I’ve been thinking a lot about this letter from gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson on the path worth taking in life and thinking about it in relation to what I’ve learned from The Procrastination Equation.
Thompson’s letter is one of the most profound things I’ve ever read, but I’d like to zoom in on one particular thing he said:
“When you were young, let us say that you wanted to be a fireman. I feel reasonably safe in saying that you no longer want to be a fireman. Why? Because your perspective has changed…”
We tend to make an assumption that we will never change over time when in reality the choices we make necessarily change us over time. The boy who wants to be a fireman is not aware that he won’t really be the same person in twenty years.
A good strategy for killing procrastination is to break up the task into lots of small tasks and to begin with only the goal of doing the first little task. Procrastinators sometimes assume that they will be miserable doing their chore because right at this very second they feel burdened just thinking about the task when in reality once they start a change will occur within them and they will develop a kind of addiction and finish one goal after another until the entire task is complete. Have you ever said to yourself “I’ll clean my room” and then “got on a roll” and cleaned your entire house? Have you ever gone to the gym with a certain routine planned but ended up “getting on a roll” and getting way more done than you anticipated? You changed at some point between the time you walked into the gym and the time you started your workout, you changed at some point between the time you started cleaning your house and later on when you really “got into it.” You won’t always be the same you. Always account for changing variables.
After giving the fireman example, Hunter elaborates:
“It’s not the fireman who has changed, but you. Every man is the sum total of his reactions to experience. As your experiences differ and multiply, you become a different man, and hence your perspective changes. This goes on and on. Every reaction is a learning process; every significant experience alters your perspective. So it would seem foolish, would it not, to adjust our lives to the demands of a goal we see from a different angle every day? How could we ever hope to accomplish anything other than galloping neurosis?”
“I don’t mean that we can’t BE firemen, bankers, or doctors — but that we must make the goal conform to the individual, rather than make the individual conform to the goal.”
We must make the goal conform to the individual rather than the individual conform to the goal. In other words, start with the talents, abilities and desires you have right now to construct your life and life’s path. Don’t start with an idea of a life’s path and then try to mold your desires, talents and abilities to it. An illustration of this may be found in the movie Rockstar when Chris Izzy Cole (played by Mark Wahlberg) hits it big by crafting himself after his favorite metal singer from the band Steel Dragon. Through a series of events the lead singer of Steel Dragon gets replaced by Chris, the “wannabe,” the tribute band singer who basically just lives his life with the dream of being someone else.
But ten years later Chris leaves the band after he realizes it just isn’t him, and we find our heavy metal singer playing much softer ballads in a coffee house and narrating that he “finally found his own voice.” I think that’s what Thompson is saying: You can either be the guy who’s found his own voice singing a coffee house somewhere or you can start with big ideas and try to force yourself to fit the mold, as in be the tribute singer. But even if you do become that rare tribute singer who actually replaces the original lead singer, you may find that the whole thing wasn’t what you bargained for in the first place.
Finding your own voice is the way.
