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Comment by bgurupra | Hacker News Reader

I have had several instances in my life where I dived into what were difficult things for me with gusto - for example when I was in school and was trying to write a program in C to calculate all the anagrams , I did not even have a computer but was up almost all night writing it on a piece of paper and rushed in the morning to a place with access to a computer to test my program on paper.That was just an example - I have had several such experiences.Almost makes me think maybe you just can't "trick' yourself into anything but just have to find something genuinely fun for you to do!As long as it is fun - it doesn't matter if it is hard or not!

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Einstein is an extreme example of such a case - when I read his biography the thing that caught me as very interesting is that he was able to immerse himself in physics irrespective of all the problems in terms of not finding a job, his mothers bitter opposition to marrying his first wife etc.You can hardly trick yourself into such concentration.He must be the lucky few who find such deep interesting topics that life is a pleasure even with all the hardships around!

Einstein's sister, Maja, recalled "...even when there was a lot of noise, he could lie down on the sofa, pick up a pen and paper, precariously balance an inkwell on the backrest and engross himself in a problem so much that the background noise stimulated rather than disturbed him."

Source;http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2005/23...

You could also argue that Einstein was procrastinating from dealing with the hardships in his life by immersing himself in physics. He was using physics as an escape from the troubles of his life (job, parents, etc).

Not that it really matters, but it is useful to look at the situation in both lights. There have certainly been situations where I stopped procrastinating on one task because a newer, more unpleasant task presented itself. "Boy, I bet I should clean my room instead of deal with these taxes!"

When asked how he simultaneously maintained a law practice; made groundbreaking discoveries in Proto-Indo-European linguistics; maintained fluency in 41 languages; translated many of the major works of Sanskrit literature into English for the first time; and wrote treatises on law, history, botany, poetry, geography, astronomy, and music, Sir William Jones replied: "A change in labour is a species of repose."

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