When we decide to create a new habit — exercise, healthy eating, meditation, writing — we can get excited and optimistic, and have an idea of how it will go perfectly.This is such a hopeful time! Unfortunately, reality has other plans.Our perfect idea of how our new habit will go is pretty much never how it actually goes. We might do really well for a few days or even a couple of weeks, but inevitably we’ll miss a day or two because of tiredness, busyness, sickness, visitors, forgetting, etc. And then things get derailed, because of our perfect idea of how we hoped the habit would go.

The Obstacles In Creating A New Habit

Perfection is one of the main obstacles to forming habits. Our hopeful idea of how it will go, and then our disappointment and frustration with ourselves when it doesn’t go that way.The idea that we should be super consistent and perfect in our habit attempts …  derails us.

Your Perfect Expectations Is The Problem

What if we simply said, “Let me try to bring a daily ritual of doing X into my life, and be curious about what it will be like”?So there doesn’t have to be a fantasy that it will go perfectly or brilliantly. We don’t know how it will be. But we can bring an intention to do it, and a curiosity about what that will be like.Then we start doing it. We miss a day, but this is not a cause for discouragement. It’s a cause for curiosity — what got in the way? What would it be like to start again today?

Reality-Based Habit Change

Each day becomes a lovely place of learning.The “successful” days and “failure” days are not really binary results of success/failure, but instead a rich place of curiosity and learning.Instead of competing with ourselves, we can glide through forming a new habit by simply being open, curious and non-judgemental.

Learn Each Day

Stashed ideas

Why Perfectionism Stops Us from Creating New Habits - zen habits

There are two types of perfectionists. 
<ul>
<li>Avoidant perfectionists have trouble beginning tasks. Deadlines trigger their anxiety about doing things perfectly, and therefore, they drag their feet when starting a new project.</li>
<li>Obsessive perfectionists tend to struggle to complete tasks. Both kinds of perfectionists have trouble prioritizing and struggle to allocate their time according to what’s most important. Both types also share a habit of expanding the scope of projects. But how you deal with these traits may differ according to the type you’re dealing with.</li>
</ul>

Figure Out Which Type of Perfectionist You’re Dealing With

Perfectionists tend to equate time with quality, so you’ll need to be particularly thoughtful and diplomatic in explaining why you don’t want to spend that much time on this project. The goal is to explain the opportunity cost of spending excess time filling in ten marginally useful columns of data when you could be serving the company in more productive ways. 
Be specific and detailed about what those “more productive ways” are, and clear and concrete in explaining why those additional 10 columns won’t be useful.

Don’t Internalize Unrealistic Expectations

Find out how your perfectionist colleague prefers to receive feedback. Some will prefer to receive it via email so they have a chance to privately process any initial defensive reactions they have. 
Self-aware perfectionists typically come-around to a constructive reaction once they’ve had time for their initial strong responses to feedback subside.

Giving Feedback

During team meetings, you might ask:<ul><li>Is there a simpler way we can achieve our goal?</li><li>Can we shrink down the amount of time we’re spending?</li><li>What’s the opportunity cost of spending extra time on this versus another task?</li></ul>For projects where you’re working with a perfectionist, you can also try creating a basic checklist to help the group stay organized, relieve anxieties surrounding to-dos, and ensure that nothing is being overlooked.

Support Processes that Help the Team Focus on the Big Picture

A perfectionist’s unrealistic expectations can unintentionally make their teammates feel like their time is not being valued. Let’s take the example of a hard-driving perfectionist who sends you an excessive number of emails — each one with a different question or suggestion — when he’s feeling overwhelmed.  You have to try setting boundaries.It’s important to recognize that every individual will engage in some self-sabotaging behaviours that, in turn, affect the rest of the team. But by developing boundaries, you will create a culture that encourages personal growth.

Set Boundaries

Mutual influence is when a teammate allows you to influence their way of thinking and vice versa. It is an important factor that helps any relationship feel more secure. 
If a perfectionist’s habits irritate you, try compromising. Identify elements of their routine that may be useful to incorporate into your own. If you expect someone else to bend to your way, then you need to show that you’re willing to bend to theirs.

Enhance Feelings of Security Through Mutual Influence

Five ways to prevent the relationship from becoming too draining.

How to Collaborate with a Perfectionist

Say you need to learn a complicated skill: physics, French or computer programming. How much time should you spend building your background knowledge before you start practicing the actual skill?
Consider machine learning. One way to learn this field would be to master first the underlying math. Then, when you encountered the programming commands for certain mathematical functions, you’d know what they are doing behind the scenes.

