The first step of any meaningful pursuit is to severely underestimate its difficulty.
The first step of any meaningful pursuit is to severely underestimate its difficulty.
The first step towards being “high agency” is always the same. You cannot take effective action towards bending the world to your desire until you know, in detail, what it is that you desire.
Take, for example, the ambition to “make your venture-backed startup profitable”: to develop, market, and distribute a product or service that’s never existed before, in a form that’s valuable and accessible enough for large numbers of people to want to pay you for it, in sufficient quantity that your revenue consistently exceeds your costs.
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Gena Gorlin • The Psychological Needs of the Extremely Ambitious
If you remember anything, remember this. You need a challenging end goal that you want to achieve, clarity on how to get there, and a simplified first step to reduce the friction of getting started.
Dan Koe • The Art of Focus: Find Meaning, Reinvent Yourself and Create Your Ideal Future
When you start off, you have to deal with the problems of failure. You need to be thickskinned, to learn that not every project will survive.
jamesclear.com • “Make Good Art” by Neil Gaiman
The first lessons were about the practical aspects of pursuing a quest. If you want to achieve the unimaginable, you start by imagining it. Before beginning, take the time to count the cost. Understanding exactly what you need to do, and then finding a way to do it, makes a quest much more feasible.
Chris Guillebeau • The Happiness of Pursuit: Find the Quest that will Bring Purpose to Your Life
First, we want to break our objective down into its smallest constituent parts—identifying the challenges that will be easiest to tackle first. Second, by surmounting the tiniest hurdles first, we hope to build up psychological momentum. Your lower mind needs to believe that it has the ability to accomplish a smaller goal before it will allow your
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