"Whatever doesn't kill you makes you *1up*"

In the intermediate time between my last blog and the present date, many things have happened in my life. There's been drama, action, mystery, romance and a whole bunch of other stuff. In all this time, I've come to notice that certain aspects of my life have radically changed. I'm not just talking about weight, build, height and all those other physical things, but my social aptitude, personality, social status, they've all undergone a metamorphisis of fairly substantial proportions. Some time ago I discovered that each social/physical/mental improvement was the result of a continuous accumulation of experience due to the undertaking of many and varied tasks. This discovery can be summed up as such:

"Whatever doesn't kill you makes you 1UP."

Procrastination

Pro-cras-ti-nate

 verb

1.

to defer action; delay: to procrastinate until an opportunity is lost.

Procrastination. We all do it. How often have you sat down at the computer to study and somehow ended up watching a video of a bear falling out of a tree, or logging on to Facebook and spending the following hour scrolling down and down, delving into the rich, cultural goldmine of the last three days of status updates. 


It's a question which plagues us daily, "To do or not to do". And the point is this - it's a choice. As much as we may try to limit our options down to a single factor, to hone in on a single goal, to optimise our time and automate our lifestyle into a machine-like, success-creating machine, we are flawed by a fundamental human-factor. I would argue that being a human is more about our flaws than it is about our achievements as a race. 


Success is widely viewed as the accumulation of comfortable wealth and happiness, procrastination, the enemy of progress.  The end that we work towards is, more often than not, no more than the reflection of modern idealism, where the measure of a man is the number of zeroes on his/her bank statement and the size of his/her house. 

Something I've learnt this year is that I'd much rather be distracted. Procrastination is just another way of saying "paying attention to what interests you." And if I don't become a lawyer or a doctor, what have I really lost? A 6 figure salary? A predictable future? Individuality is something that is worth preserving. To sacrifice that for stability and wealth is truly a wasteful use of time - not spending four hours learning a new song, not spending your gap-year travelling the world, not taking a tap-dance class. 




Invest in the things that distract you and don't let the expectations of a materialistic world shape who your are.

K