Hyperbole

Not so long ago, really - four days ago when I was leaving for Japan - I read the book The Art of Thinking Clearly at the airport bookstore and learned about planning fantasy. In brief, it's the illusion of grandiosity when we make plans. How often do we allow this idea of grandiosity to go rampage at the buffet dinner? If there's an Olympics for that kind of fantasy, I should have been awarded a thousand world-class gold medals.

Now imagine your teacher gives you an assignment and lets you decide the length of that paper and fix up the deadline to hand in the final script. The temptation is oh so great. You might have known that you'd failed to hand in term papers in due course, but you guess you're better this time. Your - I should say our - tendency always is to come up with an exaggerated goal. Plus, we make wrong estimation how quick we can achieve the goal. We promise way more than we can deliver. We set the alarm clock at such unrealistic hour that we sleep through it. We have a natural penchant for the rose-tinted spectacles.

If I'm candid, I do not believe the lesson of planning fantasy made me worry one jot about how easy I fall prey to the fantasy. You can bet I still have that fantasy. That's the reason I have been kicking myself to finish as many items on my to-do list as possible during the last four days. The good news is I did manage to complete a peer review for a medical journal, write few magazine and newsletter articles, reply a number of unreturned e-mails at my hotel room.

"Not bad," I congratulated myself and packed my luggage (before checking out tomorrow). Then I remembered that I'd brought two books and few magazines for this trip. Oh drats, I didn't even finish one book.

Guess the second book will just have to wait till next trip.

Never mind, I tried to find a crumb of comfort by reminding myself that the title of that unfinished book is The Slow Fix.