counterproductive, in certain situations, it can actually lead you to better ideas.

1:13And I think there's maybe a myth worth busting here. Research led by Fuchsia Sirwa has shown that we don't procrastinate for the reasons we think we do. So a lot of people think I'm being lazy. I'm avoiding effort. What's wrong with me? Why don't I want to work hard? But it turns out it's not hard work that you're avoiding when you procrastinate. It's negative emotions, unpleasant feelings. You are avoiding a set of tasks that makes you feel frustrated, confused, bored, anxious. A lot of procrastination is driven by fear. I don't know if I can do this. I'm not sure if I'm up to the challenge. And so I put it off.

1:50And I think one of the best ways to manage that is to ask, what are the tasks that you consistently procrastinate on? What negative emotions are they stirring up? And then how do you change those? What do you procrastinate on? I procrastinate a lot on editing, actually, and revising. I love rough drafting. It feels very creative for me. It's fun to figure out what does the best evidence say? How do I tell the story that brings the evidence to life? And then the process of tinkering to get each sentence just right, it bores me. And so I put it off. And I had to figure out how do I make that more interesting in order to stop procrastinating altogether on it.

2:28And how did you do that? Well, one of the things I did was, one of my goals in my recent writing was to try to get less abstract and more concrete. And so what I started doing was I started rewriting paragraphs in the voices of my favorite fiction authors, which was such a fun experiment. So how would Stephen King write this paragraph? How would Maggie Smith, an amazing poet, how would she write these sentences? And that made it a creative exercise again. As I was doing my research ahead of this conversation, I was watching your TED talk. And one of the things that really stood out to me in your TED talk was when you start talking about internet browsers.

3:07I immediately checked which browser I was using and I was using Google Chrome. There you go. But you make the case that people who you can tell someone's, I guess, creativity. I'm paraphrasing. I'm putting words in your mouth here by which internet browser they use. And there was a really important message in there for me. So can you tell me about that? exactly what the findings can tell us. Yeah, I was sitting at a conference that helped to organize and this researcher, Michael Hausman, is giving a presentation. He's got data from 50 ,000 people and he knows they're filling out a survey and then he's tracking their job performance.

3:44Huge range of jobs. And he knows what web browser they're on. It's one of the automatically collected data points. And he's like, I wonder if there's anything there. And he finds that he can predict your job performance and also your likelihood of staying in your job from which web browser you're using. And this is so weird. And he stood up and he said, I don't know what's going on here, but it turns out that Chrome and Firefox users are on average better performers and they stick around longer than if you're using Safari or Internet Explorer. And immediately I had a hunch. I'd been studying initiative and proactivity and being an original thinker.

4:27And what hit me was Internet Explorer and Safari are the defaults. They came pre-installed on your phone or your computer. In order to get Chrome or Firefox, you had to question the default and say, huh, I wonder if there's a better browser and take a little bit of initiative. And so I started proposing this and people are like, great. So if I download a better browser, I'm going to be better at my job. No, no, it's not about the browser. It's about the resourcefulness to say you want to be the kind of person who questions the default and asks if there's a better way. And I think what happens is in people's jobs, I've gone on to study this with some colleagues, the kind of person who upgrades their browser is also the kind of person who asks, is there a more creative way to do my job?

5:12Can I reinvent the way that we work together? And that ultimately not only makes you better at your job, it also helps you create a job that you want to stay in. It makes sense. and so on an ongoing basis i'm only going to hire people who have mozilla firefox or chrome installed on their browser it should be an interview question i don't know if i would go that far no you said it so i think i think it's it's a fun question to say okay how did you like let's let's not limit it to the browser but talk to me about uh how you've challenged the status quo in the past yeah it's a good really good question um when we think about originals, who are the sort of landmark originals of our time in your mind?

