What if You Never Sort Your Life Out?
“New Year, New You”: The traditional slogan encapsulates both the promise and the hopelessness of our annual attempt at personal transformation. On the one hand, January 1 feels pregnant with the potential for a fresh start, a reboot, a decisive repudiation of all the botched efforts and missteps of the past. On the other hand, if any of that reall
... See moreSo you just do the thing, once, with absolutely no guarantee you’ll ever manage to do it again. But then perhaps you find that you do do it again, the next day, or a few days later, and maybe again, and again – until before you know it, you’ve developed that most remarkable thing, not a willpower-driven system or routine but an emergent practice of
... See moreOliver Burkeman • Meditations for Mortals
Achieving a goal only changes your life for the moment. That’s the counterintuitive thing about improvement. We think we need to change our results, but the results are not the problem. What we really need to change are the systems that cause those results. When you solve problems at the results level, you only solve them temporarily. In order to i
... See moreJames Clear • Atomic Habits: the life-changing million-copy #1 bestseller
What Works: A Comprehensive Framework to Change the Way We Approach Goal Setting
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Focus on incremental improvements. A key reason why we fall prey to the Nirvana fallacy is our desire for perfection. Instead of aiming for the perfect solution, aim for a better solution. All these tiny improvements will compound, leading to massive changes over the long term. It’s better to run for ten minutes everyday than stay on your couch bec
... See moreAnne-Laure Le Cunff • The Nirvana Fallacy: When Perfectionism Leads to Unrealistic Solutions
One can waste years this way, systematically postponing precisely the things one cares about the most. What’s needed instead in such situations, I gradually came to understand, is a kind of anti-skill: not the counterproductive strategy of trying to make yourself more efficient, but rather a willingness to resist such urges – to learn to stay with
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