Much of life boils down to figuring out a path for yourself and then getting yourself to actually walk it. We often fail to stick to our plans because we’re not confident in our chosen path. And we fail to find paths forward because we don’t try enough things to find our footing.Decision and action are always combined. The challenge is taking the next step.

Finding a Path and Walking It

Working hard all day doesn’t matter if it’s on the wrong tasks. The most critical factor in your productivity is what you decide to work on.The question of what to work on is under-discussed. There’s plenty of advice on getting work done: setting up good habits, creating productivity systems, project management, and planning. Yet, there’s relative silence for the crucial decision of which projects to pursue.

What to Work On

In practice, most ideas—even groundbreaking ones—tend to be derivative or incremental. Even ideas that look original usually start out as a permutation on something already extant. Given background and context, even the most radical suggestions look like incremental steps.This suggests that the best way to have better ideas is to expose yourself to more ideas. To the ones used by people who are accomplishing things in same the direction you’d like to go.

Coming Up With Ideas

A fundamental distinction is between having too many ideas or too few.<ul><li>Having too many ideas creates the problem of prioritization. Evaluate your current activities and cull those that don’t make the cut.</li><li>Too few ideas can leave you feeling stuck. You want things to be better, but nothing pops out as worth pursuing. As a result, you put half-hearted efforts into tasks you’re not sure will work.</li></ul>The “right” quantity of ideas isn’t a given. Instead, it’s a mental threshold for what’s worth pursuing. Dialing it up forces you to focus, and dialing it down lets you explore more options.

Ruling Out, Ruling In

<ul><li>A threshold for action is a crude way for filtering your projects. Advice to “do less” or “do more” misses the crux of the issue. Which efforts should you drop? Which ones should you undertake?</li><li>Having adjusted your threshold, and hopefully immersed yourself in a range of possible idea templates, now you need to cross over from a notion to a commitment.</li><li>A commitment can come from either direction. You can lower your threshold for action, generate a new idea and decide to pursue it. Or you can tighten your standards and commit to focusing on a pursuit you are already engaged in. </li></ul>

Making the Choice

Working hard doesn't matter if it's on the wrong things. Thoughts on making the hard decisions about what to focus on.

Finding a Path and Walking It

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