Anti-Advice

Underestimate, procrastinate, do worse and be worse

Photo by Randy Tarampi on Unsplash

If you read self-help-type articles a lot and see the same things cropping up again and again, you may have started to feel like some of them just don’t work on you. This could be for one of a few reasons. Maybe you feel the prevailing wisdom in your culture is off-balance, and a different setup from another time or place would have suited you better. Or maybe your life has veered off course in a particular way, and you need to correct back towards the Golden Mean from the opposite direction to the people the articles are aimed at. Or maybe the articles are written by people with different personality types to your own, and your type needs different guidelines in order to function properly. You may well have to discover those yourself through trial and error.

That’s why I’ve come up with a few bits of “anti-advice” over the years that fit my personality type better than the standard admonishments I read again and again. Some of them may fit you too. If they don’t, you’re back to self-discovery through trial and error — enjoy, it can be fun!

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(1) Underestimate Yourself.

Yes, overestimating yourself can mean succeeding at things you never knew you were capable of, but it can also mean spreading yourself too thin and making yourself miserable. That’s why I make a distinction between the type of job I take on and the amount of jobs I take on. I enjoy attempting musical projects that are at the very edge of my capabilities, forcing me to work up to them and become a better player. But take on too many of them at once, or combine them with too many extra-musical things, or take the wrong ones on, or take them on for the wrong reasons, and I’m in serious trouble. I find it very difficult to know how much I’m capable of in advance, so I’ve learned that I have to take on less than I think I can handle. I’ve tried doing things the other way and it doesn’t end well.

We’re all used to factoring in a margin for error when we plan car journeys, but some of us are less good at factoring it in with every activity over every window of time. So it looks like I can get this project done in a week? What if it’s a bit more difficult than I think? Can I get it done and also get sufficient rest and exercise, get all my errands done without stress and maintain a social life? In other words, can I do it while remaining reasonably happy? What if something unexpected happens — not meteor strike-level unexpected, but the kind of unplanned occurrence that actually happens all the time when I stop to think about it — e.g. suddenly just being really tired for no apparent reason? Or say I get sick — will there be some wiggle room then, or would I be looking at a full-blown professional crisis?

Underestimate yourself and you’ll always be pleasantly surprised. You might even end up with some honest-to-God free time that you can use to, you know, enjoy yourself.

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(2) Do a Worse Job of Everything Than You’re Capable of.

Happiness doesn’t just mean doing fewer things, it means doing them less well. The links between perfectionism and OCD are very strong, and if you spend too much time overpolishing everything you attempt then you’ll take the joy out of the process and end up with less time to do the other things you want to do. Worst of all, you won’t launch a lot of potentially fulfilling projects in the first place, either because you don’t think you can get them up to the standard you demand or because trying would be so exhausting that it’d take all the juice out of the endeavour. When the “perfect is the enemy of good” trap affects the undertakings that line up with your deepest core values, you can end up very restless and unfulfilled indeed. So try getting your next project up to a “this’ll do” level and moving on, and see how it feels.

Any resistance there? Is any of it to do with pride, professional or otherwise (‘I can’t have people thinking this is the best I’m capable of’)? I think that a lot of (all?) the time, pride is a word we use when we actually mean shame. What are we afraid of when we imagine people thinking we’re worse at something than we are? Surely a loss of standing in their eyes, which would make us feel ashamed of ourselves?¹

It takes an awful lot of genuine pride — i.e. an innate confidence in your own worth that can’t be affected by public opinion — to be able to put something out in the spirit of ‘Maybe I could have done a better job, but I don’t really have the time, and I don’t feel like it anyway because I have other projects to get to, and besides I value my quality of life more than I value making everything I do the absolute best it could theoretically be, so if people look down on me for this it really doesn’t have anything to do with who I know I am’.

I’m working on it.

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(3) Put Difficult Things Off.

We’re generally told to get all the difficult, boring stuff out of the way first then reward ourselves afterwards, but I prefer to start every day with something fun. This is partly because every time I wake up I feel like I’m emerging from a primordial swamp one sediment at a time, but it’s also because the dopamine rush I get from playing piano or watching funny videos gives me energy that I can carry into the next part of the day. So my model goes fun then not-fun then fun again, making a boring-task sandwich out of the day.

Don’t tell anyone I said this, but you can also put off making important decisions. If you can let your options hang suspended in the air for a while without feeling a knot of tension that’ll keep building up until you make the call — which definitely isn’t always possible — then it can sometimes be really beneficial to give the various pros and cons of the decision the opportunity to make their case. Fun fact: some people even believe “decision procrastination” is inherently linked to creativity.

Productive procrastinating might involve waiting for more information to come in. Or talking things over with someone you trust (even hearing yourself say the words out loud often makes the right decision obvious). Or letting your subconscious play with your options a bit, which it will do even when you’re asleep. Or giving the various fears and anxieties that may be associated with each option time to simmer down, so you can perceive what’s actually at stake more clearly, and give your gut a chance to weigh in.

But the “put difficult things off” rule is at its most effective when it comes to psychological tasks you feel a strong aversion to, whether because of heavy emotional baggage, deep fears, or other mental health stuff. Conventional wisdom tells you to get whatever it is you have to do over with and rip off the Band-Aid, but it’s only a good idea to rip off a plaster if the skin has finished healing. If you’re too anxious, depressed or otherwise weakened to tackle a major psychological issue right away, all you can do is resolve to look at it as soon as you feel strong enough. It’s not something you can schedule or put into an elegant action plan.

