Today, I got over the pain of a project I had been procrastinating on.

I started a timer and got to work on it. Within just a few seconds, the pain was gone.

I had built the project up in my mind as something worse than it was. I kept bumping it forward on my to-do list, as though my future self would be pleased to see it there tomorrow.

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Nebulous tasks are always the easiest ones to put off.

Even if you have clearly defined what you are going to do (“Write first draft” or “Fill out recommendation form”), there is an ugly amorphousness to certain things on our to-do list. We just don’t know how long they are going to take, and we suspect that it isn’t going to be a fun experience to do them. This one is going to require an uncertain amount of effort, attention, and focus; that one requires us to pull something out of ourselves that we aren’t sure we have. It makes perfect sense to choose something smaller, better defined, or practiced.

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I don’t know if Savage Steve Holland’s Better Off Dead, starring a teenage John Cusack, qualifies as a cult classic, but it’s one of my favorite ‘80s movies.

In one memorable scene (featuring the late, great Vincent Schiavelli as the geometry teacher), Lane Meyer, played by Cusack, experiences that nightmare scenario of being unwittingly unprepared for class.

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My dad loves to talk about his adolescence and young adulthood. He’s got great stories of all of his early jobs, most notably working at his grandmother’s vacation cabins and shop, the Kittery-York Drive-In, and Mount Snow ski resort. But he decided to be proactive and enlist in the Air Force in 1966.

As much as my dad loves hard work, he did not love being in the service, although he made the best of it and has a lot of stories about that, too. His favorite one is to share his early mindset about joining the military. “I just kept thinking about 1970, when I’d be out. It felt so far away.” And then the punchline: “And now 1970 is fifty years ago!”

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Participation trophies have a bad rap.

In sports, it’s certainly reasonable that the trophies, medals, and ribbons go to the team or athlete who won. It’s a contest.

But the arts aren’t like that. Neither is entrepreneurship. Neither is learning a new skill. You win by doing it — by showing up day after day to do the work and get better. It’s not a competition. “The best” is irrelevant.

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