Tag: Procrastination

Categories
English Growth Money Procrastination

“Second hand procrastination” is it a thing?

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A few weeks back, in my post titled “What kind of procrastinator are you?” we talked about the different kinds of procrastinators. I want to revisit and expand on the ones that have the “student’s syndrome”. We’ve seen how they leave until the last possible moment their tasks, and then rush on to do them, their bodies full of adrenaline, cortisol, from within, and from the outside they might use stimulants such as caffeine, taurine or even others even more intense substances. In the future I will refer to this type of procrastinator as “The Rusher”, because, he rushes to get his job done, sometimes even regardless of the consequences.

The Rusher goes to extremes to get the things done at the last possible moment, just when the pressure, exhilaration and anxiety surpass his content and calm brought by doing something else. Now, this would be the end of the conversation if not for the fact that, more often than not, this rush brings unwanted results. As he sprints to the finish line The Rusher might want to cut some corners, maybe not on the job he’s doing if he’s got high standards, but on the other aspects of his personal and professional lives.

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The Rusher, is by his procrastination a risk taker, as he won’t be taking into account that Murphy may break havoc with his plans of finishing the task. That’s when an unexpected outage in the Internet, an empty printer cartridge, a late delivery all become life or death emergencies that have to be handled at any cost. The procrastinator suddenly starts asking for favors left and right, and his relationships might suffer from this or he might end up indebted much more for this help for much more than the value of the favor entitled in other more normal situations. Also our Rusher might, for example, neglect his commitments to other people or other projects, stressing unwittingly those relationships. All of this without the need of there being an extra setback on the task at hand. The simple fact of having to set everything aside because all available time, every ounce of energy, all of the attention have to be concentrated on the task can cause problems with others. A commitment previously engaged, could be even previous to the assignment or existence of the task, might have to be canceled because it’s priority suddenly drops, as the task’s rises. That commitment is now a casualty of The Rusher’s procrastination. The Rusher is no longer harming himself, he’s harming others who now suffer from this “Second Hand Procrastination”. As second hand smoking is unhealthy second hand procrastination is also harmful to the ones around the procrastinator. It cost them his time, his affections, and it can even have a monetary cost with things as late fees, non refundable tickets going to waste and others. In his professional life The Rusher might even be affecting his coworkers and subordinates, by making them miss important personal activities because of having to rush to finish some task that was waiting on his desk for 2 weeks but now has to be finished by morning. This is one of multitude of reasons why reducing our procrastinating is important. It gives us more clarity, more options, improves the chances of success and might even save a relationship or two.

Has this nudged you to work on your procrastination issues? If so, or even if not, I’d love to read some comments bellow, in the mean time, have an excellent week, and remember that on Sunday it’s Saint Valentine, so better be prepared so you don’t have to cancel it with a work emergency, lack of reservations or whatever other thing you’re putting off.

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Actionable English Procrastination

Fighting procrastination tips

Hello my readers. Up until now I’ve been talking and talking about many aspects of procrastination, and that’s fun and, well, an excellent way for you to procrastinate by reading about procrastination. Now I’m going to give the very first actionable tip to help you fight procrastination. As we’ve seen before there are many types of procrastinators and different reasons for procrastinating, so we’ll need a set of tools to be effective and efficient. One of the reasons for procrastination is facing distractions. We all have now machines around us that are fighting for our attention, and on top of that we install more apps to let them do this task better. We’ve got social media, games on top of social media, video sites, music sites, blogs like this one but less useful. Just to see how successful this companies are ate getting our attention I’ll give you some information. As of the moment of this writing, the market value of Facebook is 274 billion dollars, that of General Electric is 283 billion dollars, and that of General Motors… 45.5 billion dollars. Can you see that? Distraction is big big business. Now, we all love our Facebook, I’m not saying you should go cold turkey, uninstall the apps and curse your smartphone or computer, that would only be necessary on the most extreme cases. But what I’m going to propose is a two step strategy, two phases that will let you do your work and have fun too. The first step is to eliminate those distractions, and by that I mean all the literal bells and whistles that our apps have turned on by default. They all shout for our attention “Hey, look, someone commented on that post about a lost puppy your friend put up this morning, check it out!” or the more common “You’ve got mail”. Most phones have the “do not disturb” function or at least the one that lets you turn the ringers off. If you’re only on your computer you can shut your email down, close your browser and even turn your speakers off to quiet it down. Do you need more privacy? Shut your door, let the calls go to voicemail, that’s what it’s there for, and do your work.

