Supritha S

Choosing to front-load pain and discomfort isn't just a choice that applies to daily tasks and errands. It can also be used to nudge you toward the goals you have that you tend to procrastinate on.

Or as Steven Pressfield describes it, the resistance. The resistance is the voice in the back of our head telling us to back off, be careful, go slow, compromise.

However, real military boot camps come with two additional factors that make them work: once you sign up, you can’t slack or quit without severe consequences. There’s no way forward but to suffer and adapt. Afterward, you’re kept from backsliding by peer pressure and institutional standards, for a few years. So they work really well.

We say we want one thing, then we do another. We say we want to be successful but we sabotage the job interview. We say we want a product to come to market, but we sandbag the shipping schedule. We say we want to be thin but we eat too much. We say we want to be smart but we skip class or don’t read that book the boss lent us.

Martin’s comedy career is an excellent example of the Goldilocks Rule in practice. Each year, he expanded his comedy routine—but only by a minute or two. He was always adding new material, but he also kept a few jokes that were guaranteed to get laughs. There were just enough victories to keep him motivated and just enough mistakes to keep him... See more

On fulfilling your duty…Everything, a horse, a vine, is created for some duty. For what task, then, were you yourself created? A man's true delight is to do the things he was made for.

I think the most useful idea in this third variation is the notion of evaluating projects according to ‘activation energy’. The more built-out the project is, the more the activation energy cost has been paid, and the easier it is to work on. And so you can evaluate projects based on how far they’ve come from zero:

Cutting these emotionally draining objects loose is an amazing feeling.