A professor recently came to me for help with what he called an “issue of thinking.” 

Part of it was procrastination, which many people are wrestling with. I suggested framing the habit as an expression of inner conflict. If there is something you really want to do, but you’re not doing it, there is probably another part of you that’s resisting. So it’s a negotiation between two parties, except that they are both you.

They’re different parts of self, with needs that don’t seem to fit together—or not at the very same instant. The part that wants instant gratification, now and forever, is probably a lot younger than the part that’s more interested in getting valuable things done (like pursuing justice, or doing the laundry,), even if that means having to wait awhile for some of the other kinds of value (like ice cream, or a movie).

Like ordinary negotiations, these are best pursued with gentle firmness, a vigilant yet easygoing grace that is authoritative because it takes the long view of the situation, and sets appropriate priorities. In other words, find your most adult self in there somewhere; assume it (i.e. take it on, activate it, become it); and parent the rest of you into ceding control to this most-adult part-of-self.   

Your inner child doesn’t actually want to run the show, knowing he or she lacks the skills, the knowledge, and the fortitude to run an adult life (in the world of grownups, with taxes and jobs and the occasional blizzard). But in order to stand down and let you get busy, the kid needs to feel that his or her yearnings and appetites matter; that they will not be trampled, mocked, or ignored; and that enough love is present to soothe a small person through the fear, boredom, and sheer fussiness that delayed gratification usually involves.

But the professor was working on more than procrastination. In fact, that wasn’t the main thing. 

His problem had to do with determining what to work on—which was tricky because, he said, he’s “too detail-oriented.” He had plenty of ideas, but they all pointed in different directions. It wasn’t clear which, if any, was really worth developing into a paper he would be confident he could (and should) try to publish. So he found himself floundering, despite a real wish to be productive and enjoy his work. In the classroom, he felt something similar. He wanted to let himself be the kind of beneficially weird lecturer who, as a student, he had always wanted and rarely got: the kind who’s full of quotations and colorful embellishments that link the parts of the course together, and even connect it to adjacent disciplines. But he kept fretting about whether this would be acceptable.

In an academic department, as in a marriage or a family, it’s good to have people with diverse thinking styles. But there is an art to knowing the limits of what’s unusual about the way you do things. Of course, your difference from other people’s style and methods will be partly built-in and unconscious. And yet some of it should be, or become, a free choice that you can adjust to the needs of the moment. As a teacher you can allow yourself plenty of (semi-relevant, but educational) digressions in your lectures. But when there’s an exam coming up, it’s best to curtail those a bit, the better to support your students as they try to prepare.

If you’re brimming with lore and anecdotes and allusions, and you believe they’ll enrich the course, most students will find that style at least a little bothersome—even if they can also appreciate it a little, since it’s unusual and therefore refreshing. “He goes on tangents,” they will complain, forgetting that a tangent does touch the circle at some point, and that there is more than one way to conduct a good lecture. It’s not a military campaign or a corporate boardroom. 

A small minority of students will highly prize what you’re giving them, because they can’t get it anywhere else—assuming you’re the only faculty member in your Department who teaches that way. You’re teaching whatever the actual subject is, but you’re also modeling the figure of the lifelong learner, whose love of knowledge transcends the frame of professional credentialing and credit accumulation. Be yourself up there—especially if you’re the type of teacher who strives to impart wisdom and skills, not information alone.

On the writing side, I suggest jotting down the seeds of ideas that you can water later on. You may find they’ve already begun to germinate under the surface in the meantime. Map out a few of them without committing to the immediate development of any particular one (let alone all of them at once). Then take a step back. Get a coffee. Play with the books you’ve already read as fertilizer for the process, and the ones you’ve got waiting for you. 

Now see which of those ideas you find yourself wanting to explore first. Which do you feel like discussing with a close friend? Spell out to yourself, as you would over lunch, and see where it leads. If that first idea seems too minor, well, maybe stick with it anyway. Maybe it’s a good preliminary piece of work, a warmup before you take on something more ambitious. If it doesn’t seem likely to fit into the top scholarly journal in your field, is there a second-tier journal you respect, where it might fit better?

Your minor works do not define you as a writer of minor works only.

There’s a difference between (a) living up to your own high standards as to the quality of a project—which is necessary—and (b) executing only the most serious, far-reaching, and consequential projects—which is not necessary, and may be counterproductive. As a scholar, you are not only engaged in the project at hand, whatever it turns out to be. You are also building a body of work over a lifetime career. 