Pre-Knowledge

At a basic level, we can contrast two ways of learning. One way is to memorize, by rote, the answer to every possible question in a domain. The other way is to learn a process for generating solutions in the domain.Children seem to do exactly this when learning arithmetic. They begin with a procedure, like counting. As they gain experience, they memorize more and more of the exact answers. Eventually, they are able to solve most arithmetic problems through recall alone, and the procedure of counting fades away.

The Prerequisites to Learning a Skill: Cognitive Skill Acquisition

<ul><li>Eventually, many answers are memorized. This results in fast, reliable access and helps us perform complicated skills smoothly. </li><li>The procedure of counting is more compact than an array of memorized facts. Thus the method is learned first, with fluently recalled answers coming only after much more experience.</li><li>The counting procedure can act as a backup. </li><li>The choice to use memorization or a procedure to find an answer depends on the effort needed to perform the procedure, the reliability of the procedure, and incentives surrounding accuracy. </li></ul>

Learning Math: Work Notes

When performing skills, we use a variety of methods, from following a procedure to retrieving an answer from memory. With increased practice, the memory component becomes dominant for routine situations. Even when we can’t get the exact solution from memory, we may find parts of the answer which we can use to solve the problem faster.Digging deeper has two benefits:<ul><li>It can provide a strategy to obtain the correct answer when memory fails. </li><li>It can assist in non-routine situations where no answer is known.</li></ul>

Digging Deeper

<ul><li>Methods that directly assist with learning a domain are necessary prerequisites. Even if a brute-force approach might work, good methods are more reliable than trial-and-error.</li><li>Routine performance is largely handled by drawing on direct experience—not working from first principles. </li><li>If the principles don’t actually lay out the actions needed for routine situations, then they are mainly helpful in non-routine cases. </li><li>These principles will probably only be relevant as your experience within a field grows.</li></ul>

Digging Deep Vs Diving In

Dig deep or dive right in? How much background knowledge do you need before you should start practicing a skill?

How Much Do You Need to Know Before Getting Started? - Scott H Young

At its simplest, ethics is a system of moral principles. They affect how people make decisions and lead their lives.Ethics is concerned with what is good for individuals and society and is also described as moral philosophy.The term is derived from the Greek word ethos which can mean custom, habit, character or disposition.

What is ethics?

<ul><li>how to live a good life</li><li>our rights and responsibilities</li><li>the language of right and wrong</li><li>moral decisions - what is good and bad?</li></ul>Our concepts of ethics have been derived from religions, philosophies and cultures. They infuse debates on topics like abortion, human rights and professional conduct.

Ethics covers the following dilemmas

Philosophers nowadays tend to divide ethical theories into three areas: metaethics, normative ethics and applied ethics.<ul><li>Meta-ethics deals with the nature of moral judgement. It looks at the origins and meaning of ethical principles.</li><li>Normative ethics is concerned with the content of moral judgements and the criteria for what is right or wrong.</li><li>Applied ethics looks at controversial topics like war, animal rights and capital punishment</li></ul>

Approaches to ethics

If ethical theories are to be useful in practice, they need to affect the way human beings behave.Some philosophers think that ethics does do this. They argue that if a person realises that it would be morally good to do something then it would be irrational for that person not to do it.But human beings often behave irrationally - they follow their 'gut instinct' even when their head suggests a different course of action.However, ethics does provide good tools for thinking about moral issues.

What use is ethics?

Most moral issues get us pretty worked up - think of abortion and euthanasia for starters. Because these are such emotional issues we often let our hearts do the arguing while our brains just go with the flow.But there's another way of tackling these issues, and that's where philosophers can come in - they offer us ethical rules and principles that enable us to take a cooler view of moral problems.So ethics provides us with a moral map, a framework that we can use to find our way through difficult issues.

Ethics can provide a moral map

Using the framework of ethics, two people who are arguing a moral issue can often find that what they disagree about is just one particular part of the issue, and that they broadly agree on everything else.That can take a lot of heat out of the argument, and sometimes even hint at a way for them to resolve their problem.But sometimes ethics doesn't provide people with the sort of help that they really want.

Ethics can pinpoint a disagreement

Ethics doesn't always show the right answer to moral problems.Indeed more and more people think that for many ethical issues there isn't a single right answer - just a set of principles that can be applied to particular cases to give those involved some clear choices.Some philosophers go further and say that all ethics can do is eliminate confusion and clarify the issues. After that it's up to each individual to come to their own conclusions.