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We are ready then to work, and that’s awesome. We’ve eliminated distractions and we are prepared, pumped up because we will be able to work. We feel great and maybe we might even have won a little reward, maybe we can get a cup of coffee and… Stop, that’s procrastination too. Here’s where the second part comes in, and it’s the most important. We can see what happened before. We feel happy because we’ve accomplished a prepping task and here comes the pleasure seeking part of our brains claiming it’s reward. We are recognizing some patterns in our behavior. We can use them as triggers to actively change our responses. By first recognizing this pattern we can prepare a different response to it, so we must first do that, recognize them. Some are very easy to spot, they come in the form of “There’s a lot of time left, I’ll do this later” trigger, our response has to change from “yes, drop it” to “you’re trying to get out from doing this, let’s start now” We can frame this in IF THEN statements and be ready for them easily, I’ll give some examples next.

  • IF I catch myself saying “there’s lots of time, maybe later” THEN I’ll tell myself “Maybe, but you can start now so do it now”
  • IF I catch myself saying “I don’t feel like doing this now” THEN I’ll tell myself “You won’t feel like doing it later either, it’s a horrible task, let’s get it over with ASAP”
  • IF I catch myself saying “I need to prepare more” AND I know for a fact that I can’t be more prepared THEN I’ll tell myself “You’re as ready as you’ll ever be, buckle up because we’re doing this”

This mechanical responses can seem simple and silly, but that’s the beauty of it, they work. Try them, write them down on a notebook and check them out, grow your list. You can even write them down on index cards and carry them around with you, like little affirmations this is the software you’re going to use in your head to help you respond to this procrastinating inciting triggers.
If you liked this tips I’d really love to read your comments, you can share with us some of your triggers and responses, we can all learn from each other, so please post some here.

Categories
English Growth Procrastination

“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”

Some of you might have recognized the title of this post. Others are reading it for the first time but, after thinking a little, are beginning to agree with it. It’s known as Parkinson’s Law and it’s one of those bits of wisdom that observation of the world brings us. This one’s a big deal for us procrastinators in two very different and seemingly opposite ways. A few posts back I talked about the Student Syndrome and if you remember, how it refers to the tendency people, but mostly students, have to put off work on an assignment until the last possible moment. This tendency helps them, some say, to get fired up about the work, getting adrenaline pumping through their veins, and igniting the passion in them. In the stricter of terms this is correct, although it is very risky because it doesn’t leave any margin of error to cope with another law derived from observation, Murphy’s Law. In spite of all it’s flaws The Student Syndrome does one thing very well, and that is curb Parkinson’s Law. When we only allocate the least amount of time possible to a task then we can’t be afraid of that task taking all of our time. So you’d think this is an apology for procrastination, but it is not, because even though this could be a way for procrastinators to rationalize their ways it is also true that we can limit Parkinson’s Law on our own. Let’s go back to the Law that says that “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. It’s a perfectionist’s way of life and most of us can certainly relate to this. While we’ve got time to deliver we won’t stop reviewing, verifying, checking once, twice, thrice and more the work we’ve done. Or we can spend a lot of time previous to starting the work, procrastination 101. We can research again and again, on related topics, on the tools of our trade, on the merchants of said tools, etc. Researching before and reviewing after are not problems on their own, but they are a problem when they get in the way of doing the work. So, what can we do? Well, it’s so easy you will tell me to find a real solution, and that is we can limit the time we allow ourselves to work on the task, that’s it. Do we think it’ll take 4 hours to complete? DeskReadyForWorkWell, then complete it in that much time, after which you’re not allowed to go back to the task under some sort of self imposed penalty. You need to penalize yourself as if you were going over the deadline because if you are lenient you won’t take this seriously. Penalties will only be necessary at first don’t you worry, because you’ll have to limit the time you spend on everything, and I mean EVERYTHING. And here’s my best advice of the day for you. In order to be able to limit the time you set for your activities you’ll first have to know what your activities are, what tasks need be done and which are routine activities you already have or want to adopt. What? You say it seems I’m going to talk about a schedule? Well, you’re right. For the worst procrastinators of us a detailed schedule will be necessary if we want to use our times the best we can. I for one have a terrible memory and if I don’t allocate the hours of the day for my different tasks and habits I might skip something. If you’re comfortable with having it all in your head, you don’t drop any ball, and feel good freestyling it, by all means, be my guest, but if you feel anxious, lose focus and track of time, then you should schedule everything. So, that’s it, Parkinson’s Law can make us lazy crazy and give us the impression of accomplishment when we really wasted lots of time if we ignore it’s existence. When we tame it, we can use it to our advantage and let it work for us, just like we do with the law of gravity. Another tool for your tool belt.

