Procrastination is often rooted in a fear of failure and a desire to protect one's self-worth, rather than a simple time management issue. Overcoming it requires a willingness to embrace imperfection and commit fully to a task, akin to Victor Hugo's extreme self-discipline.
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A story about procrastination. In 1830,
Victor Hugo was catastrophically behind
deadline on the Hunchback of Notream.
His publisher had given him only a few
months left. But Hugo was a spectacular
procrastinator, entertaining visitors,
wandering Paris, and finding excuses not
to write. Desperately, he invented a
bizarre discipline system. He gathered
all his normal clothes, gave them to his
servant, and ordered them to be locked
away. He kept only a massive wool shawl
that draped around him like a monk's
robe and he was too embarrassed to leave
his house dressed like a hermit so he
can find himself indoors. He also bought
a huge bottle of ink, a literal symbol
of his siege that would go down over
time. And each morning he sat half naked
at his desk, the cold air biting with
nothing to do but face the manuscript.
From that point on his study became a
cell. According to the legend, Hugo
would draft furiously and then slide the
finished papers under the door where his
servant collected them for safekeeping.
He was so cut off that even small needs
had to be negotiated through the
barrier. Food and fresh paper were
passed back the other way so the routine
never broke. Adele, his wife, said he
had entered his novel as if it were a
prison. It was uh less jail and more
self-imposed monastic cell. And the
result was that in a feverish burst, he
wrote day after day, often for 12 hours
straight, and finished the entire novel
within the lockdown months. By January
15th, 1831, the manuscript was complete.
frantic burst that birthed one of the
great novels of the century. Without
that desperate, almost theatrical
punishment system, the book that
cemented Hugo's legacy might never have
been completed.
Basically, you will be amazed at what
you can complete when you have no other
option. And obviously, the modern world
is the antithesis of this. We have an
infinite number of other things to do,
parties to attend in Paris and virtual
meetings that we can go to even if we're
not actually a participant, we're just
observing them.
I think when you commit yourself fully
to one thing, and it's one of the
reasons why multitasking
in the macro, not even in the micro, is
such a bad idea.
When you commit yourself fully to one
thing, you can really achieve an awful
lot. I certainly know that
it's one of the, if not the biggest
unlocks that I've had ever with anything
that I've ever tried to be good at,
whether it was playing cricket as a kid
or building my business, my first
business, club promoting,
trying to DJ, the modeling thing,
the [ __ ] learning thing, the
podcasting thing, the moving to America,
the [ __ ] 01 visa thing, like every
single big achievement that I'm really
proud of has had it's required me to do
some version of this Hugo jail cell
thing where [ __ ] dude like
I I I bumped into a a girl at breath
work a couple of days ago and she we
haven't seen each other for 2 3 years
and she was like I just wanted to say
like I'm you know I'm really I'm really
happy for how everything's gone for you
and um you know it really seems like
like you've you've got on well cuz I
remember when we were talking about 3
years ago So, and I would be speaking to
you and it would be 11:00 p.m. at night
and you'd just be in your office editing
audio files for hours and hours and
hours and I'd be out with my friends and
I'd be asking what you're up to and I'
you'd just tell me that you were editing
these audio file. Are you you must have
I guess you have people that edit the
audio files now. I like yeah that
thankfully that's not a task that I have
to do anymore, but I had to and so will
you up until the point at which you
don't anymore. But you can't get to the
point where you don't have to do the
stuff without having been the person
that has to do them. I mean, it's
different for Victor because even if he
writes The Hunchback of Notream, it's
not like he gets a ghost writer in to
write his sequel or his next book. But
yeah, that thing in the macro I think
which is just a maybe worth lingering on is
is
you can't multitask. There is no such
thing as multitasking. Like what what
people think about when they think about
multitasking is parallel processing.
There is no such thing as that.