Ethics doesn't give right answers

Many people want there to be a single right answer to ethical questions. They find moral ambiguity hard to live with because they genuinely want to do the 'right' thing, and even if they can't work out what that right thing is, they like the idea that 'somewhere' there is one right answer.But often there isn't one right answer - there may be several right answers, or just some least worst answers - and the individual must choose between them.For others moral ambiguity is difficult because it forces them to take responsibility for their own choices and actions, rather than falling back on convenient rules and customs.

Ethics can give several answers

<ul><li>Ethics is about the 'other': when a person 'thinks ethically' they are giving at least some thought to something beyond themselves.</li><li>Ethics is not only about the morality of particular courses of action, but it's also about the goodness of individuals and what it means to live a good life.</li><li>One problem with ethics is the way it's often used as a weapon: If a group believes that a particular activity is "wrong" it can then use morality as the justification for attacking those who practice that activity.</li></ul>

Ethics and people

At times in the past some people thought that ethical problems could be solved in one of two ways:<ul><li>by discovering what God wanted people to do</li><li>by thinking rigorously about moral principles and problems</li></ul>If a person did this properly they would be led to the right conclusion.But now even philosophers are less sure that it's possible to devise a satisfactory and complete theory of ethics: modern thinkers often teach that ethics leads people not to conclusions but to 'decisions'.In this view, the role of ethics is limited to clarifying 'what's at stake' in particular ethical problems

Searching for the source of right and wrong


<ul><li>Ethical realists think that human beings discover ethical truths that already have an independent existence.</li><li>Ethical non-realists think that human beings invent ethical truths.</li></ul>But the ethical properties of the world and the things in it exist and remain the same, regardless of what people think or feel - or whether people think or feel about them at all.

Ethical realists and non-realists

<ul><li>Moral realism is based on the idea that there are real objective moral facts or truths in the universe.</li><li>Subjectivism teaches that moral judgments are nothing more than statements of a person's feelings or attitudes, and that ethical statements do not contain factual truths about goodness or badness.</li><li>Emotivism is the view that moral claims are no more than expressions of approval or disapproval.</li><li>Prescriptivists think that ethical statements are instructions or recommendations.</li></ul>

Four ethical 'isms'

hilosophers have several answers to this question:<ul><li>God and religion</li><li>Human conscience and intuition</li><li>a rational moral cost-benefit analysis of actions and their effects</li><li>the example of good human beings</li><li>a desire for the best for people in each unique situation</li><li>political power.</li></ul>

Where does ethics come from?

Supernaturalism makes ethics inseparable from religion. It teaches that the only source of moral rules is God.So, something is good because God says it is, and the way to lead a good life is to do what God wants.

God-based ethics - supernaturalism

Intuitionists think that good and bad are real objective properties that can't be broken down into component parts. Something is good because it's good; its goodness doesn't need justifying or proving.Intuitionists think that goodness or badness can be detected by adults - they say that human beings have an intuitive moral sense that enables them to detect real moral truths.

Intuitionism

This is the ethical theory that most non-religious people think they use every day. It bases morality on the consequences of human actions and not on the actions themselves.Consequentialism teaches that people should do whatever produces the greatest amount of good consequences. One famous way of putting this is 'the greatest good for the greatest number of people'.

Consequentialism

<ul><li>Virtue ethics looks at virtue or moral character, rather than at ethical duties and rules, or the consequences of actions. Virtue ethics is particularly concerned with the way individuals live their lives, and less concerned in assessing particular actions.</li><li><a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/introduction/situation_1.shtml">Situation ethics</a> rejects prescriptive rules and argues that individual ethical decisions should be made according to the unique situation. Rather than following rules the decision maker should follow a desire to seek the best for the people involved.</li></ul>

Virtue ethics and Situation ethics

<ul><li>Moral absolutism: Some people think there are such universal rules (that are always true) that apply to everyone. Religious views of ethics tend to be absolutist.</li><li>Moral relativists say that if you look at different cultures or different periods in history you'll find that they have different moral rules; "good" refers to the things that a particular group of people approve of.</li><li>Moral somewhere-in-between-ism: Most non-philosophers think that both of the above theories have some good points and think that there are a few absolute ethical rules, but a lot of ethical rules depend on the culture.</li></ul>

One of the big questions in moral philosophy is whether or not 

Ethics are a system of moral principles and a branch of philosophy which defines what is good for individuals and society. 

