Life

Perfectionism rarely creates perfection. You procrastinate because you’re terrified of falling short. You abandon projects because they don’t live up to insurmountable standards. You spend more time frantically burying flaws than creating something authentic.

I am a first-person protagonist in the small and specialized corner of reality that is my own life. In everyone else’s life, I’m an autonomous — and to some degree mysterious — visiting character.

Staring into the abyss means thinking reasonably about things that are uncomfortable to contemplate, like arguments against your religious beliefs, or in favor of breaking up with your partner. It’s common to procrastinate on thinking hard about these things because it might require you to acknowledge that you were very wrong about something in the... See more

While we’re focusing on being the best possible Protagonist in our respective inner stories, everyone else is seeing only how we’re doing in our other, more public role. If you think about what people are admired and remembered for, it’s always for the kind of Other Person they were.