“Don’t do today what you can do tomorrow.” How does this phrase make you feel? Comfortable? Guilty, maybe? Perhaps this phrase is nothing more than a form of denial – a way of putting ourselves at ease with having written off our “here and now” experience; our life in the present moment.
It seems as if a vast majority of us waste time relying on our future selves – a person who is yet to exist; a
figment of our creative, but often irrational, imagination. We think, “Ah, I’m sure the person I’ll be tomorrow will have the time to get things done then.” However, I ask, are we really
thinking when we think that? Or, is it that we are thinking but not in the most useful manner?
Yesterday a professor of mine made an interesting comment about the subject of procrastination. He said, “I’ve come to believe procrastination is not so much about laziness as it is about our own fear of failure.” I find this interesting and so eerily true for many situations; maybe not all, however.
Failure. Just reading that word might have elicited some kind of fear in your mind. Maybe you’re afraid of something you’ve put off doing – your homework, or writing a letter to your best friend. Maybe you worry that homework assignment you must do won’t be like you would like it to be when you complete it – or that your finished product won’t be the best work you can do. Maybe this means
failure. The same goes for writing that letter to your best friend. You put it off a few days or weeks because you are afraid you will not know what to say, or how to say it just right. So, to cope, you tell yourself that nice old saying that was mentioned earlier, “Don’t do today what you can do tomorrow,” or, even, perhaps you recite the words, “Out of sight, out of mind,” in your mind. But, is it ever
really gone?
Maybe nobody or nothing is perfect. It depends on your take on reality. Whatever the case, we must remember to
think and to do so
rationally. If we never allow ourselves to make mistakes and to accept them as useful tools, we are truly doing ourselves a disservice by limiting our capacity to grow in our knowledge, intellect, and potential.
In the book, “How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci,” it mentions a little about children and curiosity. It says people can learn many things from simply observing children – how they think, how they learn, and how they ask the simple questions about life. This insatiable curiosity, the author says, contributes to genius like that of Leonardo – the so-called greatest genius of all-time. He (the author) noted, “Be willing to make lots of mistakes. Bambinos [when learning language] do not worry about looking cool or instantly achieving perfect pronunciation or grammar; they just dive in and speak” (Gelb, 1998, p. 72).
In the end, after having read this blog, you are probably not going to have taken every shred of idea or advice and actually implimented it in your life. Why? Perhaps because it is just so darn easy to procrastinate; and again, who's perfect? But by the close of this post, if anything, maybe you will have at least acknowledged the power a fear of failure can exude.
Written by Holly H.
