Well, are <i>you</i> me?<p>Everything you said rings true with me. From the effort&#x2F;result ratio to waiting for the &quot;feeling&quot; to get things done all the way to the age.<p>I&#x27;ve been thinking about ways to fix this, though, I&#x27;m more looking into figuring out <i>why</i> I behave this way rather than <i>how</i> I can work around it.<p>Seems to me like, this type of behavior stems from the childhood (up until college) where being a relatively smart person allows one to keep afloat (and even shine sometimes) without spending much effort.<p>Then you hit college and you face the fact that you <i>have</i> to put the effort in, you can&#x27;t just get by anymore. You sorta learn to struggle through a bit of &quot;learning how to study&quot; but still not at the level where you <i>feel</i> like you owned your studies, more like enough to get back to that 8&#x2F;10 result on average. Put simply, you are now doing 5&#x2F;10 effort for 8&#x2F;10 results while it used to be 1-2&#x2F;10 effort for the same result.<p>Then you move on to the <i>real world</i> (tm) where the effort is sometimes just as important as the result. Even if that&#x27;s not the case for you, you just realize 8&#x2F;10 results are sometimes not enough (for your employer, for personal satisfaction, for whatever reason).<p>This, combined with the fact that your pride now firmly lies in your level of intelligence, makes self-improvement really hard. How? First, you don&#x27;t wanna do the <i>easy</i> stuff, because, well it&#x27;s not worth your <i>intelligence</i>; so you dream of doing the <i>hard</i> stuff. Reading complicated books, learning a new language what have you. Then, you start unconsciously delaying doing&#x2F;learning the <i>hard</i> stuff. You only do those if it&#x27;s part of your job so you <i>have to</i>. You delay it, I think, because the fact that you may not accomplish those deeds in the short amount of time you think you <i>should</i>, proving yourself that you&#x27;re not as smart as you think you are. That, is like the ghost at the end of the dark hallway. You don&#x27;t even wanna risk getting into that state of mind. &quot;I just don&#x27;t have the time&quot; or &quot;I really haven&#x27;t spent much effort on this&quot; is a much better excuse for you than &quot;I&#x27;m just not smart enough. Need to work harder&#x2F;longer on this&quot;.<p>Don&#x27;t know if that&#x27;s the case for you, but it feels like it is for me. I&#x27;m trying to <i>let myself go</i> to fix this basically. It&#x27;s okay to not be brilliant. It&#x27;s okay to fail, make mistakes, suck at certain things while being <i>just</i> okay at other things. There is no implicit need to be excellent at everything you do. More importantly, &quot;too proud to be dumb&quot; is a bad mindset to be in. Even if you are as smart as you think you are, you are not fully utilizing your capacity by restricting yourself due to a fear of <i>slightest</i> failure&#x2F;mistake.<p>That said, the ideas that you are trying sound interesting. Maybe they could also help taming this subconscious beast by my conscious idealist.