Patterns of Success for Students

The Deep Procrastination Crisis

Above is a snapshot of my blog e-mail inbox, filtered to only show e-mails from students struggling with deep procrastination. Notice that there are close to 60 such messages. If I include blog comments in the search, the number jumps into the hundreds.

Deep procrastination is a distressing affliction. Students who suffer from it lose the ability to start school work. Deadlines pass and they hand nothing in. Professors provide special extensions, but the students still can’t bring themselves to do the work. And so on.

As evidenced by my inbox, this issue is surprisingly common, especially at elite colleges. Yet it’s also almost entirely off the radar of traditional student counseling, which is why I dedicate time to it here.

In my previous post, I introduced a dubious evolutionary explanation for an otherwise very real phenomenon: procrastination, in my experience, is not a character flaw, but instead evidence that you don’t have a believable plan for succeeding at what you’re trying to do. In this post, as promised, I want to apply this evolutionary perspective to help better understand, and therefore better combat, the deep variety of this common issue.

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The Rhodes Effect

“The 2011 Rhodes Scholars were just announced, which made me depressed and wondering about how they accomplish all the things they do!”

This was the opening line from a recent e-mail. To illustrate what troubled this e-mailer, I’ve reproduced below the official bio from one of the 2011 Rhodes Scholars:

Nicholas A. DiBerardino, is a senior at Princeton where he majors in music (composition). A campus leader in student government and a junior member of Phi Beta Kappa, Nick is an accomplished composer with many awards for his compositions. He has been a composer in residence at the Brevard Music Center and the European American Musical Alliance in Paris. He founded the Undergraduate Composer Collective at Princeton. While in high school, Nick founded a program to collect, refurbish and distribute used instruments and to provide instruction to needy students in Bridgeport. He plans to do the M.Phil. in music at Oxford.

Like all Rhodes Scholars, Nicholas’ bio is stunning. It’s not just the quantity of the accomplishments, but also their quality: every accolade is impressive. It’s no wonder that my e-mailer felt down on himself: when you encounter elite students like Nicholas, it really can seem like you’re not doing nearly enough.

But here’s what’s interesting: when you spend time around Rhodes Scholars, as I did when researching the yellow book, you become skilled at understanding not just what they did, but also how they got it done, and this understanding leads to a surprising conclusion: the proper reaction to an elite student such as Nicholas is not “I should be doing more,” but instead: “I should be doing less.”