John Perry Quotes & Sayings

If you want to know what happiness is, you need to go to the philosophers. Start with the Wikipedia article "Philosophy of Happiness." Then go to the Stanford Online Encyclopedia of Philosophy, search for "happiness," and follow through the articles that come up to see what various philosophers have said. Then read the philosophers' works themselves. By the time you're done, you'll probably be dead, whether or not you are happy. — John Perry

The anceints devoted a lifetime to the study of arithmetic; it required days to extract a square root or to multiply two numbers together. Is there any harm in skipping all that, in letting the school boy learn multiplication sums, and in starting his more abstract reasoning at a more advanced point. Where would be the harm in letting the boy assume the truth of many propositions of the first four books of Euclid, letting him assume their truth partly by faith, partly by trial? — John Perry

Plan your day with an eye to your tendency to procrastinate, and put in safeguards to keep it to a minimum. — John Perry

Procrastinators often follow exactly the wrong tack. They try to minimize their commitments, assuming that if they have only a few things to do, they will quit procrastinating and get them done. But this goes contrary to the basic nature of the procrastinator and destroys his most important source of motivation. The few tasks on his list will be, by definition, the most important, and the only way to avoid doing them will be to do nothing. This is a way to become a couch potato, not an effective human being. — John Perry

I was surprised by how many people think of themselves as procrastinators, but, like me, seem to get a lot done anyway. — John Perry

While procrastinating is not a flaw, being a structured procrastinator is actually one way of being pretty productive. — John Perry

The fantasy of doing a task perfectly is common with procrastinators; they set the bar for success very high. Then they are afraid to approach it. As the deadline approaches, they must set the bar lower. — John Perry

Voltaire was a smart cookie. — John Perry

Nothing focuses attention like a real deadline. If you are in a field where life and death, or having a job or not having a job, depends on not missing deadlines, you need to learn to manipulate yourself to meet them; often a good way of doing this is teaming up with non-procrastinators. — John Perry

The essence is that many procrastinators are "structured procrastinators," people who, like me, get a lot done as a way of not working on what they should ideally be working on. — John Perry

Hope provides comfort, and hope does not always require probability. — John Perry

You may lack will power, but that doesn't mean you can't take a lot of steps to make yourself more productive. — John Perry

Taking a long time to do something not worth doing, that is, doing it inefficiently, seems even more useless. — John Perry

Task triage is the habit of making a realistic assessment of what degree of perfection is required for a task at the point of accepting it, so one doesn't need to rely on one's habit of procrastinating to lower the bar. — John Perry