I have a very interesting assignment from my Nature of Human Beings course this week and I will love to share with you, it is about how to intelligently take control of one’s life. The word ‘’Intelligent Control of One’s Life ‘’ has a very broad meaning. It is the ability to be able to act intelligently while taking charge over our actions and being able to shape our life and character in accordance with what we perceive to be true. We fail to exercise an intelligent control over our lives if we act as a mere tool in the hands of others. Intelligent control of one’s life deals with the harmony within ourselves, among our ideas, habits, emotions and actions.
Now from the video by Tim Urban ‘’Inside the Mind of a Procrastinator’’ talks about how he was a government major and therefore had a lot of paper work to be done, he gets to start the work slowly but gets to procrastinate on the work as he proceeds. This habit eventually started affecting his thesis, he started writing the thesis three days to his deadline for submission which made the thesis turn out to be a bad one. According to the video, we have procrastinators and non-procrastinators, the procrastinator has the instant gratification monkey in his brain and the non-procrastinator has the rational decision maker in his brain. However, both the procrastinators and non-procrastinators have both the instant gratification monkey and the rational decision maker in their brains.
In the mind of a procrastinator, when it is time to get a perfect job done he does not do so and procrastinates because of the instant gratification monkey in him while in the brain of a non-procrastinator is the rational decision maker, he makes rational decision but instant gratification monkey does not like to plan, the procrastinator might set out to do something or a certain thing but eventually get distracted.
Instant gratification monkey believes entirely in the present moment, he has no memory of the past, no knowledge of the future. He only cares about easy and fun and for an animal that is perfect, for example: If you a dog you can spend your entire life doing nothing other than easy and fun and that is perfect. But the human beings are another kind of species, we are an advanced being and the monkey does not know this, that is why we have another system in our brain called the Rational Decision Maker which gives us the ability to do things other animals cannot do. The rational decision maker helps us to visualize the future, we can see the big picture and wants us to take account of what makes sense to be doing right now. Sometimes, it also makes sense for human to be doing things that are easy and for fun for example: when we go out for dinner with friends, going to bed at night just to mention a few. As human beings, it makes more sense for us to be doing things that are less pleasant and harder because of our bigger picture.
For the procrastinator, this is a very difficult moment, he wants to just do things for fun and easy which is termed the Orange Circle and the Dark Playground, this is a place where procrastinators like, it is a place where pleasure happens, it is a place where the fun you are having is completely unearned, it is filled with guilt, anxiety and things that make the monkey really happy. The Blue Zone is the place of hard things and less pleasant activities but really important things happen there, the monkey does not like this place.
The procrastinator has the panic monster which is the only thing that the monkey is terrified about, the panic monster watches over him in his dark moments, for example: the monkey suddenly wakes up once there is a deadline to meet up with, public embarrassment or career embarrassment to avoid and this scares the monkey to act while the rational decision maker sits down to plan, set out his goals about his future and the monkey can spend up to three weeks doing nothing even when he has work to be done.
There are two types of procrastination but the common factor amongst them is that they both have deadlines. However, the first one is that when there is a deadline the effects of the procrastination are contained to the short term and this is where the panic monster gets involved. The second type is where there are no deadlines as such. For example: your career goals, your entrepreneurial goals, fitness goals, working on a relationship just to mention a few there are no deadlines until you have gone out to get momentum and get things going. The panic monster does not show up in this type of procrastination and as such the effects are not contained, it is this type of procrastination that is much less talked about than the fun, easy, short term based deadline kind.
The long term procrastination usually suffer quietly, privately and there could be a huge amount of regrets, unhappiness, it has made one feel like a spectator in their own lives. The frustration is not that they could not achieve their dreams but they are not even able to start chasing them. We all are procrastinators especially when deadlines are not there. It is therefore important to have a life calendar to keep track of what we are procrastinating on, we need to stay aware from the instant gratification monkey. We have ticked some of the boxes on the calendar but it should start now and also make it a habit. We make it easier to exercise that control if we train our emotions and build up appropriate habits.
In conclusion, I personally try to get rid of things that distracts my attention from my career goals, fitness goals and achievements because naturally our brains are over stimulated and we crave distractions in the first place. I have reduced the use of social media, phone calls and all other distractions and I noticed that ever since I reduced my usage of devices for fun, my attention span grew, I developed more ideas that my mind arrived at and I had more plans about my future.
#MBA 21
Bibliography
(no date) Google search. Google. Available at: https://www.google.com/search? gs_ssp=eJzj4tVP1zc0LCi3sCipKMgwYPSSLMnMVSgtSkrMUygoyk8uSiwuycxLLMnMzwMAKMMO8A&q=tim%2Burban%2Bprocrastination&oq=tim%2Burba&aqs=chrome.2.0i512j69i57j46i512j0i512l4j69i61.5411j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 (Accessed: October 31, 2022).
Cost and management accounting: Foundational key terms / learning points