Why Writers Are the Worst Procrastinators

"If you’ve spent most of your life cruising ahead on natural ability, doing what came easily and quickly, every word you write becomes a test of just how much ability you have, every article a referendum on how good a writer you are. As long as you have not written that article, that speech, that novel, it could still be good. Before you take to the keys, you are Proust and Oscar Wilde and George Orwell all rolled up into one delicious package. By the time you’re finished, you’re more like one of those 1940’s pulp hacks who strung hundred-page paragraphs together with semicolons because it was too much effort to figure out where the sentence should end...Rather, they seem to be paralyzed by the prospect of writing something that isn’t very good...the people who dislike challenges think that talent is a fixed thing that you’re either born with or not. The people who relish them think that it’s something you can nourish by doing stuff you’re not good at...Finding out that you’re not as good as you thought is not an opportunity to improve; it’s a signal that you should maybe look into a less demanding career, like mopping floors...They fear nothing so much as finding out that they never had what it takes."

-- by Megan Mcardle, The Atlantic

(http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/02/why-writers-are-the-worst-procrastinators/283773/)