I was meeting my client in central Jerusalem. She proceeded to outline a series of excuses as to why she had not began to execute her business plan. Bottom line – problems with the kids had provided her with the perfect excuse to have cake and coffee with friends rather than to move ahead commercially.

So, like any business mentor, I refused to accept this procrastination and tested the client. Was she aware of the implications of not getting done what they needed to do? Again, cutting to the chase: no project means no income, which means no presents for the kids. Could she internalize that message?  Or would the Jerusalem Syndrome win through and her painful cycle of feelings roll around once more?

One blogger describes this ‘antidote’ as the “so that methodology”. In other words, we need to understand that we do something specific “so that”…etc etc. Something good should result.

On an intellectual level, we all know that procrastination is stupid, if not financially dangerous. An academic qualification does not offer automatic success in commerce. It is interesting to note that in Israel, which still averages over 3% annual economic growth, only 36% of the adult population has a university degree. By way of comparison, in Britain and Japan, 55% and 44% respectively have higher qualifications, but their economies are struggling.

However, there is another factor to consider when moving through a work project – “grit”. Just recently, I had the fascinating privilege to read a review of the work of Angela Duckworth. Maths’ teacher turned child psychologist, she discovered in her early research that “students’ self-discipline scores were far better predictors of their academic performance than their IQ scores.”

To cut a long story short, Duckworth has come up with the “grit scale”, which is increasingly showing the likelihood of the success of a student (or worker) in a given situation. For example:

The military has developed its own complex evaluation, called the whole candidate score, to judge incoming cadets and predict which of them will survive the demands of West Point; it includes academic grades, a gauge of physical fitness, and a leadership potential score. But the more accurate predictor of which cadets persisted in Beast Barracks and which ones dropped out turned out to be Duckworth’s simple little twelve-item grit questionnaire.

Back to my client in Jerusalem: They have knuckled down over the past few days, and suddenly they are motoring along, with far less time for cake tasting and additional calories.