Even switching between tasks has a huge
[ __ ] cost in terms of what you can
achieve. But then doing it in the macro
too, you you miss out on all of the big
context window, a word that everyone
knows now from AI. The bigger the
context window, the more information
it's able to pull in and the more
connections it's able to make. I'm
watching George Mack write his book at
the moment. And the size of the context
window he's got is [ __ ] insane. like
he is all he does is read, write, train,
and sleep. That's it. That's all he's
doing. He's just obsessed. He's com he's
so deep in this process. And it made me
realize if I was trying to compete with
him for writing a book while doing all
of the other [ __ ] that I'm doing,
I'm going to get eaten alive. I'm not
going to get anywhere close to the types
of insights because I'm not playing with
the different ways that all of these
ideas can lock together. And it doesn't
matter what you're trying to achieve. If
you commit yourself to your health,
we're about to go into 2026. You would
be much better off having 90 days or 180
days on a single goal
and then changing it for the next 3/4 or
half of the year than you would be
trying to do all of those things. Well,
it's important to have a balanced life
and you know, yeah, you'll get you'll
burn yourself out if you do too much of
one thing. It's like, no, I fully
disagree. Find something that you can
get obsessed about. But allow it to
climb inside you and wear you like a
[ __ ] parasite. And then once you are
done with that thing, you will make more
prog. Here's a best example. You will
make more progress in 6 months of
dedicated training than in 2 years of
halfin halfout training. And you will
learn more and you will be spending all
of your time [ __ ] trolling forums and
watching videos and doing all the rest
of it. And that is the unlock. There's
another insight about procrastination.
Like I've been thinking a lot about
procrastination this year.
Procrastination, as far as I can see, is
often about fear. We like to pretend
procrastination is a time management
problem, but regularly it isn't. It's uh
more like a self-p protection strategy
wearing a Fitbit.
When we delay doing the thing we know we
should do, we're sometimes not wrestling
with our schedule.
We're wrestling with our selfworth. And
the logic goes a bit like this. If I try
and fail, everyone will see. So if I
never try at all, the failure is private
and deniable and safe. This is the
psychological slight of hand at the
heart of much of procrastination. As far
as I can see, it feels like avoidance,
but it functions like armor. You
convince yourself the task is scary or
the conditions aren't perfect or you
need to feel ready first,
but really you're just terrified that
doing your best might not be good enough,
enough,
so you don't do anything. On the
surface, procrastination looks like
laziness, but underneath it's fear
wearing a pajama top. And the tragedy is
how elegant the trap is. Number one, you
procrastinate because you don't want to
look bad. Number two, this fear stops
you from doing things. Number three, you
are afraid of failure. But by
procrastinating, you guarantee failure.
You inoculate yourself from failure publicly
publicly
by certifying your failure privately.
You get to say, "Well, I could have done
it if I'd actually tried." This is the
safety blanket. It's an emotional
insurance policy, the psychological
loophole that allows you to stay intact
while your dreams slowly starve. It's
weirdly one of the few behaviors where
we congratulate ourselves for executing
a strategy that literally delivers the
opposite of what we want. It's like um a
man who refuses to play the game unless
he can guarantee victory, not realizing
that refusing to play is the only
guaranteed loss.
Every time you hide in procrastination,
you choose the fake safety of
hypothetical excellence over the real
messy human business of trying and
failing and trying again. You choose the
version of you who could have done great
things over the version of you who
actually might. And this is the
uncomfortable truth. Procrastination is
often not about indecision. It's a
decision to live in theory rather than
in practice. Um once you see it clearly,
the whole game changes. The question
stops being why can't I get started and
becomes what am I so afraid will be true
about me if I actually try?
That's a much harder question, which is
why most people never ask it. They just
carry on congratulating themselves for
their caution while quietly guaranteeing
the outcome that they fear most. The
antidote isn't motivation. Motivation
comes and goes. The antidote is surrender.
surrender.
You lower the stakes. You let yourself
look foolish. You accept the
embarrassment of being a beginner, the
awkwardness of doing something badly,
the exposure of your real effort being
put on the line. Because once you remove
the need to look good, the need to start
becomes easy. It turns out that the
hardest part of any meaningful work is
not so much the work itself. It's the
identity shift that you must endure from
someone who protects their image
to someone who risks it. If you can do
that once and procrastination stops
being a dragon, instead it becomes what
it always was, which is a flimsy
emotional habit built to protect a
version of you
that was never meant to survive adulthood.
adulthood.
