The library instead of uni

I lasted about two weeks at university.

That's how long it took me to decide I hated it. I found it boring, wasn't particularly interested in what I was studying, and mostly just wanted to start making some money.

I'd always been into music, and music technology was what I'd wanted to study.

I was only a kid really.

And I wanted stuff.

A car, nice clothes, games, holidays. I had all these ideas about the life I wanted, but absolutely no idea how I was going to afford any of it.

So I left university.

There was just one problem. I hadn't told my parents.

I was worried about how they'd react. I thought I'd get into trouble and they'd make me go back.

Instead, every morning I'd leave the house as though I was going to university, except I'd head to the library in Slough.

My parents thought I was studying for a degree.

I was sitting in a library trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do with my life.

I kept asking myself the same questions.

What do I do with my life? What am I going to do? How do I make loads of money?

At some point I ended up in the business section. And it was in that library that I came across a book called Think and Grow Rich.

I remember picking it up and thinking, wow, this sounds interesting.

It was the first business book I'd ever read.

Although, to be fair, it's probably more of a book about belief and mindset than business.

I read it and came away thinking that if I could just apply these principles, I could become really successful.

I've read it plenty of times since, including as an adult. Some of what's in there has stayed with me all these years.

From there I started learning about internet marketing. Building websites, that sort of thing.

I wanted to build a business. Get rich. Be known.

Pretty normal ambitions for a young lad, I suppose. Most of us want to feel special at some point.

The funny thing is, I wasn't actually doing any of it.

I wasn't building websites. I wasn't trying to sell anything.

I was just reading about it all.

Eventually I started worrying about money.

I wasn't at university anymore, but I wasn't earning anything either.

So I got a job.

Then another one.

I worked a temporary contract at a gym, then a mobile phone shop, a clothes shop and eventually a bank.

God, working in a bank was boring.

Somewhere along the way, I finally told my mum that I wanted to work and didn't want to bother with university anymore.

What she didn't know was that I hadn't actually been going for about a year.

And do you know what?

She was fine with it.

Her attitude was basically, if you want to go and make some money, go and make some money.

I'd spent about a year worrying about telling my parents something that turned out not to be much of a problem.

Bit ridiculous looking back.

But the time bothered me more.

All that stuff I'd been reading about internet marketing hadn't gone anywhere.

I was moving between jobs. Either I got bored and got fired, or I didn't work hard enough and got fired, or I left because I wanted to do something different.

The real start came around mid-2012-ish, when I'd been fired yet again and decided I wasn't getting another job.

I went on Google, typed "how to make money online", and started looking.

That's where the next part of my story begins.

The interesting thing is, I'd spent all that time learning how to do it. But when I finally started, it was because I'd run out of other options.

I could have carried on reading and preparing for years.

I'm not sure I'd ever have felt ready.

Looking back, I think one of the problems was that reading about business looks a lot like working on one.

I was reading books about business. Learning how things worked. Trying to improve myself.

Surely that was a good use of my time?

Well, sort of.

There's some interesting research on why we put things off.

Research note Meta-analysis of procrastination's causes and effects, based on 691 correlations

Piers Steel pulled together decades of research on procrastination in a big review and meta-analysis. Among the strongest and most consistent predictors were how unpleasant a task feels, how far away its reward is, how much you believe you can do it, and how impulsive you are. The review also cites estimates that 80 to 95% of college students procrastinate. Steel, 2007.

When I think about what I was doing in that library, it makes quite a lot of sense.

Actually building a website meant having to figure things out. I'd probably get things wrong. And even if I managed to build one, there was no guarantee I'd make any money.

Reading about building websites was much easier.

I could finish a chapter and feel like I'd accomplished something.

And I couldn't really fail at reading a book.

Research note Procrastination as short-term mood repair

Fuschia Sirois and Timothy Pychyl argue that procrastination has a lot to do with managing how we feel right now. Tasks that seem boring, frustrating or lacking structure bring on bad feelings, and putting them off makes us feel better in the moment. The cost lands on our future self, who still has the task to do and often feels worse about it by then. Sirois and Pychyl, 2013.

Their paper is a review and an argument, so I'd treat it as a way of looking at the problem. It does draw on experiments, including one where people who'd been put in a bad mood spent more time procrastinating.

I can relate to that.

Sitting in a library reading about becoming successful felt pretty good.

Trying to sell something to a complete stranger?

That probably would have been quite uncomfortable.

