Supritha S

Why is it so difficult to do what we say we’re going to do?The lizard brain.

Within eighteen months, Dyrsmid was bringing in $5 million to the firm. By age twenty-four, he was making $75,000 per year—the equivalent of $125,000 today. Not long after, he landed a six-figure job with another company.

The amygdala isn’t going away. Your lizard brain is here to stay, and your job is to figure out how to quiet it and ignore it.

I find this to be an empowering way to think about consistency and progress in nearly any area. It’s never my intention to make a mistake, but if I do, I have given myself permission to view my progress over a longer timeline than a single day or an individual event.

The words accomplishment and achievement usually signify conspicuous, outwardly-visible gains, often ones that come with status and material rewards. Do an image search for either word and it’s all grad ceremonies, sports medals, boardroom handshakes, and people standing on mountains. But there’s so much more being achieved in the human world.

And that's one of the simple secrets behind Seinfeld's remarkable productivity and consistency. For years, the comedian simply focused on “not breaking the chain.”

The time has come to acknowledge expertise as overvalued. There is no question that expertise and hedgehog logic are appropriate in certain domains (i.e. hard sciences), but they certainly appear less fitting for domains plagued with uncertainty, ambiguity, and poorly-defined dynamics (i.e. social sciences, business, etc.). The time has come for... See more

Just recording the numbers—without striving to change anything about what you’re tracking—almost always creates a sustainable, healthy transition to a better way of doing things.

Cutting yourself some slack becomes even more important when we consider the science behind habit formation and continual improvement. Research shows that, regardless of the habit that you are working to build, missing a single day has no measurable impact on your long-term success.