最近在读《拖延心理学》，恰好就看到了Tim Urban的那次TED演讲，你有拖延症么？
觉得讲的相当好，不论是从演讲技巧还是话题分析上都很精彩。演讲讲的好的人很容易成为我羡慕的对象，所以看完之后就想把稿子扒下来。本来准备白天上班抽时间弄的，谁知道领导突然安排任务，还略纠结，计划被打乱了。
但是既然是想做的事，就要努力去做啊～晚上回家之后就开始用小手机扒讲稿。中间实在是有好几次想要放弃的念头，但是想想咱的计划，想看看自己究竟能不能挺过这一阶段，于是乎，咬牙继续。
终于在敲完最后两个词的时候长舒一口气。收获还是不小的，至少这种方法拯救了我这个“看过就忘星人”，印象很深，尤其是拖延症那个英语单词，procrastination，估计一时半会忘不了了。
ok，就说这么多，如果各位看官有兴趣看这篇稿子，那么请调整好你的心态，忽略文中可能出现的大小写、标点符号以及单复数混乱吧。
正文如下：
So in college, I was a goverment major, which means I had to write a lot of papers. Now when a normal student writes a parer, they might spread the work out a little like this.
So you know, you get started maybe a little slowly, but you get enough done in the first week that, with some heavier days later on, everything gets done, things stay civil. And I would want to do that like that. That would be a plan. I would have it all ready to go, but then, actually, the paper would come along, and then I would kind of do this.
And that would happen every single paper. But then came my 90-page senior thesis, a paper you're supposed to spend a year on. And I knew for a paper like that, my normal work flow was not an option. It was way too big a project. So I planned things out, and I decided I kind of had to go something like this.
This is how the year would go. So i'd start off light, and I bump it up in the middle months, and then at the end, I would kick it up into high gear, just like a little staircase. How hard could it be to walk up the stairs. No big deal, right?
But then, the funniest thing happened.
Those first few months? They came and went, and I couldn't quite do stuff. So we had an awesome new revised plan.
And then, then those middle months actually went by, and I didn't really write words. And so we were here.
And then two months turned into one month, which turned into two weeks. And one day I woke up, with three days until the deadline, still not having written a word,
and so I did the only thing I could: I wrote 90 pages over 72 hours, pulling not one but two all-nighters--humans are not supposed to pull two all-nighters--sprinted across the campus, dove in slow motion,and got in just at the deadline. I thought that was the end of everything.
But a week later I got a call, and it's the school. And they say, "is this Tim Urban?" And I say, "yeah." And they say,"we need to talk about your thesis." I say, "okay." And they say, "it's the best one we've ever seen."
That did not happen. It was a very very bad thesis. I just wanted to enjoy that one moment when all of you thought "this guy is amazing." No, no, it was very very bad.
Anyway, today I am a writer-blogger guy. I write the blog wait and why. And a couple of years ago, I decided to write about procrastination. My behavior has always perplexed the non-procrastinators around me, and I wanted to explain to the non-procrastinators of the world, what goes on in the heads of procrastinators, and why we are the way we are.
Now I had a hypothesis, that the brains of procrastinators were actually different than the brains of other people. And to test this, I found an MRI lab that actually let me scan both my brain and the brain of a proven non-procrastinator, and I could compare them. I actually brought them here to show you today. I want you to take a look carefully to see if you can notice a difference. I know that if you're not a trained brain expert, but just take a look, ok?
So here is the brain of a non-procrastinator.
Now, here's my brain.
There is a difference. Both brains have a rational decision-maker in them, but the procrastinator's brain also has an instant gratification monkey. Now what does this mean for the procrastinator? Well, it means everything is fine until this happen.
So the rational decision-maker will make the rational decisions to do something productive, but the monkey doesn't like the plan. So actually he takes the wheel, and he says, "actually ,let's read the entire Wikipedia page of the XXX scandal, because I just remembered that that happened. Then we will go over the fridge to see if there's anything me win there since 10min ago. After that, we're going to go on YouTube spiral that starts with videos of Richard Feynman talking about magnets and ends much much later with us watching interviews with Justin bieber's mom.
"All of that is going to take a while, so we're not going to really have room on the schedule for any work today. Sorry!"
Now, what is going on here?
This instant gratification monkey doesn't seem like a guy you want behind the wheel. He lives entirely in the present moment. He has no memory of the past, no knowledge of the future, and he only cares about two things: easy and fun. Now in the animal world, that works fine. If you're a dog and you spend your whole life doing nothing other than easy and fun things, you're huge success. And to the monkey, humans are just another animal species. You have to keep well-slept, well-fed and propagating into the next generation, which in tribal times might worked okay. But, if you haven't noticed, now we're not in tribal times. We're Oman advanced civilization, and theme key does not know what that is. Which is why we have another guy in our brain, the rational decision-maker, who gives us the ability to do things no other animal can do. We can visualize the future. We can see the big picture. We can make long-term plans. And he wants to take all of that into account. And he wants just have us do whatever makes sense to be doing right now. Now sometimes it makes sense to be doing things that are easy and fun, like when you're having diner or going to bed or enjoying well-earned leisure time. That's why there is an overlap. Sometimes they agree. But other time, it makes much more sense to be doing things that are harder and less pleasant, for the sake of big picture. And that's when we have a conflict.
