The other day, I posted a little about procrastination, especially wrt two late papers. I had read a very helpful and interesting book about procrastination that discussed motivations for and causes of procrastination, such as failure-based fear and success-based fear, among other motivations and causes. I had never thought of those things as causing procrastination. Especially fear of success - who'd be afraid of success? Don't we all want success, with no reservations whatsoever? That's kind of like one of those untrue common truths, e.g., Everybody loves seeing every single one of their relatives at the holidays, preferably all at once. All babies are cute and all brides are beautiful. All priests are celibate and none are pervs. Thing is, you aren't aware that you're afraid of success.
The fear of success thing makes sense bc what happens after success? Success is usually followed by yet another challenge. Unless you die or retire from life or decide to stop striving for anything. It's always easier to just stay put, even if that's a dissatisfactory strategy in the long run. So, yeah, I can definitely see that as a factor after all.
Fear of failure seems like a more natural and obvious cause of procrastination. And that was probably the more more common cause of my procrastination in the past. Unfortunately, I think it's played a role in my procrastination wrt these papers. Fear that they'd really suck, so much that they'd ruin any chance of getting into grad school. (I'm not saying this fear made sense.) I also have the inkling that fear of success may have played a part, too. Fear that they'd help me get in and then I'd have to keep proving myself over and over again throughout grad school and then over and over again throughout my career and gaaaah! until retirement. (Again, I am so not saying these fears made sense.) A sort of commingling of opposing fears. Hmmmm. It's kind of a bummer to see old bad habits rearing their ugly heads again. But it happened and I guess the best thing I can do is deal with the bad habit resurfacing, see what I can arrange wrt these papers, try not to beat myself up too much about it and move on.
I tend to be kind of hard on myself wrt this personal development kind of stuff. I think that I should recognize failings, figure them out/find a rationale for them, fix them and move on, all within a half-hour or so. After all, what am I, stupid? See? I'm even hard on myself wrt how I'm hard on myself. I forget that, even though there's a rational reason for why I'm doing/thinking some negative practice/thought, there's also psychological or emotional factors at work, too. And sneaky psychological and emotional factors at that. All subconscious and whatnot. Damn that Freud!
Well, peeps, back to working on the current course's paper/breaking the late habit.
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