Procrastination

England is not famous for producing skilled footballers. But there was Matthew Le Tissier. He had no pace, but he was extremely skilled, strong, and scored many goals. He played for a club called Southampton who was always one of the weaker sides in the top flight of English football, yet he comfortably kept them in the Premier League year after year. Recently, their financial troubles has been one of the sad stories of English football.

In Southampton, during his time, he was regarded as God. He was the captain of the side. He scored spectacular goals. He took around 50 penalties over his career and only ever missed one. But invariably his name has the adjective “enigmatic”. You never knew whether he was going to be the man of the match, or whether he was going to fade away and be an anonymous watcher. No matter, for somebody of his caliber to be playing for one club, a minor one at that, for most of his career, was extremely rare.

In contrast, when he was a youngster, there was another young striker playing alongside him at Southampton. He was considerably less talented all round, but he had a very forceful personality, and he always gave his best no matter what. He moved to Blackburn where he won the league, and then to Newcastle, his hometown club, where he was their biggest player. He came closer than anybody before or since to winning the European championship on home soil in 1996. There were a few good years, where they qualified for the Champion’s league, even though they never actually won anything. He was Alan Shearer.

And while Alan Shearer was almost always in the England team, the same was not true of Matt Le Tissier. He only had less than 10 caps. There were coaches who tried to sign him away from Southampton, Glenn Hoddle for Chelsea and Terry Venables for Tottenham. But later on when both were England managers, neither gave Le Tissier many chances to wear the England shirt.

It probably is the case that both of them recognised that Le Tissier was a talented person, no more. He didn’t have the fire or the ambition. If he didn’t want to get to the next level, then he shouldn’t represent England either.

I was first called a procrastinator in primary school. I think back then my mother had great ambitions for me. At least, much more than she had for herself. Maybe I never got into the habit of liking what I did. But I took my time to do things, and never ever pounced into it whole heartedly. I suppose that was my nature.

The central issue of my life had already been articulated for me at a very young age, by a teacher: “it’s never about what you’re capable of. It’s about whether or not you’re ever going to use your gifts.”

I had always been an above average student when teachers had this opinion I could have been one of the best. But you never know, perhaps my talent was merely being able to appear intelligent. Some people look like owls although when you scratch under the surface they are pretty empty inside. I’m not one to trust anybody’s judgement completely.

I got things done, though. There were a few things, but they were things that weren’t competitive in nature. Creative endeavours, being the class clown, invention competitions. Stuff like that. There were wonderful things that happened during my school days, that were the result of daydreaming. I suppose I never told my parents what I really wanted to do, and after hearing them nag at me about why I never did A, in the end I could still show them B, C and D, which they never asked for. A classmate once said to me, “why are you bitching about how crappy your record is? You’ve still got a whole lot of things”. Yes, but no leadership positions, mind.

The Myers Briggs test indicator has this axis of whether you are a “perceiving” or a “judging” type. I was firmly in the perceiving area. I never liked simple explanations when the truth was more complex. I often got irritated when my boss told me to water down the story for an audience. I got annoyed when some people are always so sure of themselves, although I do notice something: first, they will be right a great number of the time, and second, when they are wrong people seem more willing to forgive them. But people like that, people who act on their first impulses, aren’t generally the creative types. The creative types are the ones who are willing to entertain crazy ideas and make them work, or are willing to wait and do nothing until the perfect idea or the perfect opportunity comes along.

I ended up taking on a job that I wasn’t 100% sure that I enjoyed. There were people who were always telling me that since Maths was my best subject, I should do something that was related to it, and this job had a lot of Maths. But somewhere I knew that it wasn’t true that Maths was my best subject: I was good at a whole lot of other things too, it was merely the first subject that I took to. It was horrifying to discover that perhaps I wasn’t going to enjoy it that much. But I didn’t do much to look elsewhere.

I “majored” in Maths at school. I think it was lazy thinking, after all it was the subject that I could do, that was very well respected. I could have done something more useful, or something that I liked more. But I got lazy or stubborn and didn’t want to change. I could have been a computer science major instead.

I couldn’t decide what I liked best either, so I just tried a bit of everything. It was very disorientating, even though I was sorda glad that I had a very varied education. Although sometimes I wondered whether I was putting in a lot of effort at trying to master a discipline that I would never see again in my life. Perhaps it could have been a bit more focused. Still it is very amusing when people point at me and say, “maths guy”.

Some people have judged me and said that I’m a wanderer, a drifter. It’s not entirely false. But it’s a little unfair when they always think that this is a weakness rather than a strength. Eventually, I learnt: you can only do one thing at a time. So at any one time, you should decide what you’re going to do, give it your best, concentrate, and do well so that even though you never have to do it again, there will be no regrets.

I could have gone around and immersed myself in American culture instead of holing myself up in books. But I just felt that books had more to teach you than popular culture, most of which was junk anyway. Unfortunately it’s popular culture, rather than books that makes it easier for you got earn friends.

There were always things that people were going to do in a lifetime: grow up, earn money, start a family, settle down. I have dithered at these things. Financial planning, learning to drive a car, getting your own house, these are things that I did late in life, later than many of my peers. There were things that stood in my way: building the perfect CD collection, downloading MP3s, watching movies, reading books. Especially reading books.

There was this once, when I thought that I would go after a girl. We had 1 or 2 dates, nothing special. I decided to stop for a while while I did other things – I can’t remember the reason I gave myself for procrastinating, but it couldn’t be important because I can’t remember it now. Maybe I wanted to spend the weekends reading books instead of wracking my brains thinking about what to do for the next date? Maybe it was the marathon? But the marathon was 5 months ago. In any case, 6 months passed, a year, and suddenly I get some rumours that she’s going out with somebody else. There’s nothing to blame people for, only myself for being so spectacularly stupid. (Edit: you can read more about this episode when I get down to publishing an entry called “teapot”)

On one hand, it shouldn’t make any difference because, both before and after I wasn’t doing anything. On the other hand, I learnt about this when I was about to go look for her again. It’s very irritating and disruptive of my plans.

There are a lot of things that were fun when I was younger, but I outgrown them. I used to take a stack of books to an all night café on Saturday night and read the whole night, or at least as much as I could. Either that or I would go watch a football match at a coffeeshop and read a book at the same time. Some of the other patrons look at me, bemused. One of them even called me to the face, “our friend with the books” But to me it makes perfect sense to watch matches and read books because you can always have something to do when all the boring stuff is going on, which is 50% of the time.

It was good while it lasted. I’ve blogged about this before, you felt like because you were putting in that much effort, that you were doing something with your life. There are nice places in Singapore that are not overcrowded, even on weekends. You can pick up I-S magazines and there will be cafes in out of the way areas located where lots of wealthy angmohs stay. Some are expensive, some less so, but you will not get hordes of screaming kids and maids like in a suburban mall.

But I think gradually I was doing so much of it that it felt like overkill. In retrospect maybe I wasn’t really enjoying it but rather the placid stresslessness of doing nothing.

In the last few weeks, I had decided to stop my lazy, horizontal lifestyle. There were a few factors. Maybe it was a change of job scope which made me busier. Maybe it was my getting older and realising that time was running out. Maybe my first foray into dating in a long long time forced me to reconsider how I have to live my life so that my dreams for myself don’t remain just that – as dreams. Maybe I just needed to live out a whole era of procrastination in order to learn that it wasn’t really what I should be doing.