Patch Adams on Procrastination

Today, I was involved in an all-day event sponsored by gctraining.ca. The focus was on "Finding Joy in Life: Living each day to the fullest." I spoke about procrastination and how it serves to undermine our well-being. Patch Adams spoke about laughter, choice and living a life of joy. I asked Patch what he thought of a potential gap between intention and action. Here's what he said.

If you've had a chance to hear Patch speak, you'll know that he has many messages: medical, philosophical and political. Essentially, however, he distills the pursuit of joy in three words: intention, performance and consequences. First we have to have an intention to live joyfully, or more specifically, an intention to embrace joy through a focus on loving relationships. An example of an intention of this sort might be to act towards your partner with loving kindness. Second, we have to perform the acts of loving kindness, perhaps through words spoken or in taking time to listen to him or her. Finally, we will see the consequences of these intended actions through the increased love and well-being in our lives.

My question to Patch was, "What happens if you have an intention but then say something like ‘I'll feel more like it tomorrow' and fail to perform or act on your intention?" His answer was simple, direct and to the point.

He said, "When you left the house today, you had the intention of putting clothes on and you did. You didn't try to put your pants on today. You simply put them on. The same has to hold for all of our intentions. We don't try to be more loving partners. We make the intention, and we act on it."

I can't disagree with this. It is about choice. It's about responsibility for our lives, as I've written before in a discussion of Existentialism and procrastination (see "The Anguish of Procrastination" or "Existentialism and Procrastination -Part 2: Bad Faith").

Patch added, "You've got to know what you want. This is central to acting on your intentions. When you know what you want, you realize that all there is left then is time management. You'll manage your time to achieve your goals because you clearly know what you're trying to achieve in your life."

Again, my reading of the psychological research literature on the psychology of action leads me to the same conclusion. Self-concordant goals, the goals for which we have ownership and for which we act autonomously, are crucial to our goal pursuit and well-being. In fact, all of what Patch had to say, particularly if you could look past some philosophical differences we might have, is based on the fundamental human needs as presented by Richard Ryan & Edward Deci in their Self-Determination Theory. That is, we have a need for autonomy, competence and relatedness. When we fulfill these needs, we find joy in our lives.

Closing thoughts . . .
Of course, acting on our intentions, even on our self-concordant goals can be problematic at times because we can fall prey to some all too human shortcomings such as the way we think (e.g., temporal discounting, intransitive preference structures or irrational beliefs like worry), or our tendency to want to do "mood repair" first to feel good (e.g., "Giving in to feel good" or "Counterfactual thinking and procrastination"). I hope that this blog will help you to develop your own insight in terms of when, how and why you might become your own worst enemy by having a gap between intention and performance.

This gap between attention and action is not a new topic in psychology. In fact, William James, a founding figure in psychology, had some straight talk about "schemers and dead-beats" who could not link action to intention. In the chapter on "Will" in his two-volume Principles of Psychology, James spoke directly to those he thought lived in a lethargic state. I'll give the last words in today's blog to James.

William James on obstructed will:
"Here we get the obverse of the truth. Those ideas, objects considerations, which (in these lethargic states) fail to get to the will, fail to draw the blood, seem, in so far forth, distant and unreal. The connection of the reality of things with their effectiveness as motives is a tale that has never yet been fully told. The moral tragedy of human life comes almost wholly from the fact that the link is ruptured which normally should hold between vision of the truth and action, and that this pungent sense of effective reality will not attach to certain ideas."

"Men [people] do not differ so much in their mere feelings and conceptions. Their notions of possibility and their ideals are not as far apart as might be argued from their differing fates. No class of them have better sentiments or feel more constantly the difference between the higher and the lower path in life than the hopeless failures, the sentimentalists, the drunkards, the schemers, the ‘dead-beats,' whose life is one long contradiction between knowledge and action, and who, with full command of theory, never get to holding their limp characters erect.

Procrastination Essential Reads

7 Ways to Face Tasks You Dread

From Procrastination to Productivity in the New Year

No one eats of the fruit of the tree of knowledge as they do . . . and yet their moral knowledge, always there grumbling and rumbling in the background . . . never wholly resolves, never gets its voice out of the minor key into the major key, or its speech out of the subjunctive into the imperative mood, never breaks the spell, never takes the helm into its hands."
(James, 1890; Vol 2)

You can search far and wide in current psychology texts or journals and not find a stance this poetic or direct towards the problems of procrastination.

It's difficult to improve on this. It's time to take the helm into our hands and steer our own course in life.

References
James, W. (1890). Principles of Psychology. London: Macmillan.