The value of remaining positive and beating procrastination.

Procrastination does to you mentally what paralysis makes you physically. I agree it is a strong statement, but that is what truly affects most of us, who fall prey to this life debilitating condition. There are times when howsoever positive minded you may be, the events and happenings on a particular day or issue might leave you knocked out. If you do not pay heed to the developing symptoms, it would repel the success that knocks on your door once in a while.

There are so many incidents in our lives if we trace back personal history, where we had got ample opportunities to prove ourselves, but negative thoughts assisted by the procrastination habit had closed doors to potentially successful avenues or ventures.

Imagine getting a call from an old time friend, about a lead in business, but you don’t turn up, or give the lead a call, as mental cobwebs in your thinking force you not to pick up on the lead. You get a call letter for an interview or get selected for a course. You do not turn up for both, and still continue searching for other avenues out of your grasp.

You get a good opportunity to patch up with your colleague or a friend, but you just leave it and lose out on friendship, that could have been revived, had you used that opportunity.

During my work history in the Middle East, I was trying desperately to close a software implementation project in payment systems at a bank, for more than 6 months, but the user was always citing negative examples of how the software had glitches with the payment hardware, and thereby delaying the user acceptance. I had almost given it up, of ever getting the user acceptance.

One fine day, I got a call from a Project Manager from the bank’s side, who had assumed responsibility recently, and was looking at such delayed projects. He asked me, if I could meet him and the user in half an hour time in the payments department. Maybe he was also trying to test our response time. I said – Yes, and put the handset in its cradle.

Procrastination and negative thoughts dormant as they are, in some part of our thinking process, immediately started getting activated and started to weave their cobwebs. But I was out of my office in a minute and hailed a cabbie before they could get hold of me and force me not to go. The rest of the story as they say is history, as the PM asked the user in my presence, as to how much of his time was lost in what he referred to as software glitches. These were in fact hardware timeouts, where we had provided a software solution springing the machine back in no less than 5 secs. He asked him, how many such timeouts happened in his cheque clearing time of 4 hours. Maybe, 2 or 3 times,he said, now on the defensive and sounding meek. The PM requested him “Ok, can you sign the acceptance form, if you have no other issues?” in a tone that had a air of loaded machine guns.

This example just shows how we can beat procrastination by immediate action and the DO IT NOW principle, so very well illustrated in the book by Napolean Hill and Clement Stone – Success with a Positive Mental Attitude, link of which is pasted below for your convenience.

http://books.google.co.in/books?id=NA1vDgWzAsIC&printsec=frontcover&dq=napoleon+hill&hl=en&sa=X&ei=G1sxUp7rCsbJrAf1gYGQDw&ved=0CEwQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=napoleon%20hill&f=false.