Words from the Weiss

Words from the Weiss
What Happened to Winter/Spring 2008?

The world is a funny place. It's full of procrastination. On the other hand, maybe it's not.
Maybe it just seems that way to me because I'm full of it. True, I'm sitting here now, at my
desk in the Rejected Quarterly Corporate Headquarters, diligently typing my column. But
this doesn't take the past into account. To get to this point I've procrastinated. At the risk
of sounding immodest, I'd characterize myself as being very adept at the art. Not a
professional procrastinator, perhaps, but certainly a top amateur.
The world is a funny place, but it's also a logical place. In other words, most things are
done for a reason. And procrastination doesn't exist in a vacuum; nobody procrastinates
without just cause. Remember, Rome wasn't built in a day. For the sake of argument,
suppose it had been? What a sorry city it would have been. Certainly a city constructed
without procrastination wouldn't have defeated Hannibal and his famous elephants.
I can hear the murmurs of protest even now: He's not talking about procrastination, he's
speaking of planning! Perhaps, but I'll submit to you that procrastination is a very high
order of planning. While seemingly delaying a task, one is actually improving it, or at least
making it possible to do it better later.
Let's examine this. First of all, why does one not do something? So-called practical people,
who rush in like fools and do tasks as they become available, may think it's because the
person is oppositional or lazy. I'll be the first to admit that there probably are cases like
this. But because there are CEOs making millions of dollars who don't have as their highest
priorities the welfare of their workers and the qualities of their products, does that mean
we should get rid of all millionaire CEO's? Okay, maybe that's a bad example. Here's a better
one: just because there are a few bad trout in a river, does that mean all trout are bad?
Absolutely not. And it is the same with procrastinators. Simply because some
procrastinate for petty or even selfish reasons, this doesn't mean we all do.
So why do we procrastinate? Because we are not ready to do the task at hand.
Procrastinators, by and large, are a thoughtful, artistic lot concerned with quality. Which
means doing anything other than what a practical person would say should be the task at
hand, a procrastinator is actually thinking about that task, and building a better
mousetrap, so to speak.
Which brings me to my next point: The world is a funny and unfair place. Why do
procrastinators always get the short shrift? Why are we looked down on? I'm not arguing
for minority status, but truthfully, if you're not a mouse, why wouldn't you want somebody
to come up with a better mousetrap?
History is littered with famous procrastinators. Mark Twain, for instance, wisely intoned,
"Never put off for tomorrow what you can put off to the day after tomorrow." Nobody can
argue the societal contributions of Leonardo da Vinci. But did you know he was an
accomplished procrastinator as well? John Huston finished editing The African Queen only
days before its release. Throw in St. Augustine, Samuel Coleridge, Agatha Christie, and
Douglas Adams and you get the idea. Ahh, you say, but what about all the people
throughout history who did not procrastinate? There must have been plenty of those as
well? Naturally. They're the ones we don't remember.