Half-assing it with everything you've got - LessWrong

Given any project, always aim no higher than the quality target, and always strive for minimum expenditure of effort. It doesn't matter whether you're writing a term paper, pulling a person out of a burning house, or creating a galaxy-spanning human civilization — the goal is always to achieve some quality target with minimum effort.

Say you're a college student, and you have a paper due. The quality of the paper will depend upon the amount of effort you put in. We'll say that you know the project pretty well: you can get an A with only moderate effort, and with significant effort you could produce something much better than the usual A-grade paper.

Your preferences are not "move rightward on the quality line." Your preferences are to hit the quality target with minimum effort. If you're trying to pass the class, then pass it with minimum effort. Anything else is wasted motion. If you're trying to ace the class, then ace it with minimum effort. Anything else is wasted motion.

Advice for people who want to do something big, interesting, or important, but who utterly lack the ability to commit themselves to a particular action (because they can't convince themselves it's worth doing):

The bigger question of what to do with your life is one of these problems with a hard core. There are important problems at the center, which tend to be hard, and less important, easier ones at the edges. So as well as the small, daily adjustments involved in working on a specific problem, you'll occasionally have to make big, lifetime-scale adjust

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