In 1934, Upton Sinclair ran for governor of California and published a book about it first. Not a campaign book — a book written in the past tense, describing the brilliant policies he had enacted as governor of a state he had not yet been elected to lead.

His friend Carey McWilliams watched the campaign fall apart and wrote about what he observed: "Upton not only realized that he would be defeated but seemed somehow to have lost interest in the campaign. In that vivid imagination of his, he had already acted out the part of 'I, Governor of California'... so why bother to enact it in real life?"

The book was a best seller. The campaign was a failure. He lost by more than ten percentage points.

What happened to Sinclair happens to most of us at a smaller scale, more quietly, without a bestselling book. His talk got out ahead of his campaign and the will to bridge the gap collapsed. The imagined version had already been completed. The real one had nothing left to offer.

At the beginning of any path, we're excited and nervous. So we seek to comfort ourselves externally instead of inwardly." The talk is not laziness. It is fear management. And fear management that works well enough to make the actual work feel unnecessary.

Research shows that after a certain point, the mind begins to confuse goal visualization with actual progress.

After enough time spent explaining, discussing, and describing a task, the brain registers a form of completion even without anything having been completed.


This is the mechanism. Talk depletes. It draws from the same resources as action, and once that energy is spent on describing the work, there is less available for doing it. Success requires a full 100 percent of our effort, and talk flitters part of that effort away before we can use it.

Reflect on this:

Where are you talking about a goal more than actually working on it, and what would happen if you started acting instead?

^{Share your reflections in the poll at the end of the email.}