Books mentioned in this post

Parkinson’s Law, and Other Studies in Administration

Categories
English Mindfulness Procrastination

A quick thought on mindfulness

As this is my first post of 2016 I’d like to thank all of you who have being reading me, it’s a good feeling to be read even if it’s only one person. As you’ve seen by now procrastination is my demon. I’ve lost many things to this demon and thus I’m committed to fighting it and help my fellow procrastinators transform into actors of their own lives, creators of their destinies, masters of their present and future. As we’ve seen so far on other posts, if you haven’t read them do it now, I’ll wait, they’re not that long, it should take you at most 5 minutes, so go, now, yes now. Ok, as I was saying, as we’ve talked before procrastinators are not all the same, and so not one technique will work on all procrastinators, we need many. The same way that we’ve heard the saying that when the only tool you’ve got is a hammer every problem looks like a nail here we need to go beyond a single method to combat procrastination. We can use focus and visualization as we’ve seen before. This tools allow us to have a better grasp on what it its we want to accomplish, our goals. Visualization helps us first by establishing what “done” looks like. We’re not talking here o a single or multiple metrics goal, as would a business KPI, or a timed performance for an athlete, we are talking about a visualization of much more than that. Again, I’m not trying to be esoteric here, I’m very much grounded, but what I’m saying is that a description would require a narrative worthy of a novel, and unless you are or want to be a writer this is not necessary. I’m talking about establishing how we will feel when we’re done, how we will look like when we are done, how our environment will be when we are done. This is a visualization that will help our brains set targets and our actions will then be compared to those targets, we will feel stress building if we are pulling on the wrong direction. So that for visualization, now, for focus. We need to focus our actions to go in the sense of that visualization. We need to set boundaries to our attention so we can achieve our goals. When we don’t set these boundaries what we do can in the worst case destroy work we had already done to achieve our goals. Focus allows us to work, advance, build on the path of our goals. Now, having focus is not easy, we are easily distracted, all the time something is there competing for our attention, be it external like social media or plain old media or be it internal, our own thoughts. We can blame every gadget we own for our lack of attention, but we are, by far, our worst distractor. We are constantly being bombarded by wandering that emerges from the most subtle reference from our senses and mostly from the last wandering thought and build a chain of disperse ideas linked by the most obscure references. And now, here we are, at last, ready to talk about mindfulness. MeditatingInBrugesWhat does it have to do with focus and visualization? Mindfulness is a tool for us to use, a way on which to travel to gain better focus and be better at visualizing. By practicing mindfulness we learn how to be in the moment by stepping in front of our wandering minds and not letting those pesky meandering thoughts catch our attention. Current Internet mythology establishes our thoughts at about 50,000 to 70,000 different ones per day, most would have to come and go and come back some more. Mindfulness trains by constant repetition, and if we are attentive enough we could call it deliberate practice, to keep those thoughts at bay and get a genuine sense of calm, but also it trains us to swiftly bring our focus back when distracted and that’s the most important part. By using this ability we can bring our focus back when we get distracted from our tasks or from our visualizing. Visualization is a difficult exercise because we can be thrown to every other direction by any distinct thought, but realizing this and getting back on track, by bringing the focus back to our visualization, we’ll be able to set our paths to our goals and have a safe journey.

So, have you thought about mindfulness before and are you interested in it? I’d love to read your comments.

Categories
English Growth Mindset Procrastination

Seeing the future.

