At last, I came across something truly valuable regarding the problem of procrastination—a problem that each of us knows to one degree or another. It can range from mild stress and anxiety to genuine agony at the thought that time is passing while, for some reason, we are not doing what we want or need to do. I am referring to a TED talk by the psychologist Adam Grant on creative people, in which he says that the tendency to procrastinate is a typical trait of theirs.
His central thesis is that the need for more time to think is not a sign of inadequacy, but quite the opposite—an expression of originality and uniqueness. What appears at first glance to be procrastination is, in fact, the creative phase of incubation: the time an idea needs to rest in the unconscious so that something original and valuable can mature.
Therefore, if we want to pass through the incubation phase without inflicting additional stress upon ourselves, it is important to know that there are two kinds of doubt: doubt in ourselves, and doubt in the value of our idea. While the former is destructive to the creative process, the latter is essential for anyone who is not satisfied with anything less than the very best.
As Adam Grant points out, truly original and creative people also have their fears and doubts, but unlike less creative individuals, their greatest fear is not the fear of failure. Their greatest fear is not trying to do what they most deeply want to do. Although the number of their failures and unsuccessful attempts is greater than that of others, the magnitude of their success compensates for this many times over.
I am glad that through the arguments of scientific experiments and research, a branch of psychology that at first glance seems unrelated to the soul and the care for it—organizational psychology—manages to articulate the alchemical formula for transforming the “suffering of procrastination” into the gold of self-creation. This formula is as follows:
- Do not be afraid to doubt your ideas—this is how they develop. But do not allow doubt to affect your sense of inner worth.
- Do not fear that you are late according to deadlines imposed by the mind. Fear living under the pressure of the mind and its limited notions of timing—especially when it comes to something essential.
- Do not fear mistakes. Fear living by other people’s rules of what is right and wrong and never discovering your own truth.
The theme of creativity (which is the theme of this talk) is, at its core, the theme of realizing our individuality—and this will always, to some extent, diverge from social standards and from others’ expectations of us. In Jungian analysis, this ongoing process of revealing one’s unique form is called individuation. It is an expression of inner maturation in close cooperation with the unconscious, and in this sense it does not conform to the mind’s ideas about when and how things should happen.
I am reminded of Adam Grant’s example of Leonardo da Vinci, who worked on his Mona Lisa for a full sixteen years. When it comes to creating such a masterpiece as our own unique Self, time loses its importance even more.
And while our inner bear sleeps its winter sleep, waiting for the right moment to awaken into action, there are still things to be done. One of them is reflection, which helps us see more clearly the fears that sabotage us. Another is choosing to trust the innate wisdom of nature and to believe in ourselves—to loosen control and learn to live in harmony with the natural rhythms of growth in life. But the most important of all is not to be afraid of making mistakes. To experiment, even if those attempts are still far removed from the masterpiece toward which we aspire. The Mona Lisa was not painted in the final month of the sixteenth year after it was begun. The consolidation of the contours of our life projects does not happen all at once; it accumulates over the years.
According to psychological research on the relationship between regret and the factor of time, regret over mistakes made is stronger in the short term. In the long term, however, we regret more intensely the things we could have done but did not. In this sense, we regret the undone things more—the things left undone out of fear of making mistakes.
And this is another insight we gain from Adam Grant’s talk—the curve describing the interaction between time (procrastination) and the quality of creativity. On one end are people who have no problem with procrastination but are not particularly creative. On the other end are people who struggle with procrastination and are creative. Beyond them is a third group, for whom procrastination becomes prolonged or even endless, because they never reach the realization of their ideas.
Thus, the alchemical formula for dealing with procrastination is to arm ourselves with patience and trust, knowing that this is the way to synchronize the conscious mind with the processes of the unconscious. That this is the time required for the interaction between the seed and the soil that nourishes it. And that procrastination is not, in fact, procrastination at all, but an expression of natural processes of inner maturation. Therefore, if things do not unfold as we imagine, it is crucial to withstand the frustration of our need for clarity and quick results. And above all, not to allow the fear of failure and mistakes to bring us down—because this, in the end, will turn out to be our greatest mistake.
Kameliya Hadziyska
