The most important thing to know about procrastination is that it’s an avoidance tactic.
We all have it, it is a matter of degrees. Successful people, successful students avoid what they have to do, in this case doing their homework, less of the time. But just know: every time the idea of doing comes up: the idea of avoidance comes up too.
What is the difference between a student who chooses doing their homework and a student who chooses to do avoidance?
The difference is not so much in the moment, but in the students approach to life and studying in general.
Context is decisive, goes the saying.
Context is the why of an activity.
Context answers the ‘Why would you do that? Why do you want it? To what end would you do it? What’s in it for you?’ questions
- A good student has answered that question differently from the avoiding student.
- A good student could have picked an goal, like getting educated, getting good grades to get into a good college, getting good grades to please my mother, learning to work my brain, etc.
A bad student considers learning useless, a waste of time, something that was imposed on them. They, potentially, consider liberty higher: doing what they want to do when they want to do it, and not doing what they don’t want to do… when they don’t want to do it. They consider liberty more important than freedom, even though it is freedom what they ultimately crave. The freedom to be themselves.
Nietzsche, a famous German philosopher, called that behavior ‘infantile will to power’… which means, that when you do avoidance tactic, you are acting like a belligerent young child, maybe even a baby, crying for the bottle.
One of the most valued capacities for a human is maturity. Behaving and using your adult capacities… choosing, saying no, the ability to be with, and be effective in spite of negative emotions, pain, or bad thoughts.
And another invaluable capacity of an adult is to choose the context carefully…
…choose it to help you through the difficulties of dealing with unpleasant feelings, memories, and emotions, successfully, so you move forward in life.
The biological age of a person can be 70, but their behavior can alternate between 5 years old and 15 years old: I know, I have clients like that.
Band-aid type solutions like the many (too many) articles teach are just that: band-aids.
Tricks don’t make a difference… what makes a difference is working on your why… working on your context, working on your clarity of what you really want… working on the mistaken idea that you can get away in life with doing nothing.