It can be helpful to call to mind a figure you respect, whose best work you deeply admire, and who also wrote quite a lot. Some scholars write a small number of books, but a large number of papers across the decades. How is that achieved? By taking oneself seriously, with an encouraging version of humility. Assume your own thinking will probably bear valuable fruit, if you allow yourself to try things out and see where they lead. As they say in finger-paintiing class, “Get in there and smear.”

 The point isn’t to produce as much as possible, but to become as free to produce as you can possibly become.

If this post resonates with you, consider booking an appointment with me at 917-873-0292, or email Jamey@drjameyhecht.com. Sessions are available in-office in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and remotely in NY, NJ, TX, and CA.

I don’t believe in laziness. Instead, I believe in internal conflict. For me, there’s no perverse trait that makes people avoid necessary work. Instead there are, as Freud taught, various parts of the self, some younger and more primitive, others older and more developed, and these want different things that conflict with each other. I’ve discussed the issue in this blog before, but I want to explore another side of it now.

Perhaps there are tasks you’ve been avoiding, even though you believe they would do you a lot of good—maybe you keep not-doing some prescribed physical therapy, or postponing a consultation with a psychiatrist, or putting off a reckoning with some career decision that keeps knocking at the door. Why aren’t you making the moves you wish you would make?

Well, check whether there’s any hidden rage that might be in the way. Are you more pissed off than you tend to suppose? If you take a look underneath your de facto boycott of what ought to come next, do you find some smoldering archaic anger blocking your progress? Maybe, maybe not—but anger can be hard to recognize in yourself if you disapprove of it, because you want to avoid any self-critical shame that might come from realizing you’re mad without having a rock-solid justification. If your anger is big, irrational, daunting, primal, disproportionate, scary—it may have those characteristics because it’s coming from a primitive part of self that has big feelings, big enough to be overwhelming. That’s why it’s repressed: the rageful child part of you is afraid its own anger would vaporize the world if you were to feel it in full; the more adult parts are ashamed because this same anger is so unreasonable, so savage, so… childlike.

Wounded child parts of self tend to feel that they live in a broken world, a cosmos cracked in half by the injustice of not getting the perfect parents that they needed (and sometimes, not even the good-enough parents). They feel cheated. Their rage is a cry for justice—that is the beautiful aspect of it, which should be respected. The downside is that feeling cheated by life tends to stop us from making necessary improvements. If I am stuck in the bitterness of feeling screwed-over, I may be living inside the misconception that any progress I dare to make would be a betrayal of the wounded child inside me. Adults boycott their own lives, they flounder and self-sabotage and procrastinate, because of a beautiful, bittersweet, tragic loyalty to their own grievances from long, long ago. The unwritten law of such a life is: If I go ahead and start building my own life for myself, it will mean that I approve of all the wrongs that were done to me in the past.

But the inner child is not actually gratified by the adult’s refusal to live a full, open-hearted life. The inner child is simply afraid that such a life would erase forever her claim to some eventual cosmic justice. So the way to get free of this prison-house is deliberately to seek out the inner child, and provide the necessary loving nurturance directly from your adult self, with reassuring words of warmth and dignity and tenderness. Don’t be a tough guy. Stop identifying with your Spartan high standards for a few minutes and give that kid some wholesome generous attention, because somebody has to, and you’re the only one who is in there deep enough to do the job. Remember a time when you were hurt or scared, and your parent either stayed away, or made it worse. Now watch yourself in your mind’s eye, the grownup you’ve become, walking onto the stage set and going straight to the suffering child and holding that child, saying soothing words of commitment and connection and safety. For example: “This stuff that happened was not fair. But I am here now, and I got you. I can’t betray you, because I am you; I’m you all grown up. And I’m with you, and I always will be. I love you.”

Now, watch the kid go to sleep at last, all done crying, inside your heart, where there’s a bed with a night-light and a teddy bear and all the good stuff kids need. Now walk quietly out of the room. Now turn back toward the current moment, your adult life, your present opportunities to build and to repair and to explore.

Action and learning and success are no longer stained with the implication that you have somehow capitulated to a corrupt world-order. You may have thought growth would require more cynicism, a devil’s bargain you persistently refused. It turns out, however, that less cynicism is what did the trick—not getting colder and more jaded (which is what scoffers mean when they yell ‘Grow up!’), but the opposite: giving that furious sulking inner infant your heartfelt affection, without scorn, without shame, without despair. Forward movement is your own prerogative, an exploration of what the environment affords and what your own gifts and experiences can equip you to attempt. You are free to live as best you can, knowing that though you will someday die, you do at least get to find out who you are, and to see what feels worthwhile, by earnest trial-and-error. It is time for that serious form of play we call work.