Problem Solving

Ethics - Introduction to ethics: Ethics: a general introduction

Clutter can be defined as anything that keeps us from living the life we are meant to lead, anything that stops us from our accomplishments and the true joy of living.
We clutter everything. Our homes, cars, storage compartments, offices, phones, and even our minds are filled with more clutter than we can possibly manage.

Overwhelmed With Clutter

Clutter is not just the physical things but can be digital, mental, emotional and spiritual.
<ul>
<li>Physical clutter is the stuff we accumulate.</li>
<li>Digital clutter is our overflowing inbox and the thousands of files saved on our phone/PC.</li>
<li>Mental clutter is our to-do list and our anxieties.</li>
<li>Emotional clutter can be the biases, negative thought patterns and obsolete beliefs we carry around like extra luggage.</li>
<li>Spiritual clutter can be not being at peace or the lack of forgiveness.</li>
</ul>

Types Of Clutter

Clutter, whether physical, mental or spiritual, can be distilled down to delayed and postponed decisions and the constant procrastination going on in our lives.
Take the physical paper files and email cluttering our office (or home) and our computers. Each email or piece of paper needs a decision we are not willing to make, postponing it and filing it away.

Clutter Is Postponed Decisions

Taking care of physical, emotional and mental clutter is hard enough, as our constant anxieties and thought patterns create a cobweb that paralyses us.
Spiritual clutter is even harder to take care of, as we don’t even know what is stopping us. It can be our guilt, our deep fears, hidden emotions, and even the ideas lying in the freezer that we have not worked on.

The Problem With Spiritual Clutter

Having clutter isn’t bad, but the guilt associated with the burden of postponed decisions is the real culprit. We need to face our fears and find ways to get rid of the emotional and spiritual clutter. A few ways can be:
<ol>
<li>Journaling daily.</li>
<li>Meditating daily.</li>
<li>Going out for a long walk in nature.</li>
<li>Talking to someone.</li>
<li>Taking positive action and moving forward.</li>
</ol>

The Fears That We Are Not Facing

We're filling our houses, cars, phones, minds and hearts with more than we can manage, says professional organizer Kerry Thomas. Here's how to understand the kinds of stuff overwhelming your life and start dealing with it.

There are 5 kinds of clutter — which one is filling your life?

<div>Most people jump straight from finding a problem to attempting to solve it.</div>Having a systematic approach to how you deal with problems, as opposed to just going by gut and feelings, can make a big difference in how you creatively find answers to your obstacles.

Systematic approach

Detectives and investigators use the process. They ask both obvious and unthinkable questions.Get close and collect information about how the problem is manifesting.  Understand where the problem does and doesn’t happen, when the problem started, and how often the problem occurs to generate critical insight for the problem-solving effort.

Study the problem first

<ul><li>Don’t look for solutions immediately; Keep redefining the problem until you arrive at the root cause.</li><li>Don’t try to guess the solution; try to understand how the obstacles, or challenges manifest first.</li><li>Gather data to analyze all potential root causes.</li><li>Consider all options, regardless of how irrelevant they currently appear.</li><li>Find a way to connect the dots. Make better analogies. One good analogy is worth three hours of discussion.</li></ul><h1></h1>

Question for great answers

<ul><li>A problem broken down is half way solved. E.g: if you don’t have enough money to get a mortgage, you could divide the obstacle into “too little income,” “high expenses,” and “expectations of future house.”</li><li>Address each category on its own.</li><li>Once you have categories, it’s very easy to continue digging.</li><li>Finally, execute the best action plan.</li></ul>The point of analysis is to never accept statements at face value, including your own.

Break the obstacle down

In many situations when people encounter a problem, they tend to default to what they should do instead of asking what they could do.Could helps you think outside an existing problem to generate more creative solutions.Should narrows your thinking process to one answer, the one that seems most obvious.

A “could” mindset

Concentrating harder won’t force that ‘eureka moment’ you need.Instead, your best option might be to step away from the problems and get do something unrelated to the project.When you stop thinking about a task, your brain continues working on the problem in the background.<h1></h1>

Don’t rush the thinking process

For many years, scientists have found that amazing ideas, solutions to problems and obstacles often come to people when they aren’t actively trying to develop a solution.The incubation period works because your brain gets to take a break from everything distracting you.

The power of the incubation period

Working backwards is useful when the final result is clear but the initial portion of a problem is obscure.Reverse engineering allows you to notice patterns your brain normally ignores.

