Tim Urban Did a TED Talk in the Past

If you're a procrastinator, Tim Urban nailed it once and for all.

His thesis...well, I won't spoil it.

But a similar thing to what he first claimed about his thesis once actually happened to me. I was a freshman at Dartmouth taking an art history course, and near the end of the term we were given two and a half weeks to write a 10-page paper which was to be a big part of our grade. The paper was due at 4:30 on a Tuesday afternoon, just before the professor left her office for the day.

Those were the days before personal computers. It was normal to write a paper in longhand, with a pencil, on lined paper, and then type it on a typewriter to be turned in. As a completely unnecessary aside, I will mention that I completely visualized a laptop computer one day in 1976 while failing to take notes in an astronomy class, right down to the folding book-like design and just about the exact size that laptops eventually turned out to be; the size gauged, of course, by the needed keyboard. My mental image was just about like a current MacBook Pro, although the real MacBook Pro can do a lot more than I was able to imagine. I believe that ideas of coming things often occur to many people's minds just before the things actually come into existence, like the idea of photography occurred to many people's minds in the 1820s and '30s. My imagined laptop was just what I would have needed to take notes in the astronomy class that was happening at that moment—if you overlook, conveniently, the fact that I could not type.

I had it in mind what I wanted to write, but, the day before the paper was due, I still had not actually written anything. So, I thought—calmly—I'll just write the paper today and type it tomorrow.

That I did not do. 

So, with the panic monster still not present, I realized that I would have to pull an all-nighter. No big deal; my sleep problems at the time included an inordinately long circadian cycle, so I was in the habit of pulling at least one all-nighter a week, sometimes just to get myself back in approximate sync with the World's inconveniently short 24-hour clock. So I settled down on my bed with a yellow pad and three sharp pencils and got to work...

...And woke up the next morning with one paragraph on the yellow pad and seven and a half hours to go till the paper was due.

So I composed the paper on the typewriter. What else? There was nothing else left. Typewriters, if you don't remember them, were basically a write-once medium. You could correct little mistakes with Wite-Out, a brand of correction fluid, which itself was invented, and I kid you not, by Bette Nesmith Graham, the mother of future Monkees guitarist Michael Nesmith, who wrote "Mary, Mary," which was later recorded by Run-D.M.C., a founding member of which, Jam Master Jay, was murdered in 2002. (Down, Instant Gratification Monkee*.) You rolled the paper upwards, painted out the mistake, and retyped over it. This was best for small, infrequent mistakes, and more of a PITA if the mistake happened at the bottom of a page. Typing is not a good medium for on-the-fly rewrites. I always say I would never have been a writer if it wasn't for the Macintosh; I've already done more corrections, rewriting, revising, and reshuffling on this little post than would have been possible on a typewriter.

Anyway, I worked at an intense pitch at the typewriter without food or beer for seven hours and fifteen minutes straight.

Well, not exactly straight; in the middle of page seven, I suddenly typed, in a fit of tension-induced mirth, "Quack quack, I am a duck! Ducks do not have to write art papers...", and then proceeded to type three utterly inane paragraphs from the point of view of the duck, chucking maniacally the while. My dormmates at our end of the hall somehow did not find this funny. In my pressurized delirium I was temporarily serious about turning in the duck version, reasoning that the professor, sick of reading papers, would be delighted by the sudden turn. My roommate Roosevelt Morris patiently talked me off the ledge and got me to re-type page seven and get underway again.

I ran across campus and dropped the finished paper in the slot at about 4:28 p.m. The rumor was that at 4:30 sharp, the professor removed the basket inside the mail slot and replaced it with a wastebasket. Or maybe I'm conflating one professor with another. It was a long time ago.

I got an A on the paper. Really. It was possibly the worst thing that ever happened to me, from an academic-process standpoint.

By the way, Dartmouth traditionally did not give grades of A+; A was the highest grade you could get. The idea was that A sufficiently described excellence, and nothing more was needed. Cf. "Mint+++" on eBay: "Mint" does all the work by itself, and therefore cannot meaningfully be plussed. The only thing higher than A was a College Citation for excellence. I later got an A and a Citation in an English class. I'm not even sure Citations were ever given for mere papers.

Anyway, this turned out to be bad for me because it made me believe, wrongly, that I could perform adequately at the very last, last minute. What I failed to realize was that an essential component of last-minute performance was panic, as a motivator, and, if you suffered from the belief that you could do whatever was needed at the very last minute, then you did not panic.