And for the procrastinator, that conflict tends to end a certain way everytime, leaving him spending a lot of time in this orange zone, an easy and fun place that's entirely out of the make sense circle. I call it the dark playground.
Now, the dark playground is a place that all of you procrastinators out there know very well. It's where leisure activities happen at times when leisure activities are not supposed to be happening. The fun you have in the dark playground for isn't actually fun, because it's completely unearned, and the air is filled with guilt, dread, anxiety, self-hatred--all of those good for procrastinator feelings.
And the question is, in this situation, with the monkey behind the wheel, how does the procrastinator ever get himself over here to this blue zone, a less pleasant place, but where really important things happen?
Well, turns out the procrastinator has a guardian angel, someone who is always looking down on him and watching over home in his darkest moments--someone called the panic monster.
Now, the panic monster is dormant most of the time, but he suddenly wakes up anytime a deadline gets too close or there's danger of public embarrassment, a career disaster or some other scary consequence. And importantly, he is the only thing the monkey is terrified of.
Now, he became very relevant in my life pretty recently, because people of TED reached out to me about six months ago and invited me to do a TED talk. Now, of course, I said yes. It's always been a dream of my to have done a TED talk in the past. But in the middle of all this excitement, the rational decision-maker seemed to have something else on his mind. He was saying, " are we clear on what we just accepted? Do we get what is going to be happening one day in the future? We need to sit down and work on this right now." And the monkey said, " totally agreed, but let's just open the google earth and zoom in to the bottom of India, like 200 feet above the ground, and scroll up two and a half hours till we get to the top of the country, so we can get a better feel for India." So that's what we did that day. And six months turned into four and then two and then one, the people of TED decided to release the speakers. And I opened up the website, and there was my face staring right back at me. And guess who woke up?
So the panic monster starts losing his mind, and a few seconds later, the whole system is in mayhem. And the monkey, remember, he is terrified of the panic monster, boom, he is up to the tree. And finally, the rational decision-maker can take the wheel and I can start working on the talk.
Now, the panic monster explains all kinds of pretty insane procrastinator behavior, like how someone like me could spend two weeks unable to start the opening sentence of a paper, and then miraculously find the unbelievable work ethic to stay up all night and write 8 pages.
And this entire situation, with the three characters--this is the procrastinator's system. It's not pretty, but in the end, it works. And this is what I decided to write about on the blog just a couple of years ago. When I did, I was amazed by the response. Literally thousands of emails came in, from all different kinds of people from all over the world, doing all different kinds of things. There are people who were nurses, bankers, painters, engineers and lots and lots of PhD students. And they were all writing, saying the same thing: "I have this problem too!" But what struck me was the comtract between the light tone of the post and the heaviness of these emails. These people were writing with intense frustration about what procrastination had done to their lives, about what this monkey had done to them. And I thought about this. Well, if the procrastinator's system works, then what's going on? Why are all of these people in such a dark place?
Well it turns out that there's two procrastination. Everything I've talked today, the examples I've given, they all have deadlines. And when there is deadlines, the effects of procrastination are contained to the short term because the panic monster gets involved. But there's a second kind of procrastination that happens is situations when there is no deadline. So if you want wanted a career where you're a self-starter--something in the arts, something entrepreneurial--there's no deadline on those things at first, because nothing is happening at first, not until you've gone out and done the hard work to get some momentum, to get things going. There's also all kind of things outside of your career that don't envolve deadlines, like seeing your family or exercising and taking care of your health, working on your relationship or getting out of a relationship that isn't working. Now if the procrastinator's only mechanism of doing these hard things is the panic monster, that's a problem, because in all of these non-deadline situations, the panic monster doesn't show up. He has nothing to wake up for, so the effects of procrastination, they're not contained; they just extend outward forever. And it's this long-term kind of procrastination that's much less visible and much less talked about than the funnier, short-term deadline-based kind. It's usually suffered quietly and privately. And it can be the source of a huge amount of long-term unhappiness, and regrets. And I thought, that's why those people are emailing, and that's why they're in such a bad place. It's not that they're creaming for some project. It's that long-term procrastination has made them feel like a spectator, at times, in their own lives. The frustration is not that they couldn't achieve their dreams; it's that they weren't even able to start chasing them. So I read these emails and I had a little bit of epiphany--that I don't think non-procrastinations exist. That's right--I think all of you are procrastinators. Now, you might not all be a mess, like some of us, and some of you may have a healthy relationship with deadlines, but remember: the monkey's sneakiness trick is when the deadlines aren't there.
Now, I want to show you one last thing. I call this a life calendar. That's one box for every week of a 90-year life. That's not that many boxes, especially we've already used a bunch of those. So I think we need to all take a long, hard look at that calendar. We need to think about what we're really procrastinating on, because everyone is procrastinating on something in life. We need to stay aware of the instant gratification monkey. That's a job for all of us. And because there's not that many boxes on here, it's a job that should probably start today. Well, maybe not today, but, you know. Sometime soon.
Thank you.
（手机排版，可能不太好看）
