When I'm truly engaging those critical thinking skills, I'm much less likely to blame myself for failure. I'm less likely to fixate on my own shortcomings and how to overcome them. Critical thinking created a more satisfying life for me than positive thinking ever could.

goals become a sort of technology for self-erasure. We learn to recognize all the ways we don't fit in and the rungs we haven't yet climbed and define our future selves against those traits. We rarely—if ever—stop to think whether the things we're not are actually a core part of who we are. And that's not just a personal problem. It ripples out

Games—whether they're sports, board games, video games, or party games—necessarily simplify values and goals, providing the structure for play. In playing a game, we temporarily take on those values and goals for the pleasure of the experience.66

What would it take to view the differences we possess not as negative, not even as positive, but as … neutral? Facts rather than qualifiers. Circumstances rather than performance metrics. What works, in my opinion, is when we bring greater awareness to the systems we operate in and debug the code that guides how we think. The beautiful thing is

In contrast, we're often fed the opposite line: You can do anything, don't quit, no limits, and so on. These phrases sound good, but when you are faced with real limitations—and the vast majority of us are—they can be supremely disempowering. Again, we start to internalize that it's our self-discipline that's lacking. This is where Bandura's

so many systems for planning and goal-setting assume the user works a salaried desk job five days a week, with paid time off and fully funded healthcare,

health precarity, interpersonal precarity, home and housing precarity, and other forms of uncertainty and instability. Precarity isn't a personal failing—although it's often perceived as such.

Growth, change, creating cool stuff—it

When your projects are clearly tied to your strategy and your strategy is clearly tied to your vision and your vision is clearly tied to your values, you know that what you're working on really, really matters.