Page 25 - End Procrastination Now Get it Done with a Proven Psychological Approach

End Procrastination with a Three-Step Approach xxiii

• Most failures are fictional, such as thinking that if you are
not 100 percent perfect in whatever you undertake, you are a
failure. That show-stopping idea can lead to many manufac-
tured miseries. Who’s perfect?
• Failure can be instructive when you use its consequences for
self-correction. Sometimes the instruction is painful. Some-
times the consequences lead to new insights and discoveries.

The fear of failure trap has different window views. The irra-
tional perfectionism view is through a watermarked prism win-
dow. The prism distorts what you experience. The watermarks
represent a contingent worth point of view: you’re noble if your
life is filled with successes; your failures define you. This black-
white perspective is a slippery slope toward procrastination.
Can you spring free from this success-failure trap? Fear of
failure is a fictional trap that has everything to do with you, and
little to do with what you do. If there is no failure, you have noth-
ing to fear. Fortunately, you can eliminate failure. Well, at least in
the area of your self-development.
View your self-development efforts as experiments and your
plans as hypotheses. That changes the view. Now you are operating
like a scientist. You test the plan and judge the result, not yourself.
If you don’t like the result, you adjust and retest the plan.
Introducing this new tolerance-building line of thought into a
well-practiced contingency worth script is not an overnight deal.
New philosophies take time to take hold.

Take on the Do-It-Now Philosophy

The do-it-now philosophy is to do reasonable things in a reasonable
way within a reasonable time to increase your chances for health,
happiness, and desired accomplishments. Following the do-it-now
way, you simultaneously attack procrastination and responsibly
follow through on what is important to do. You contest your urges