I’m sorry for the late post of my article, as I am quite busy recently. Last week Xiu Tao had talked about the keys to success, so this week I’m am introducing one of our biggest enemies to achieve success, Procrastination.
According to Wikipedia, procrastination is an avoidance behavior that characterized by the deferment of actions or tasks to a later time. In simple words, procrastination is a habit that one does to delay his actions or tasks.
Since very young I have been practice this habit where every time I was given a task or something I would tell myself, ‘never mind do it tomorrow I still got plenty of time left!’, and delayed the tasks to the very late. Sometimes I would even procrastinate the time is running out, for instance, during high school examinations I always tell myself, ‘don’t worry I still have 1 month to study!’ and then ‘I think 2 week enough for me to cover all’ and on the last week, ‘one week? Can la sure no problem…’ and even to the day before the exam, ‘OMG tomorrow is chemistry, wait a minute, I think I can cover the topics in 2 hours…’ In the end, I didn’t study for the exams at all, and I suffered very very bad results for the exams.
Besides from myself, I noticed a lot people also like to procrastinate. ‘C’mon we can finish this very fast, let’s go out and play’; ‘Damn I never liked this task, I will do it later’. Then I started to think about it, maybe procrastination is a Malaysian culture. I am serious.
For many people their reasons to procrastinate can be different. It can be from being lazy, to being distracted by something else. I am not a lazy guy (PLEASE DON’T LAUGH I’M BEING VERY SERIOUS), but I always distracted by other influences, maybe because my willpower is very weak. I used to try myself to get rid of some addictions (not the serious ones like alcoholism and smoking), yet I couldn’t success even until now. For example, I used to control myself to play lesser computer games, but I always tell myself ‘never mind I will stop playing I tomorrow, today will be the last day so I must play more!’, and so, tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow, until the tomorrows of now I’m still playing spending hours on computer. Not only this, I had tried to control my other bad habits but never success, because I always procrastinate. Then I came to a conclusion, my willpower is very very weak.
To overcome it, I always tell myself, if you want to do something, do it NOW, or u can NEVER finish it. For me it’s quite true because I always procrastinate and procrastinate, then leave everything undone. For people like me it’s very difficult to achieve, but u won’t get any fruit if u don’t try. I believe with a strong determination (although i don't have), one can overcome everything even though the possibility is very small.
by Wei Yang - Treasurer of Young Entrepreneurs' Club
