Megan McArdle, a columnist at Bloomberg View, attempts to explain why writers are great procrastinators. She suggests many, perhaps most, writers haven’t failed enough. They have rested on their natural talent for too long and believe that the talent is all they have to offer. They don’t see their talent as a muscle that will grow with exercise; rather they see it as a solid that can be tested for purity. If the world discovers they aren’t as good as they sometimes appear to be, they will be certifiably, undeniably doomed.

“This fear of being unmasked as the incompetent you ‘really’ are,” McArdle writes, “is so common that it actually has a clinical name: impostor syndrome. A shocking number of successful people (particularly women), believe that they haven’t really earned their spots, and are at risk of being unmasked as frauds at any moment. Many people deliberately seek out easy tests where they can shine, rather than tackling harder material that isn’t as comfortable.”

When faced with this fear, people may choose to hamper their own performance. She quotes Alain de Botton, saying, “Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.” “For people with an extremely fixed mind-set,” she continues, “that tipping point quite often never happens. They fear nothing so much as finding out that they never had what it takes.” (via Lore Ferguson)