Resistance & Procrastination–Creative Muggers
Aaaaagh! Gasp! Cough! Choke!
Procrastination has its hands about my throat once again! Peeling back its fingers one by one, I am reminded that two years ago, just about this time, I wrote another post on procrastination. In that post, I championed procrastination as a way of eliminating those things that are not worth doing.
However, this time procrastination has gotten such a firm grip on me that I am turning blue with all the unwritten words of blog posts and book projects. Time to let me—and my creativity—breathe.
Just today, I read a quote that said, “Perfection is just another definition for procrastination.” As I loosen procrastination’s determined fingers, I manage to nod my head in agreement. After all, I want my posts to be perfectly written, perfectly grammatical, perfectly meaningful and perfectly…well, you get the picture. Writing a perfect essay on some meaningful topic can be both fun and daunting. So I procrastinate.
And then there is the issue that Steven Pressfield talks about in his book, “The War of Art”(more on that in future posts)—resistance.
Resistance teams up with procrastination, tripping us up or distracting us, while procrastination pounces on us and holds us immobile.
Resistance distracts us when we enter the studio with the sudden urge to clean up, or check email, or call a friend. Or he sticks his big foot out every time we head to our studios or workspaces, keeping us from even entering, from even getting close to working. And the deadly thing about how the two work together is that the longer we allow resistance to make us procrastinate, the less resistance has to work on us to get us to do it. It’s kind of like that law of inertia we learned in high school science—that it takes more energy to get a body moving than it does to keep that body moving.
There is a secret there…if we can get ourselves moving on our creative projects, resistance and procrastination will have a bigger fight on their hands. They will have to work harder to get us to stop. And we’ll have to work less (hopefully) to keep going.
That is the catch, though. We have to keep going. Today, tomorrow, the next day. Because it is easier to win that battle with resistance on the first day than it is after a week or two or three of not doing our creative work.
So, hey. I’ve pried procrastination’s hands from around my throat. I’ve broken the resistance spell—for today. And if I keep writing on my other projects today, maybe I will work up enough momentum that come tomorrow, resistance and procrastination will only get in a swing or two before they are trampled under my feet as I head for my studio.
And no, I won’t give them a hand up.