You don't need courage to begin. You
just need the willingness to be seen beginning.
beginning.
Procrastination is a massive problem and
there's practical limitations usually
two as far as I can see. The first one
you don't know what to do. Uh you have
this big project. You don't write a
book. You write a sentence or you open a
word document or you do research. Don't
know what to do. Relatively easy
solution. What is the next physical
action? I need to write a book. Okay.
Well, where are you? I'm in bed. Okay.
Well, I [ __ ] throw the covers off
you. Then you need to get one leg out of
bed, then another leg out of bed. Then
you need to stand up. Then you need to
go to the bathroom. Then you need to put
your pants on. Then you need to go into
the living room. Then you need to get
your laptop out. Like that is the next
physical action. Most people can go one
more step but can't run a marathon in a
single go. The same thing is true.
Second big practical reason is you know
what to do but you don't know how to do
it. And that with the world of chat GBT
and Google and YouTube and friends that
you can ring and experts and coaches is
pretty easy to fix. Like
I don't know what to do. Break it down
to next physical action. I don't know. I
know what to do but I don't know how to
do it.
Ask somebody including a [ __ ] AI
agent. Uh but the big bit I think when
asking why is it that I'm scared of even
getting to that stage? Why do I not want
to answer that question myself
is because of this it's this identity
problem. It's the fact that you would
rather assure your failure privately
inoculate yourself from failure publicly
by assuring your failure privately. And
um yeah, there is this bit of you that
it's a kind of a coward in a way. Uh it
is. Oh, not a coward. That sounds too
mean. Look at me. Look at how gentle and
uh [ __ ] soft signal of effectiveness
I'm trying to be here.
It It is It is maybe cowardly, but it's understandable.
understandable.
that version of you, that bit of you
that needs protecting
doesn't actually need as much protection
as you probably think. It's quite a
juvenile version of you. It's it's
immature. It's nent.
And uh it
it
what it doesn't want is to look silly.
It doesn't want to be judged. uh it
doesn't want its selfworth to be damaged
because it's failed at something. It
doesn't want other people to think less
of it because it's not performed in the
manner that it should have done. And um
this is one of the ruthless things about
imposter syndrome and especially as you
progress, imposter syndrome doesn't
necessarily go away that quickly because
like every higher rung on the ladder
that you climb just gives you further to
fall. Oh my god, look at what my minimum
level of output has to be now. And this
means that the procrastination thing, if
you're not careful, if you don't turn
around and face or pick up that sort of
part of you that's worried about being
seen, that's worried about failing,
that's scared about being judged from
if you don't turn around and deal with
that, he will or she will follow behind
you. And every time that you try to sort
of take a step back to run at something,
you'll step on them and they'll yelp and
they'll go, "Oh no, what if we what if
we mess up?"
And I don't think that that's a good
situation to be in. And you know the
final point is do you know
about what the people
do you know what the tasks that you
didn't go for made other people think
about you?
Nothing. They don't think anything about
you because you didn't try. So the very
thing that you are worried of happening
which is becoming irrelevant and people
not caring
is going to happen if you don't go for
it. And I would much sooner maybe maybe
it's a maturity thing. It's probably
going to get easier as you get older
because people realize as they age that
failure isn't that big of a deal. And
that somebody who tries and and who try,
somebody who tries, regardless of
whether or not they succeed or fail,
somebody who gives it a crack is worthy
of respect way more than somebody who
has this sort of sardonic distanced non-
earnest insincere like cutting cool. I
didn't need to do that, man. Like I
didn't really tried anything, man. All
right. Well, they're not the people that
I want to hang around with and they're
not the people that my friends want to
hang around with either. So find your
tribe. You can be around people who have
the willingness to be seen beginning or
the people who would rather look cool
for fear of failing publicly at
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Congratulations for making it to the end
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