Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator | Tim Urban | TED

"When I read the emails from thousands of people, I noticed a heavy, shared frustration. These weren't people who had tried and failed; they were people who felt like spectators in their own lives. They were stuck in the Dark Playground for years at a time, not because the work was too hard, but because they couldn't get past the monkey at the starting line. The frustration was not that they couldn't achieve their dreams; it's that they weren't even able to start chasing them." — [12:33](https://youtu.be/arj7oStGLkU?t=753)

"We often joke about the funny, short-term procrastination of cramming for a paper, but we ignore the version where the Instant Gratification Monkey wins every single day because there is no 'Due Date.' When you look at a Life Calendar and see how few boxes we actually have, you realize that this long-term kind of procrastination is much less visible but far more tragic; it is the source of a huge amount of long-term unhappiness and regrets for those who realized too late that the boxes were running out." — [13:03](https://youtu.be/arj7oStGLkU?t=783)