Hello readers. I won’t count you today because we are on holidays and maybe you are not here, you’re all on vacation somewhere. So, from the title you might enquire that I have gone metha or something. Nothing further from that, except we are going to talk about VISUALIZATION (in upper case for all you skimmers). Again some might ask “What does visualization have got to do with fighting procrastination?” Glad you asked, and the answer is a lot. When you visualize you are bringing attention to something that is not real. You can visualize about anything, and let’s do a quick exercise right now. Please, if you will, close your eyes and visualize your best friend from elementary school and see him or her, then after a little while open our eyes again. Go ahead, do it, I’ll wait right here. Did you do it? Good. Now, think about how hard that was. It wasn’t, was it? And that’s all there is to it really. You can visualize things that are not right there and that are tucked away in your memory. Now, can you visualize non existing things?Visualization Yes you can, just as easily, as long as you don’t try to cram too many details all at once. You have to let your mind build the visualization on the fly. So, you may ask now what does this have to do with procrastination? Good question, and the answer is better. You see, when you visualize you are creating the subject of your visualization. No, I’m not talking about the law of attraction or something like that. What I mean is that the image you are creating in your brain is pretty real, in your brain, so you might as well use it like that. So, for our purpose of procrastination let’s put it to the test. Let’s say you have a pending task that you are dreading, finishing a report for instance, and you need some data for that, and the only person who can give your this data is someone you can’t really stand. I can see it right now, you are dreading doing the report because you are dreading getting the data. You procrastinate, and then some more. Making matters worse you know you are procrastinating, which makes you anxious, and then more anxiety comes from you imagining the dreadful encounter. You are visualizing the encounter and materializing in your brain over and over and over and you get the point, right? No? Let me explain. By postponing the dreadful task you are suffering much more than by executing the dreadful task, how crazy is that? Now that we know a little bit what is happening we can do something about it. The first option is the “band aid method” that it minimizes the suffering by going at it fast and in one single motion. That’s the best option if the fear is not paralyzing. The second option is the “Nike method” and “just do it”, similar to the first but here the speed is not in the process but in going at it as soon as you know you have to do something unpleasant, go get it done and relax after that, you’re done. Again, pretty good advice, minimizes suffering by not allowing you to suffer except for the task itself. This two advices are pretty good, when you’re not paralyzed by fear. The last advice is a little more complicated and here is where visualization comes in. You are paralyzed by fear, you are dreading the task as much as a condemned man dreads the gallows. What you can do is start visualizing what it will be like after you’ve done what you dread, how it’s all OK now and how much better it is now that you’ve done this. Visualize it again and again. Even if you know this is pretty unlikely, visualize it, you won’t “make it happen” but your brain will be better prepared for it, and your fear will subside. When your fear subsides enough that you can move then you can “Nike” it and “band-aid” it and then you’ll be done. This has helped me recently on number of occasions when I needed it. I hope you can benefit from this little technique, if so, or not, leave a comment and tell me what has helped you fight your procrastination when you dread the task so much you’d rather book an appointment with the dentist.

Categories
English Growth Procrastination

What kind of procrastinator are you?

Hello my triad. Read the title of this week’s post again. Right, now, you might say “hey, wait a minute, I am not a procrastinator” to what I’d have to answer “Baloney”. If you are not then I need to CAPTCHA this site and fend off machine readers because, if you’re human, you’re a procrastinator. So, we’ll talk about different kinds of procrastinators and you’ll be able to identify yourself. It’ll be a fun experience in self exploration, you’ll see. I’m in no way saying this classification is final, if you google “different kinds of procrastinator” which I did, Google’s a procrastinator’s best friend, you find that there are many posts like this one, some even better, and that they don’t have the same numbers. So I’m going to use a simple one, and then on future posts we’ll be able to elaborate. The simplest classification would be a couple, but that’s not going to cut it this time, so we’ll go with a triad, hey, just as many as my readers, maybe there one of each in here. So, the three types of procrastinators very different amongst them, the reason they procrastinate is not the same and the things they procrastinate on are not the same either.Napping The first one we can remember, and that’s the person who suffers from the “student’s syndrome” and is proud of it. We’ve all been students here, some for a longer time others not that long ago but we’ve all been there and done that. The majority of students tend to put off work to the last possible moment, for instance, if an essay is given now, just before the new year’s break, and it’s due on, let’s say the third week of February you’ve got a better chance of winning the lottery than having half of the class start the work on the week that they come back from the break. “What’s the rush” they might say, “I need to do more research” might be another “reason” that’s a rationalization and not a reason. But hey, let’s be fair, not only students suffer from this, if that was the case then they wouldn’t be so long lines and online jams on tax return season, or other mandatory tasks that governments and organizations make us do. And most of them are easy to do, but yet they’re put off to the last minute. So, why do we do this to ourselves? Well, some research combines two reasons. Our lack of vision and our like of cortisol and adrenaline. Our lack of vision makes us think that a certain task will take less time and will not be plagued by interruptions and accidents. When we estimate the time a task will take to be finished we remember how much a similar task took. The problem is our memory isn’t flawless and we tend to make good things bigger and minimize bad things. This is nice and leads to a healthier life, but it’s awful as a measuring stick to do a benchmark on. Compound that with the fact that we also tend to forget that Murphy exists, and all hell breaks loose. Now we have less time to do our task, we must decide how to do “the impossible” and that’s where the second reason kicks in. With the stress we caused our bodies and the fear that’s starting to materialize the hormones start rushing on our system. We feel cortisol but also adrenaline levels rise and we get a rush out of it. We feel that rush and we work nonstop to finish the assignment, the project, a report. Lucky for most we can turn in a good enough work, and we feel happy about our heroics, but we know it wasn’t our best effort, but hey, under the circumstances, in the end, we pulled it off on such a short amount of time. We put ourselves into an ego boosting trip. If the work is good then we are ecstatic for the amazing job we did, if the work is not good enough we find tons of excuses of why that was, most of them have to do with not having enough time or being hit by Murphy when we know it was us who decided to start working much later. There you have it. The first kind of procrastinator, the student. I know I behave like this sometimes, much less now than when I was an actual student. Do you remember when you acted like this? Leave a comment if you’d like to share with us.