We think of motivation as something driven by discipline. Often it is just that, a pressurized pushing and shoving from behind, away from the possible bad consequences of our inaction. As someone like Jordan Peterson is happy to remind us, discipline guards against the perils of what some people call laziness. But discipline is not the only form of motivation.

Rather than being pushed from behind, away from the failure we dread, we can be drawn forward from in front, led onward by curiosity, fascination, and a desire to explore the world. I do not believe in laziness. I think what we call laziness is actually internal conflict, a pattern in someone’s functioning, not a trait of his or her nature. If together we can bring the conflict into focus, you can position yourself to make more free, informed choices about what it is you actually want to do with your opportunities. “All you have to do,” as Gandalf said to Bilbo Baggins in Tolkien’s The Hobbit, “is decide what to do with the time that is given to you.”

I had a teacher years ago—a brilliant, soulful teacher of Ancient Greek, the late Jack Collins—whose maxim was “To row is human; to sail, divine.” Of course it was a play on the old proverb “To err is human; to forgive, divine.” What he meant was that there’s a place for discipline, and it’s often necessary, especially near the beginning of a project. But after discipline has done its work, after it’s gotten us launched, rowing our boat away from land, pushing on the oars, there comes a time when discipline is no longer needed, and the serious joy of the work takes its place. When you row a boat, there’s a 1:1 correspondence between the effort you invest, and the result you get. Shove on the oars this much, and the boat lurches forward so much as a result. But when we sail, we hoist the canvass, and thereafter the job is just to maintain the right relationship to the wind—a mighty force, for whose creative power we are not responsible. The wind is a free-flowing, abundant aspect of the environment, and the sailor(s) work is to keep the sail so oriented that the ship can move in the desired direction under the wind’s wild, natural power. Rowing is no longer necessary. One unit of effort can now yield much more than one unit of progress.

Reading books, or writing them, works the same way. At first, you’re counting how many pages you’ve read since you sat down; how many minutes you’ve been reading; what chapter you’re up to; and so on. But then you get successfully caught by the unfolding story, and you forget about all that counting and measuring. You read on because you want to know what happens next; because you care about the main character; because the story is carrying you along. Of course it isn’t only our intellectual tasks that work this way. So do a great many more of our human endeavors…

Therapy is sometimes a form of rowing out, away from the familiar shores of our trouble, and toward the open world, where there are currents and breezes that we can harness for our purposes if we can find the right balance of humility, self-knowledge, and ambition. To row is human; to sail, divine.

If this post resonates with you, consider booking an appointment with me at 917-873-0292, or email Jamey@drjameyhecht.com. Sessions are available in-office in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and remotely in NY, NJ, TX, and CA.

What was the most thrilling role you ever played?

Well, how often does that experience come to mind as you ask yourself what you’re doing with your life? It’s easy to get obsessed with the business side of the art, since that’s what allows you to keep on acting. Chasing after fame and fortune can be quite pragmatic, but it can also be vainglorious. Generally it’s the people who cherish their experiences on stage and/or in front of the camera who have good outcomes, whether those look “successful” or not. Those who are hypnotized by the grandiose rewards of success (perhaps especially in acting) tend to berate themselves for not having it yet; when and if they do achieve it, they tend to be the people who go nuts (they “decompensate”), doing cocaine in hotel rooms, alone, or with hangers-on. Those who remember the art and their experience of it—both the acting and the camaraderie of being in a troupe or a cast—tend to cope better with lack of outward success (since the aspect that really matters to them is the one they already do have), and, if things go well, they can tolerate success without losing hold of themselves.

Another way to put this--directed more at the spiritual right hemisphere of the brain than the logical left--is that an art form is safe to practice when the artist stays close to the spirit that sponsors it. In the case of the actor, that would be Dionysus; for the historian, Clio; for the dancer, Terpsichore; the doctor, Asclepius; the poet, Apollo and Athena and Calliope and Urania. These are of course Greek Gods, whose names became powerful for me through years of reading Greek literature. But it doesn't matter what culture produced your guiding spirit, nor whether it's immortal or human. All I'm suggesting is that good results come from dedication to a point outside the circle of the artist and the audience. Play the violin for the composer. Do Shakespeare for Old Bill. Or as the late great Lou Reed once said, "play football for the coach."