Vague goals massively underperform. “Try hard” is basically no goal at all. Effective goals have to be specific enough that you can say with certainty whether you hit them, and challenging enough to actually require something from you.
-Austin Scholar, from this edition
From ancient times until now, wise men and women who wanted to make the world a better place didn’t start with some grandiose plan for others. Instead, they practiced the “make your bed” philosophy, where real change most often starts with self-improvement.
-Jeff Minick, with his list of seven ways
Robert Pirsig honors the aggravation. "Motorcycle maintenance gets frustrating," he writes. "Angering. Infuriating. That's what makes it interesting." His approach is to inspect the aggravation itself. He proposes that when you're baffled, it means your current theories about how to proceed aren't working. You have to empty your mind of them, Zen-style, which takes time. He advises:
Just stare at the machine. . .Watch it the way you watch a line when fishing and before long. . .you'll get a nibble, a little fact asking in a timid, humble way if you're interested in it...
After a while you may find that the nibbles you get are more interesting than your original purpose of fixing the machine. . .Then you're no longer strictly a motorcycle mechanic, you're also a motorcycle scientist, and you've completely conquered the gumption trap of value rigidity.
Three terms for his last sentence bear examining. Pirsig's technique for becoming a "motorcycle scientist" is through studying how he arrives at solutions. By "value rigidity" Pirsig means "an inability to revalue what one sees because of commitment to previous values."
-Stewart Brand, Maintenance: Of Everything
Some days I nail it, and others I fall short, but the difference now is grace. Growth takes time, and strength—real strength—is built one rep and one meal at a time. This is so frustrating when we are all promised that we can be shredded in twenty-one days.
-Shannon McDonald, from here
There's a common illusion that spiritually evolved, loving people never have any negativity, as though they are already angelic. They get annoyed that they still have negative feelings, and then it's compounded by their guilt and self-frustration. They have to realize that feelings are transitory, whereas their intention to evolve remains constant. Let go of feeling guilty that you are still just an ordinary human despite your angelic ambitions! Having compassion towards your innate humanness, its nervous system, and the brain function that goes with it allows for greater equanimity. Heavenly ambitions do not necessarily make us angels!
-David R. Hawkins, Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender
If you view progress as being driven by the genius of individuals, of course it’s hard to imagine a future where things are dramatically better, because no individual is orders of magnitudes smarter than average.
But when you view it as one person coming up with a small idea, another person copying that idea and tweaking it a little, another taking that insight and manipulating it a bit, another yet taking that product and combining it with something else – incremental, tiny bits, little ideas mixing, joining, blending, mutating, and compounding together – it’s suddenly much more conceivable.
-Morgan Housel, from here
However frustrating this debate may be for all participants – and I imagine it can be very frustrating at times – to me it is an excellent example of the dynamic process of the scientific method. Claims are advanced, they are robustly criticised, and additional evidence is brought forward to refute the critiques. Bit by bit, the field advances in its understanding.
Eating a chocolate bar right now won’t make you unhealthy. Just as not eating it won’t make you healthy. Saving money today won’t make you rich, just as not saving it won’t make you poor. Reading a chapter of a great book today won’t solve your problems just as not reading it won’t make them worse.
Not doing the obvious thing you know you should do — the thing that positions you for future success — rarely hurts you right away. . . .
For your choices to compound, you need to be consistent. Intensity will only carry you in the short term but if you want compounding results you need consistency. In the absence of immediate rewards, we can keep up the intensity for a while but most of us become intermittent.
A lack of consistency keeps ordinary people from extraordinary results. It’s like we’re Sisyphus rolling a boulder halfway up the hill, only to throw our hands in the air and go home. When we show up the next day, we see the boulder at the bottom of the hill. Not only did this undermine our progress but it makes getting started even harder.
Excelling at the small choices that compound over time perpetually leaves you in favorable circumstances. No matter what happens in the world, you’re never in a position where you are forced into a bad decision.
-from this Farnum Street post
The big lure of all such moments – as you'll know if you have a similar weakness for time management systems, decluttering initiatives and suchlike – is the promise of making a fresh start. The unspoken hope is that you won't just change a few things for the better, but make a total break with the past. You'll reboot your life, leave disorganization and procrastination behind you once and for all, and do everything differently from now on.
As you're presumably aware, this is a terrible mindset for actually making lasting changes. What you need, instead, are tiny goals and a commitment to incremental progress ("small wins"), plus a willingness to encounter failure after failure as you stumble toward improvement. To put it another way: fresh-startism is a form of perfectionism, and as with all forms of perfectionism, the solution is to stop being such a perfectionist – to resign yourself to the fact that things probably won't unfold as flawlessly as you'd hoped.
-Oliver Burkeman, from here
In his studies with living teachers like Crates, and his conversations with the dead—that chance encounter with Socrates's teachings that the oracle had predicted—Zeno danced with wisdom. He explored it in the agora with his students, he had thought deeply about it on long walks and tested it in debates. His own journey toward wisdom was a long one, some fifty years from that shipwreck until his death. It was defined not by some single epiphany or discovery but instead by hard work. He inched his way there, though years of study and training, as we all must. "Well-being is realized by small steps," he would say, looking back, "but is truly not small thing."
-Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman, Lives Of The Stoics: The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius
Baker also recognized that while Reagan talked in black and white, he governed in gray. For all of the conservatives chanting about "let Reagan be Reagan," Baker saw time and again a president who was more pragmatic that some of his supporters assumed. "I'd rather get 80 percent of what I want that go over the cliff with my flag flying," Reagan told Baker repeatedly. Holding out for some pure version of policy or principle was not Reagan's way. He was willing to take what he could get, then come back and get more the next time. Sometimes he even took a few steps backward in interest of moving ahead another day. "That was Ronald Reagan," said Jim Cicconi, a White House aide to Baker. "He was the labor negotiator and he was a very principled conservative but he believed in getting things done and he recognized that in a democracy you can't have your way 100 percent of the time."
-Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III
It turns out that, if you ask yourself “Can I keep going?” rather than “Can I make it to the finish?” you’re far more likely to answer in the affirmative.
-Alex Hutchinson, from this essay
One of the flaws in the way we recount stories of innovation is that we unfairly single out individuals, ignoring contributions of lesser mortals. . . . Innovation is not an individual phenomenon, but a collective, incremental and messy network phenomenon.
-Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works And Why It Flourishes in Freedom
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