The annoying portmanteau word “wantrapreneur” describes the (equally annoying) phenomenon of the person who’s constantly talking about the startups they want to launch – “like Airbnb, but for goats! Or for hats!” – without ever doing anything about it. This syndrome goes far beyond the tech world, as you can deduce by comparing the number of your friends who are “working on” a novel or screenplay to the number who’ve written one. But I hadn’t seen the problem clearly until the other day, when I encountered the illustrator Kazu Kibuishi’s term for it: “idea debt”. You run up an idea debt, Kibuishi’s fellow artist Jessica Abel explained, when you spend “too much time picturing what a project is going to be like, too much time thinking about how awesome it will be… and too little time actually making the thing”.
Just as the accruing interest on a credit card makes it harder and harder to get back on your feet financially, idea debt impedes action. The more glorious and detailed the pictures in your mind, the more daunting it feels to start making them real.
The underlying hazard here is that merely thinking about a task feels subtly like you’re doing something constructive about it. This doesn’t only hamper ambitious creative projects, but mundane errands, too: mentally chewing over items on your to-do list feels vaguely productive, yet really wastes time. I love the anti-procrastination advice of the blogger and libraries activist Jessamyn West: start including the time you spend thinking about tasks as part of the time it takes to do them. “Some emails, by the time I’ve written them, I feel like I’ve spent five days not-writing them, and the damned things only took five to 10 minutes to write,” West observes. “Now I try to make the task itself take (less) life time by doing it closer to when I [first] think about doing it.”
An especially sneaky form of thinking as a substitute for doing is “deciding”, since it seems so bold and courageous. (“I’m the decider!” George Bush famously declared – making the point, however clumsily, that deciding means running the show.) Yet a decision alone changes nothing. As Gregg Krech writes in his book The Art Of Taking Action, external reality remains exactly the same after your decision to ask someone out, to write a book, or leave your job. What matters is “creating ripples”, as he puts it – actions, however tiny, that alter things in the world outside your head.
Generosity is a striking case in point. Acting generously is both morally right and happiness-inducing: what’s not to like? Yet I’ve lost count of the times I’ve decided – truly, sincerely decided – to donate to a charity, thank someone, or offer to help them… then done absolutely nothing at all. (By contrast, I rarely procrastinate over typing a sarcastic tweet.) Joseph Goldstein, the meditation teacher, describes his personal “generosity practice”: to just do the generous things he thinks of, as soon as possible, even if doubts or counter-arguments arise. Most of us probably don’t need to become kinder people; we just need to be better at the part where we do a damn thing about it.
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
