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Ayla Jain
@aylajain
The excellence you're trying to pursue
As a whole, our working lives are more like niches. There are numerous professions, but the path for success in many professions are extremely narrow.
The more defined a field, the narrower the relevant dimension of competition.
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Francisco W.
@franciscoaw46
Get the Most From Your Limited Free Time | Scott H Young
The Focused Life at Home
The goal of the focused life at home is to choose where to spend your time.
Unfortunately, our free time fails to live up to our ideal and instead of spending time on our hob...
The Low-Quality Leisure Trap
Most of the meaningful things we could do in our free time require some kind of effort. And we sometimes lack the energy to do them.
We all want to be on our phones less, spend more time with our family, or dedicate ourselves to our hobbies. Except the day ends, we’re tired, and all of the things we value seem too difficult.
The Paradox of Effort
The feeling of effort is a sensation of opportunity costs. When you’re doing anything, and an alternative activity promises to be easier and more immediately rewarding, the activity feels effortful.
This explains why people could spend all their time reading in earlier eras. They could do so because this activity didn’t need to compete with cheaper stimulation.
Simon I.
@sim_ni93
Why is Taking Action Hard? | Scott H Young
Taking action = eventual success
Inaction is the biggest cause of our failures and our miseries. If we could consistently do the things we know we should do, we would be more successful, and our lives would be better. Yet w...
Explaining inaction
Some possible but weak reasons why action is hard:
- Talent. But the world is full of brilliant stars that flame out and mediocre minds that build empires.
- Preferences can explain our failure to try, but don't explain our inner struggles with inaction.
- Capacity for effort. If your capacity for doing things is lower, it does not explain chronic bursts of activity with inevitable crashes in your goals and projects.
- Motivation. Some people with the most reason have the hardest time taking action.
Confidence
- Your motivation to complete a task depends on the value of the reward and your expectation of success.
- Your expectation of success depends on your motivation.
If your projects tend to fail, your expectations are low, and motivation fades. If your projects tend to succeed, your expectations go up, and motivation stays strong.
Noah Burke
@noahb
How to Commit to Long-Term Goals | Scott H Young
Long-term flexible commitment
What many people fail at with long-term commitments is that they make their initial vision too rigid.
Flexible commitment can help overcome this by bringing together two pr...
Walk the Winding Path
- Stick to short commitments. Get good at this skill before going further.
- Understand your goal at different levels. The highest goal should be fairly abstract.
- Set a much more specific agenda of how I could fulfill this.
- Have periodic reviews where you can change your direction and incorporate new ideas.
- Don't let your reviews interfere with the short-term process of committing.
The winding path: Goals and projects
- A goal level, which is big-picture and abstract. It has just enough detail to inspire, but not so much that you're stuck pursuing things that don’t matter when conditions change.
- Underneath that, have projects: these tend to be short-to-medium term efforts you think will help realize the larger goal.
The flexibility of the system comes once one leg of a short-term commitment has ended. This provides an opportunity for pivoting and redirecting.
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