Why Procrastination is Good for You
Here’s a good tip for playwrights who owe someone a second draft. Simply point out that University of San Diego professor Frank Partnoy, writing in Smithsonian Magazine, said that the key to success is waiting for the last possible moment to make a decision:
Lehman Brothers had arranged for a decision-making class in the fall of 2005 for its senior executives. It brought four dozen executives to the Palace Hotel on Madison Avenue and brought in leading decision researchers….For the capstone lecture, they brought in Malcolm Gladwell, who had just published Blink, a book that speaks to the benefits of making instantaneous decisions and that Gladwell sums up as “a book about those first two seconds.”
Lehman’s president Joe Gregory embraced this notion of going with your gut and deciding quickly, and he passed copies of Blink out on the trading floor. The executives took this class and then hurriedly marched back to their headquarters and proceeded to make the worst snap decisions in the history of financial markets.
I particularly like this advice: “Take more pauses. Stare off into the distance.” Sounds exactly like how I’m handling my current Act Two revisions.