Tim Urban nails all this much better than I just did.

YouTube is an interesting phenomenon. Yes, it's in the process of being ruined by commercialism. (One of my personal axioms is "commercialism ruins everything.") But it's still functioning, more or less, at this late date. It's a giant morass of drek with the occasional absolute gem buried deep within. Not unlike the process of moving tons of earth and stone using industrial methods to find single little nuggets of gold. Although not efficient—nowhere is there meaningful editing or culling—it's still a true pleasure when you unearth, or are given, one of those gold nuggets.

And this is one. This might strike the more disciplined amongst ye like the duck in my art paper struck Rosey Morris, but it made me smile and LOL (yes, actually OL) the whole way through. (Biggest laugh: the bit about getting to know India.) Big thanks to reader Patrick, who gave us this big, fat nugget this morning. And thanks, of course, to Tim Urban—who can not only say he did a TED Talk once, but that he did a great one. I'm sure I'll watch it four more times, as I usually do when I find these rare bits of true YouTube treasure.

Mike

*You saw what I did there.

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Joe: "Oliver Burkeman's book Four Thousand Weeks and his twice-monthly letter are right on point for these issues. (And his first book, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking, (obviously on a different topic) is one of my all-time nonfiction favorites.)"

Mike replies: I wrote about The Antidote here. Great book, one of my favorites from this year's reading so far.

Neil Partridge: "I have been a very infrequent visitor to TOP over the last five years due to house moves...family events...and not having the time to take any photos (other than snapshots with a phone). Something nudged me this week to return and I encountered this wonderful video about procrastination. I have recently been wondering whether I should ask for a very late diagnosis of something which has caused decades of depression and an inability to focus. I have only watched the first five minutes, literally laughed OL several times, and found the idea of the Instant Gratification Monkey 100% accurate. Thanks for a timely post, and I look forward to browsing five years of missed posts."

J D Ramsey: "The TED talk was brilliant! The scariest part came at the end with the boxes representing the weeks of a 90-year life. Wait, there are so few! How can that be? OMG, there goes my Panic Monster."

Charles Jacobs: "Mr. Urban is close. But the instant gratification monkey and panic monster are the exact same entity. It is a Clark Kent/Superman issue. You never see both at the same time. When the deadline is close, the highest level of instant gratification is completing the job (with the potential superwin of getting high praise for a job well done.)"

Mike replies: Incisive insight! You may be right!

Comments

[John Krumm]

I have a rational decision maker monkey. That is, my instant gratification monkey knows that I need some rational excuse for what I am doing instead of what I should be doing, so he steers me to productive but less necessary tasks, like doing the wash, cleaning the fridge, organizing the spices, or any other number of possibilities. I suppose you could view this as "tacking" in a sailing sense, except you never actually make progress in the intended direction. Productive avoidance.

[xf mj]

I, too, am an unreformed procrastinator. Sooo many (school, and beyond) stories like yours. I'm lucky that my day-to-day job has regular deadlines, delivering stuff roughly two or three days out of the week, where I can occasionally "wing it" and also where my standards for myself are a bit higher than what I actually need to deliver. I recognize too much of myself in your "expect X from me in Y days, I swear" posts, identifying one of the many strategies I deploy ("if I publicly announce that then maybe it forces me to get 'er done").

Every several years, I am free of my regular schedule, though, and it can be debilitating to be in that deadline-free state. So I think you should be gentle on your self-beatings. Use a feather flagellum rather than a spiky leather one, because you've been editor-free or "self-editored" for so many productive blog years. My wish for you is that you appoint (or imagine) a forgiving, and doting, editor that has ways to convince you that you have real deadlines, but also accepts (rightly) that your blog could handle just fine a 33% to 50% hit rate on you delivering things. They'd encourage you to bail now and then, without shame, with your offhand posts that are a perfectly awesome delivery of content we all enjoy too. These side roads often lead us in an unexpected and productive direction.

I see several regular readers that could play that role with you here, and maybe they already do. They seem like wise taskmasters of creative work, would mostly help you be kinder to yourself in the process, and also help you apply slight polish or loose-end scissors to things you've done that you consider rough, those near-done things you see as not ready for prime time. And they could give you slippery slopes to completion, help you redefine tasks you've created that are too Sisyphean for any one writer to reasonably complete.