Categories
English Growth Mindset

Where was I? Oh yes, a post on focus.

Hello again my faithful triad of readers. After friday’s post maybe I’ve convinced a fourth one to come join you so you will be a quartet from now on. If you don’t know what post I mean go check it out, it was fun, not funny. Again, where was I? Laser focus Right, FOCUS, I was going to talk to you about focus. As I see focus is the ability to concentrate one’s efforts or thoughts on a single object or idea. Pretty simple right? Well, as we’ve seen I am a little odd so focusing for me is very difficult. I get distracted by almost everything, or everything, I’m not sure. I really have to work hard to be able to focus, and that’s where problems start, because you see, I use part of my energy just to be able to use my energy, very silly if you ask me. So, to overcome this, I am exercising on pure and simple focus right now. In my morning meditation I focus on different parts of my body and I cycle through them. And I go like that for 30 to 40 minutes. Again, it sounds silly but I know better now than to dismiss practice. You know, unlike most of you I didn’t practice a sport regularly as a boy, so that part got missed by me, this is something I have to learn now, and it’s not easy. Back to focusing, see what I mean. During my day I have to worry, as you might have to, about many things pertaining to my work, home, or personal spheres. Each one requires my attention. And I try to focus on each particular task, until something else pops up that is. This is where productivity experts of many sorts have been able to help most of us. Many of you have already a productivity routine in place, but some don’t. I’ve found out that the most important part of this routines is being able to focus anew on the task at hand when focus gets broken. We can try to prevent external interruptions, and we must, but there will always be internal interruptions that can’t be muted, sent to voice-mail or unattended in some way. And those are the most frequent ones. So, in the coming weeks I’ll try to post regularly on this topic, much more pertinent this blogs unstated mission (note to self, write the mission out, not just think about it) of helping people fight procrastination. If you are asking “how a productivity hack can help me prevent procrastination?” then either you need this more than you think or the cause of your procrastination is deeper, and that’s another subject that we’ll take on on another post. In the mean time, how do you think that focusing and regaining focus immediately would help you finish your tasks better? How about achieving your goals? How about having a better life?

Categories
English Procrastination Stories

Patience is a virtue, so they say

Marshmallows

So here I am, waiting for some news from a client on what will happen with a project I’ve been pitching. They haven’t given me an answer, not a yes or a no. It gets to be really annoying doesn’t it? Waiting, expecting, imagining a bunch of “what ifs”. These “what ifs” feed our wild imagination that goes to places we wouldn’t have thought even existed in our minds. They build their own worlds with wonderful scaffolding that grows upwards in the most beautiful dreams, and that digs down dip into the most awful nightmares. Because we imagine great futures with this result as a starting point, don’t we? Nah, I’m sure you’ve never done it, am I right? But dreaming is not the problem here. The problem is when our next decisions come with the dream as a starting point. Because you know, “what if”. So we need now to be patient. We must take a page from meditation and learn to bring the focus to where we want it when our mind strays. Curiously this also happens to have something to do with procrastination. because one of the characteristics of a certain type of procrastinator is his inability to delay gratification. This procrastinator is impatient. He wants it all and he wants it now as the song says. His limbic system wins the battle over his prefrontal cortex and then he loses all control over his impulses. Whatever brings the most immediate pleasure is what gets done, what is important gets shoved to the later drawer.