5:57What domain do we want to talk about? Are we talking tech and business? Tech and business. Let's go for that. I mean, it's hard not to put Elon Musk on that list. You can love him or hate him. But when it comes to, you know, dreaming up the vision and also taking the initiative then to try to make us a, you know, a multi-planetary species with SpaceX and build reusable rockets, which, you know, NASA had never really thought to do, you know, moving us into an all electric car future. You know, I think there are a lot of things to complain about with Elon's leadership and decision making and the way he communicates on the platform formerly known as Twitter.

6:33But I think he's an original, no doubt about it. How does he fit your profile of an original? I think he fits first and foremost because he challenges the status quo would be the beginning. And then secondly, I think he's relentless in trying to make his vision a reality, which is, I think, something that's driving some of his former fans crazy right now. Some people might say, well, he was like a child prodigy or he was a child genius. So that's why he's so great. Do you agree with that statement or do you dispute it? I think it's hard to say in his case. I think my job as a social scientist is to ask, what does the evidence tell us about child prodigies?

7:13And it turns out we overestimate them in a lot of cases because once something comes naturally to you, you often have a hard time thinking about it in original ways. So you see kids, for example, who can play a Mozart sonata at age four, and they drill over and over again, and they're amazingly fast learners. And practice does make perfect, but it doesn't make new. They don't learn how to write their own original scores. They don't get experienced with failure. with trial and error. And so they don't take enough risk to figure out how do I invent something that's never existed before. That's, you know, that's not true in every case, but it is empirically true that most child prodigies do not become known as adult geniuses.

7:58And I think that's in part because they don't learn to stretch their creative muscles. Because they're overwhelmingly talented, so they don't need to put in the hard graft that others do, and they don't need to fight for new information in the same way that others do? In some cases, they get rewarded over and over again for basically just mastering the way everyone else has always done it. And so they don't learn to break free from the mold. These adult geniuses then, what is it that they have that child prodigies don't? Well, a lot of it is what I've come to think of as character skills, which is a set of capabilities to put your principles into practice.

8:37So they're often people with hidden potential. They may not be naturals at first. They could be underdogs or late bloomers or slow learners, but they are obsessive about making themselves uncomfortable, saying, if I only play to my strengths, then I'm never stretching myself and I'm not taking on enough new challenges. There's a bunch of research to suggest they're like sponges. They're soaking up lots of information and then trying to filter what's helpful in and then kind rule out what's harmful. And they're what I've come to think of as imperfectionists, which is they're really careful and disciplined about saying, when is it important to aim for the best?

9:20And when is it okay to look for good enough? Perfectionism is a topic people talk about a lot. And I think everybody, it seems to me that everybody wants to be considered a perfectionist as if being a perfectionist is better. Because what does that say about my my values it means that i really care about things being great it therefore means by way of that that i think i'm i produce great things and saying you're a perfectionist is almost like saying i make great work um but you're saying that being there are some there are often times where it's better to be an imperfectionist that the judgment of knowing when something is good enough yeah yeah i think you're onto something here so you know when when you have to answer that annoying job interview question, what's your greatest weakness?

10:00It's everyone's favorite answer. I'm too much of a perfectionist. It's like Michael Scott from the American office. Like, I have weaknesses as a leader. I work too hard and I care too much. And yeah, people do think that perfectionism is, you know, ultimately more of an asset than a liability. And that's why they try to get away with that in the weakness question. But the evidence tells a really different story. Research led by Tom Curran here in the UK, shows that perfectionism is not all it's cracked up to be. It's a risk factor for burnout. It also, if you look at the best evidence available, perfectionists do get better grades in school, but they don't actually perform any better in their jobs.

10:41Why? I think the jury's still out, but my hunch based on the evidence that's been gathered so far is that perfectionists are good at school because they know exactly what's gonna be on the test. And so they can cram and memorize until they're prepared to ace the material. The real world is much more ambiguous. You don't know exactly what's going to show up in your performance review. It's not entirely clear what work is going to be valued. And perfectionists are terrified of failure. They don't want any flaws. They don't want any defects. They want to avoid every mistake. And so they don't take enough risks.

11:18They focus very narrowly on the things they know they can excel at. and they don't end up growing and evolving and improving enough.