No #183 | August 24, 2025

by Matthew Boyd

Good morning, welcome to the weekly Lead It Cool.

Breaking news: my kids have both started reading more books this summer (and it only took a little bit of bribery😜). So to all the other parents out there, anything is possible!

In this week's Lead It Cool newsletter:

• ⌚Procrastination
• ⛰️Vista Views
• 🤣Row Boats
• 😎Cool Links

⌚Procrastination

This week I came across this quote:

"Procrastination is how you preserve the fantasy of your potential."

That hits deep.

I’ve battled procrastination for as long as I can remember.

Over time, I’ve learned the best way to beat it is with external deadlines that aren’t negotiable. The fear of missing them is powerful, it overrides the temptation to delay. It has worked well in many areas of my life, and it even works for this newsletter. The thought of people opening their inbox on Sunday morning and not seeing this email is enough to get me writing (even on a sunny Saturday).

Tim Urban (of Wait But Why) calls these external triggers the “Panic Monster.”

It’s the external trigger that jolts us awake when procrastination has lulled us into false comfort. The Panic Monster shows up when the stakes suddenly get real, when missing a deadline means frustration, disappointment, or worse.

There’s a scene in the movie Fight Club that captures this phenomenon in an extreme way.

Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt) robs a convenience store, takes the employee’s ID, and tells him that if he doesn’t pursue his dream of becoming a veterinarian, he’ll be back to make sure he regrets it. Suddenly, that employee is more motivated than ever. That’s the Panic Monster at its most brutal: accountability cranked up to eleven.

What I’ve realized is procrastination isn’t something you cure once and for all, it’s something you manage.

The key is finding the right Panic Monsters, the ones that scare you just enough to get moving, but not so much that they paralyze you.

⛰️Vista Views

Have you ever noticed that when you look at a vista or a horizon you become more relaxed and clear-headed?

Well it turns out that there is some science behind it.

Looking at vistas is relaxing because we are forced to switch our vision to panoramic as opposed to tunnel vision (which is what we're in most of the time as we work indoors and stare at screens).

By shifting to panoramic vision, we activate the part of our nervous system associated with relaxation and calmness. We can see all of our surroundings, which reduces our threat of being attacked by a sabre-tooth tiger🐅.

So if you're feeling a bit stressed these days, try to put yourself in situations where you're using your panoramic vision.

🤣Row Boats

Building off my article about boats last weekend. This one is 🤣

😎Cool Links

💪Going to the Gym in the Dark. Maybe you’re a runner, maybe you’re a biker, maybe you practice martial arts or yoga or tai chi, maybe you train for the Ironman or the Spartan race. It’s all great! And it’s all for the same reason—to rehearse, to prepare, to beat into our thick skulls the mindset of embracing adversity.

🤖Stop AI-Shaming Our Previous, Kindly Em Dashes—Please. The punctuation mark in question is the em dash. The idea—the terrible, mistaken idea—is that the use of em dashes in a piece of writing is a sign that the text was generated by AI. Some people have been saying this on, guess where, the internet. The implication is that human writers should avoid em dashes for fear of being mistaken for chatbots. No. Wrong. I am here to raze this implication to the very ground and salt the earth where it stood.

🎻The Violinist Problem. Two hundred years ago, there were a lot of violinists. Many made a living at it. If you were of means and wanted to hear music, your best option was to hire someone to play it for you. Of course, the invention of the phonograph and the radio changed all of that. Now, one great violinist could be heard by millions, not dozens of people.

🌍Finally, if you've got bored kids, a fun activity to do with them everyday is Worldle. It's sort of a geography related quiz game.

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Thank you!

Let’s connect! 💬 You can find me on LinkedIn and Twitter