Taylor Pearson really\u00a0has become a fine essayist. This one on procrastination was packed with wisdom:<\/p>\n
\n\n“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 can\u00e2 – the so-called “iron prescription” – I think that really works.” Charlie Munger<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
In his letter to shareholders back in 2016, Jeff Bezos gave the best advice I\u2019ve ever heard on how to stop procrastinating:<\/p>\n
\n\u201cMost 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\u2019re probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you\u2019re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
What Bezos is saying is that you should think like a C student. When you\u2019re about 70% sure, you take a guess and see what happens.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
…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.<\/p>\n
…Courage is the Cure for Procrastination<\/p>\n
In his account of an expedition into the Himalayas in the 1930\u2019s, explorer William Hutchison Murray put it this way:<\/p>\n
\n\u201c\u2026 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\u200a\u2014\u200abooked 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.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n
William Hutchinson Murray, The Scottish Himalayan Expedition (1951)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n