John Butler is a octogenarian spiritual master. He is also an ASMR superstar because of his amazing voice. My wife and I listen to him at bedtime, partly for the wisdom, partly for soporific power of his voice.
His YouTube channel is full of delights. Treat yourselves.
There is a well known bias related to this called the Einstellung effect, a psychological phenomenon characterized by a fixation on the first solution to a problem discovered at the expense of being able to find potentially better solutions.
This is aggravated by multitasking. William Dershowitz on Multitasking:
“Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube.
I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn’t turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing
Taylor Pearson really has become a fine essayist. This one on procrastination was packed with wisdom:
“Whenever you feel that some situation or some person is ruining your life, it is actually you who are ruining your life… feeling like a victim is a perfectly disastrous way to go through life. If you just take the attitude that however bad it is in any way, it’s always your fault and you just fix it as best you canâ – the so-called “iron prescription” – I think that really works.” Charlie Munger
In his letter to shareholders back in 2016, Jeff Bezos gave the best advice I’ve ever heard on how to stop procrastinating:
“Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.”
What Bezos is saying is that you should think like a C student. When you’re about 70% sure, you take a guess and see what happens.
Colin Powell has a similar rule for how to stop procrastinating. You should make a decision when you have between 40% and 70% of the possible information. He believes that with less than that, you are bound to make a wrong decision.
However, if you keep looking for information beyond 70%, then by the time you make the decision, it will be so late that you will have missed the opportunity.
…Use the formula P=40 to 70, in which P stands for the probability of success and the numbers indicate the percentage of information acquired…Once the information is in the 40 to 70 range, go with your gut.
…Courage is the Cure for Procrastination
In his account of an expedition into the Himalayas in the 1930’s, explorer William Hutchison Murray put it this way:
“… but when I said that nothing had been done I erred in one important matter. We had definitely committed ourselves and were halfway out of our ruts. We had put down our passage money — booked a sailing to Bombay. This may sound too simple, but is great in consequence. Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too.”
William Hutchinson Murray, The Scottish Himalayan Expedition (1951)