Victor Hugo’s Secret to Starting (And Why You Can't)

Why do you put off the things you actually want to do? You finally get a free evening for the guitar, the story, the plan you've wanted for a year, and you spend it cleaning the fridge. Psychologists have caught this happening in a lab. Then there's Victor Hugo, months late on Notre-Dame de Paris, and the very strange thing he did to finally write it. Chapters 0:00 The fridge instead of the guitar 0:39 A famous writer who couldn't start 1:35 What putting it off does to you 2:21 The frozen mood experiment 3:11 Why even the guitar gets put off 3:48 You, later 4:14 How the book got written 5:19 The kindest study Sources Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, Oeuvres completes (ed. Paul Meurice, 1904), notes quoting Adele Hugo: https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Notre-... Tice & Baumeister (1997), Psychological Science 8(6): https://www.psychologicalscience.org/... Tice, Bratslavsky & Baumeister (2001), JPSP 80(1): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11195... Sirois & Pychyl (2013), Social and Personality Psychology Compass 7(2): https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/91793/ Pronin, Olivola & Kennedy (2008), PSPB 34(2): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18156... Wohl, Pychyl & Bennett (2010), Personality and Individual Differences 48(7): https://bps.org.uk/research-digest/cu... Narration: AI voice. Research and drawings: Inside the Ordeal.