In fact, I believe that the moment when you first become aware of a psychological issue that needs attention is often the worst moment to start tackling it: a lot of the time you need to give yourself a while to even process the fact that the issue exists at all, never mind figure out what to do about it. And when you do start down the road of sorting through everything, 99% of the time it’s going to take longer than you’d like, and a spirit of gentleness and patience will be at least as important as one of determination and resolve.

Oh, and one more thing -

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(4) Don’t Bother Being Good.

It may seem like a subtle distinction, but there’s a big difference between wanting to embody goodness and wanting to be a good person. Aiming towards the good involves living out your values, becoming progressively more aware of the interconnectedness of people and things, appreciating your own worth and that of others, choosing gentleness over judgement, that kind of thing. But there’s something kind of out-of-kilter about wanting to be a good person, isn’t there? Much better to see yourself as neither bad nor good — or if you prefer, as good in a way that doesn’t have anything to do with the neat box-checking morality we associate with goodness — and then shift the focus to what you do, and whom it benefits.

This isn’t just psychological hair-splitting either; the practical implications are deadly serious. As I’ve written about here and here, when C19 first hit I decided to live my life as if I were an asymptomatic carrier, and spent many hours and enormous amounts of mental energy making absolutely sure that my actions couldn’t possibly infect someone else. This “moral OCD” left me with precious little time or energy left to pursue the things I really cared about — writing and playing music — and didn’t even succeed in making me feel good about myself.

So why did I go that route? I came to realise that very little of it had to do with caring about other people’s suffering — I just didn’t want it to be my fault that they were suffering. Duty/guilt stuff. I didn’t want to make less effort to protect the vulnerable than my neighbours, friends and all those people who write those helpful articles on disinfectants and how to wash a banana peel. I used to half-jokingly call this “moral competitiveness”, but the underlying mechanism is shame, the most hardcore of primal “social emotions” that thrives on comparing yourself unfavourably with the people around you.

If you suspect you’re inherently worse than everyone else — and it doesn’t matter whether they think so or not, you know better — then you have to make an almighty effort to behave at least as well as other people, all around you, all the time, in order to redress the balance. Better to behave better than they do to be safe; overshooting the mark gives you some wiggle room. Undershooting it could be catastrophic, after all.

Behaving in a way designed to make you and others think you’re a good person, then, is really an effort to placate an authoritative inner voice that’s programmed to tell you the opposite. But of course that voice can never and will never be placated. It can only be ignored. Your outputs are only as good as your inputs, and if the inputs are fear, competitiveness, guilt and shame then the outputs are bitterness, exhaustion, resentment and burnout. Sure, you might do some good in the world while you’re at it. But at what cost to yourself? Can’t afford to neglect your own wellbeing when you’re the only person in a position to reliably maintain it!

The type of goodness you’re designed to bring into the world has to do with your particular nature, skills and interests. Enneagram 1s are natural saints; Enneagram 2s are natural helpers; let them be the preachers and nurses. Nine times out of ten, an Enneagram 3 or 4 trying to be a Gandhi or Mother Teresa is just a disaster waiting to happen.² It’s not coming from them, it’s coming from external influences like family patterns, traumas and outdated core beliefs. 

So for a person like me to spend all my time worrying about germs was to deny my nature, and that was a costly mistake. Even by the standards of fear-based living I wasn’t being authentic — I’m not a germaphobe; I’m a being-a-bad-person-phobe! So naturally, as soon as I learned how to relax my moral standards around C19 and go back to thinking about germs probably a bit less than I should, I felt good. Put another way, I decided to focus less on being a good person — i.e. an upstanding, dutiful citizen — and more on aiming towards various goods that I value: improving on the piano, having fun with friends and family, writing this.

You’re unlikely to have as fraught a relationship with the Thou Shalt as I do, but most of us are more in thrall to it than we’d like, so how about you try this experiment. As you go about your day, investigate how you’re feeling as you make decisions about one thing or another — particularly explicitly moral decisions. Do the decisions make you feel good? Do they express your authentic beliefs about life, or do you feel you’re imposing them on yourself somehow? If so, why? You’ll find there’s definitely some fear there — what is it of?

If you’re an overresponsible type with an overdeveloped superego, chances are you’re holding yourself to all kinds of stringent standards and inwardly chafing about it. In that case, it might be necessary for you to do the “wrong thing” sometimes and see how that feels, starting small and working your way up (though maybe stop short of murder). You may find it frightening at first, but it’s amazing how often, and quickly, that fear turns to triumph the second you get the Bad Deed over with. Trust me.

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If you’re reading all this thinking ‘I’m happy with my life the way it is — why would I want to go out of my way to be less productive, less efficient and more amoral?’ then go out and live your best life. But if you share any of my tendencies towards self-flagellation or burnout then, for you, trying less might mean achieving more and being less good could mean doing more good. I wish you all the best in your quest for laziness, neglect and procrastination.

1. People very rarely look down on you over a piece of work they don’t like anyway. They might be disappointed, sure, but the idea that they’ll go on to lose all faith in you as a person is a construct of the fearful mind. If they do in fact have such an extreme reaction, that’s their problem.

2. I think this is one of the reasons John Lennon gets so much pushback today for his activism. I actually admire his dedication and think he showed more courage and did more good than some of my generation are willing to admit; we’ve long since swung from unthinking hero-worship into an overcorrection. But at the end of the day he was the 4 to end all 4s, and 4s are just not Martin Luther Kings! I think the contradictions here can be seen not just in Lennon’s personal life but in the very substance of the activism itself, and that’s what has people so eager to rip him down.