Marshmallows
Marshmallows

This is the basis of the famous marshmallow experiment conducted at Stanford some 40 years ago by Walter Mischel. If you don’t know it I’ll give you the basics here. In this experiment the investigators tested the ability to wait of children of both sexes aged 7 to 9. What the kids had to wait for was, as the name may be implied already, eating a marshmallow. More precisely the experimenter left the kid in a room with a marshmallow and then told the kid that he or she could eat it immediately, but if they waited for him to come back a few minutes later he’d give them another marshmallow, so they could eat in fact two. The experimenter left the room and filmed the results. This is pretty much it. Then there’s the follow up studies, after many years follow up interviews were done with these kids, and the results were that those kids that showed more restraint, more patience, were the ones with better grades, were better adapted and more mature. Does that mean that we are screwed if we’re impatient? No, patience is an ability we can develop, like many others, the funny thing is that it requires dedication, and that means, yes, some patience, so it’s a little of a catch-22, but not that much. You can exercise patience by giving yourself a buffer time before making a choice or taking some action, like 5 minutes before pushing that “buy now” button on the web site, or sleeping on it when you have a big decision to take. I like to meditate. What do you like?

Categories
English Stories

The man with the torn coat

A man who used to work in an office in a big building downtown used the subway everyday for his commute. He was lucky enough to live in a city where public transportation works relatively well and this allowed him to walk a little every day, it was good exercise Beggar_with_a_Lyra,_by_Svishchev-Paola_1900severyday too. He would pass an old man who used to beg on a corner and everyday he would give him some coins, in one occasion he even gave him a bill. This daily ritual repeated itself until one day when the man had no coins and no bills, for the first time he was barely making ends meet. “I work hard for my money and I deserve a prize from time to time” he thought as he was buying that pair of gorgeous and expensive Italian shoes on which he had spent much more than he used to. He didn’t expect to be ambushed by all the emotions that he felt when he saw the old man and wasn’t able to give him any money. Surprise was the first emotion, surprise when he realized it was the corner where the old man used to be and that he couldn’t help him today. Shame was the second, shame when he tried to go back on his steps but they gaze of the old man crossed his own, who, upon seeing him, smiled, just a little. The third one was rage, the rage that he felt with the old man for making him feel ashamed, after all, it wasn’t his duty to give him money. Sadness was the fourth the sadness that the old man shared with him when the man told him “I don’t have money today old man, can’t you see I bought this gorgeous and expensive shoes and spent it all?” that’s when the smile on the old man’s face turned into a frown of extreme sorrow.  So great why the sadness in the old man’s face that the fifth emotion was curiosity, because by no means the amount that he used to give him could mean so much to him to cause this much pain. “Easy old chap, I’ll double it next time, don’t be sad, I owe you” he told him trying comfort him. The old man answered “What makes me sad is seeing myself, you know, I was you once, but somebody stole all my money and I ended up here, in the street
begging for money to survive.” The man was outraged, his sixth emotion, and said “that’s horrible, did you catch him? Did he escape? Why didn’t you get any of it back?” The old man answered serenely “He didn’t escape, as a matter of fact I see him all the time, the man who stole all my money and no I couldn’t get any of it back because he spend it all, every last cent.” The man felt his seventh emotion, disbelief. “How come you can see him everyday?” he said “at least tell me who he is so I can give him a piece of my mind, he cannot steal and not be punished” The old man stood up and stood tall, put his hand on the man’s shoulder and said “the thief who took all my money and left me begging on the streets is me, it was me because I didn’t save when I was young like you, for having spent it on shoes, travels, cars and restaurants, like you. That’s that’s why I was so sad to see you today with no money, because this will be the first of many days like that. You don’t owe me anything, but you owe yourself you owe the old man you will be one day.” The last motion of the men she was taking the old man’s hand in his was gratefulness.