And given the choice, I kept doing the thing I enjoyed.

Meanwhile, the years went by and I ended up working jobs I didn't particularly like.

Something else I remember is how much time I spent imagining being successful.

Think and Grow Rich asks you to picture yourself already having the money. One of Napoleon Hill's steps is to read your goal out loud twice a day and "see and feel and believe yourself already in possession of the money".

I was pretty good at that part.

I could imagine the car, the clothes, being known.

And there's some research on this too.

Research note Expectations versus fantasies, four studies including graduates looking for work

Gabriele Oettingen and Doris Mayer separated two kinds of positive thinking about the future: judging that a good outcome is likely, and enjoying fantasies about it. In their first study, final-year students at a German university who had more positive fantasies about getting a job had, two years later, sent fewer applications, received fewer job offers and were earning less. Students who simply expected to do well did better. Similar patterns showed up in studies on crushes, exams and recovery from hip surgery. Oettingen and Mayer, 2002.

The job study was small. 83 students took part at the start, and the researchers reached 40 of them two years later. So I wouldn't lean on it too hard.

But it did make me think differently about the book.

Because there's something else in Think and Grow Rich that I conveniently overlooked.

The same chapter that tells you to picture the money also has a step four: "create a definite plan for carrying out your desire, and begin at once, whether you are ready or not, to put this plan into action".

Well, I was certainly doing the imagining.

Not so sure about the rest of it.

I think I enjoyed picturing the result so much that I kept putting off the work involved in getting there.

So what should I have done differently?

I wouldn't tell my younger self to stop reading.

I learned things in that library that have stayed with me ever since.

But I probably should have spent a bit more time actually trying things.

There's another piece of research I found interesting.

Research note Meta-analysis of if-then plans across 94 tests

Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran reviewed research on implementation intentions: plans that spell out when, where and how you'll act, in an "if situation Y happens, then I'll do X" format. Across 94 independent tests involving 8,461 participants, adding one of these plans to a goal had a medium-to-large positive effect on reaching it, compared with holding the goal on its own (d = .65). The plans helped with getting started and with staying on track when something tried to pull people away. Gollwitzer and Sheeran, 2006.

An effect size like that is an average across lots of studies with very different goals. It can't tell you how much it'll help you in particular.

Now, I had plenty of goals.

I wanted to start a business. I wanted to make loads of money.

What I didn't really have was a plan for what I was going to do when I sat down at that library table.

Something as simple as deciding that tomorrow morning I'd spend the first hour making a web page before I opened another book.

That would have been a start.

Because I knew I enjoyed reading about business. I could have happily done that all day.

The bit I needed to get better at was actually trying the stuff I was learning.

I don't think I'd tell him to go back to university.

And I wouldn't tell him he'd wasted his time, either.

I found a book in that library that I still read today.

But I'd definitely tell him to start trying some of them.

Read something interesting? Great.

Now go and have a go at it.

Build that page. See if somebody would pay you for something.

And if it doesn't work, fine. Go back to the library and learn a bit more.

I have no idea whether doing that would have changed how things turned out.

But he'd have found out a lot sooner whether he could actually do any of it.

1. Steel, 2007. Meta-analysis of procrastination's causes and effects, based on 691 correlations. Steel, P. (2007). The nature of procrastination: A meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure. Psychological Bulletin, 133(1), 65–94. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.133.1.65
2. Sirois and Pychyl, 2013. Procrastination as short-term mood repair. Sirois, F., & Pychyl, T. (2013). Procrastination and the priority of short-term mood regulation: Consequences for future self. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 7(2), 115–127. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12011
3. Oettingen and Mayer, 2002. Expectations versus fantasies, four studies including graduates looking for work. Oettingen, G., & Mayer, D. (2002). The motivating function of thinking about the future: Expectations versus fantasies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(5), 1198–1212. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.83.5.1198
4. Gollwitzer and Sheeran, 2006. Meta-analysis of if-then plans across 94 tests. Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69–119. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(06)38002-1

Book quoted: Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich (1937), chapter 2, "Desire", steps 4 and 6. https://sacred-texts.com/nth/tgr/tgr07.htm

Turn one page into one action

What have you been reading, watching or learning about instead of doing?

What's the smallest version of actually doing it that you could try this week?

Finish this sentence: "When ___, I'll ___." Put a time and a place in the first gap.

Before you open the next book on it, decide when and where you'll try one small piece of it.