In saying all this, it is definitely my charcoal pot pointing at your jet-dark kettle. If I'm somehow projecting too many of my features onto you, and missing the mark, my apologies!

[Albert Smith]

Term papers: The thing that I remember was the aversion to taking typing classes in high school in the '70s, because of the less than enlightened ideas of gender roles back then. Indeed 90% of the classes were filled with females. When I got to college, I found out how expensive that lack of ability would be. Expert typists were charging one dollar per page to produce a ready to turn in term paper. Many would type exactly what you gave them long-hand, typos and grammatical errors and all, so you had to do everything right before before handing it over to be typed. So, besides putting off the assignment, you also had to factor in the time to would take to find the service of a typing student that had the time to do their own work and then fulfill that service for those of us that thought "real men don't type", and then come up with the cash on a limited student's finances.

47 years later, I knocked this out with two thumbs on my phone, fixing errors along the way without any need for white out... the future!

[Ken Bennett]

That TED Talk is really good, Mike, thanks for posting it. I was that guy in college, too, writing papers or code a few hours before the deadline.

[Herman Krieger]

Is being a procrastinator any worst than being an anticrastinator?

[MikeK]

I hear you. I had similar experiences with last minute essays at university - and it didn't help that sometimes I got really good marks for those night-before-deadline splurges.

The primary part of my honours year grade would be a 10,000 word dissertation. We had the whole academic year to complete it, so what was the rush? I poked and prodded at an opening for it for quite some time. Eventually I had a blinding opening paragraph. And nothing else, except two days to the deadline.

So two solid days of trying to create something came, and I finished in time, albeit a little short, and somewhat lacking in the primary research that was really required. But never mind, job done.

It was probably arrogance that made me assume I would pass. The hubris of youth. I did not pass.

For all that though, my two days work, it was only 8% off the pass mark. Granted the pass mark wasn't an amazing grade, but still. If only I'd spent two weeks on it instead of two days it might have been alright. Or maybe if I had spent two semesters, as was intended, it might have been a work worthy of my arrogance.

I would dearly like to say I learned my lesson. But, to quote paraphrase Laurence Fishburne's character in The Matrix - there's a difference between knowing the path and walking it.

My parents, in a cleanup of their house, unearthed it last year and gave it back to me. I shredded it, unread, and put it in the garden compost; hopefully something useful will grow from it eventually.

[Robert Roaldi]

His blog 'waitbutwhy.com' is pretty good too.

[Kye Wood]

GREAT POST MIKE.

Were you extra bright as a child? Sadly for me, I was identified as gifted. Which effectively meant that everything academically came to me effortlessly. You'd think, wahoo! But the boredom induced by teachers who were just in it for the paycheck, combined with never needing to study for anything, set me up for inevitable failure.

Because at some point, a person comes across something that will require some effort to master. If you've never had to develop that ability, the ability to persevere, you're pretty well stuffed.

The plodders can persevere. They learn that grinding on, you will eventually prevail.

That lesson took me an extra 20 years to figure out.

Around the same time as that epiphany, I promised myself to always, always do what I say I will. Removing the excuse to procrastinate. If I say I'll do something, I commence doing it immediately. Then it never gets forgotten, or put on a back burner.

Now it's just a habit. But like giving up an addiction, you've got to hit your own personal rock bottom, before you'll trigger the hormone that locks in that commitment to yourself.

[Ronny A Nilsen]

This cartoon is spot on I think. :-)

https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2023/10/22

[Stan Waldhauser]

Speaking of procrastination...
https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2023/10/22

[Bear.]

As the late, great Douglas Adams said, I love deadlines, I love the sound of them whooshing by ...

[Gary Merken]

You say "I believe that ideas of coming things often occur to many people's minds just before the things actually come into existence, like the idea of photography occurred to many people's minds in the 1820s and '30s."

When I was in college, maybe just a couple years after you (1981-85), I had two ideas that occurred to me before they came into existence.

The first was a sort of home for older people. Not a nursing home, where one or two residents were assigned to a small room with not much more than a bed and a side table. But rather a facility where you'd live in your own space. Help would be available if, and to the extent, you needed it. Not long after, the assisted-living industry came into being.

The second idea was being able to pay for gasoline at the pump. It would be so efficient. So you wouldn't have to go inside, wait for someone to come to the register, leave a credit card, go back out and pump the gas, then go back in and retrieve the credit card. Not long after, credit-card readers built into the gas pump came into being.