Work backwards

In many cases, when you are tempted to stay up late to find a solution to an obstacle, you might be better sleeping on it.The brain makes better connections when you are asleep, allowing you to make new and useful associations between unrelated ideas.Your brain might solve the problem for you while you’re fast asleep.<h1></h1>

It pays to sleep on it

"You can increase your problem-solving skills by honing your question-asking ability." - Michael J. Gelb Hurdles are disheartening, and they're often unavoidable. It happens to all of us. Even the most successful people you admire face obstacles everyday. Life is like a game of chess. There is an infinite number of ways to play.

Think Like a Scientist: How to Solve Everyday Problems

For most types of work you can increase your productivity by increasing the intensity of your work. No more watercooler chats or lingering over emails.
Some productivity systems admit that we can get more done within the same time. But scheduling every moment of your working day takes extra effort.

The role of effort

Incentives: If you're paid hourly, then the expectation is that you will work for a certain amount of time. Nobody pays you directly for working harder within the same time. Working harder often simply means raised expectations.
Incentives may explain laziness but are seldom the only factor. Students use inefficient methods, even if it will cause them to suffer. Freelancers and entrepreneurs may procrastinate, even though lowered productivity directly impacts their income.

Why we struggle to work hard enough

Our default position is not to work particularly hard. Farming societies overcame this default with cultural exhortations to work harder and social norms about when to work and rest. Also, the relative poverty of pre-industrial people ensured an incentive to work hard. If you didn't, you had nothing to eat.
In our more recent affluence, we tend to work less intensively than we should, even if we could reap more rewards for hard work.

Working harder is not our default position

<ul>
<li>A compelling reason to be productive can increase the intensity. Big ambitions can also inspire greater productivity. It is one reason why we should set big goals.</li>
<li>Working harder in bursts. Cycles of productivity are natural. If we recognise the existence of energy cycles, we can use them by relaxing in the slower phases.</li>
<li>Working on systems can make effort easier. We can make tasks easier by limiting alternatives. Reading books on your phone is much easier if you don't have Instagram next to it.</li>
</ul>

Strategies to increase effort

Can you get more done, in the same amount of time, just by working harder. If so, why is intensity so difficult to sustain?

How Hard Should You Work? | Scott H Young

<ul>
<li>We all normally learn from our mistakes, getting to know how to not handle something or what not to do in a situation.</li>
<li>Most of our failures happen while we are trying our best to succeed. No one actively seeks failure and makes deliberate mistakes to gather learning.</li>
<li>No amount of preparation can help us in various obstacles, and failure becomes the rite of passage to increase our adaptability, flexibility and eventual mastery in any skill.</li>
</ul>

Practising Failure

Practising failure is a great learning tactic, however unintuitive it may sound. One has to move into 'failure' territory to be able to attain mastery on a skill or subject.
One can commonly see it in tools like flight simulators, and other training modules where one has to go through the failure in order to learn the entire concept.

Making Mistakes On Purpose

People look for experienced professionals in senior job roles with extreme levels of responsibility because they know that when there is no time to think about the process, and a split-second action or decision has to be made, only real experience counts.
Example: A pilot who has never stalled a plane and then recovered would not know the pressure, time and space that is necessary to make the split-second judgement.

Only The Experience Of Failure Matters

Practice Failure

<ul>
<li>Specific events. Their usefulness is limited to particular events that will not be repeated in the exact same way. What did this person do right, or wrong? What ideas worked? What strategies failed? </li>
<li>Broad behaviours that repeatedly surface in many fields and eras. These behaviours are often ignored. How do people think about risk? How do they react to surprise? What motivates them, cause them to be overconfident, or unsure?</li>
</ul>

There are two kinds of historical events to learn from

<ul>
<li>Good times often breed complacency and scepticism of warnings. Until 2020, the public assumed pandemics were things of the past. 100 years ago, people had a better understanding of how dangerous an outbreak could be.</li>
<li>Carl Jung thought that an excess of something gives rise to its opposite. When there are no recessions, people get confident. Confident people take risks, leading to recessions.</li>
</ul>

Calm plants the seeds of crazy

Optimism and pessimism go hand in hand. In finance, we are told to save like a pessimist and invest like an optimist. The short term is full of setbacks, problems, breakages, depressions, pandemics, errors, but if you can stick around long enough, you can experience long-term growth.
The long-run is usually rather good and the short run is normally quite bad. In reconciling the two, we learn how to manage both.

Progress requires optimism and pessimism to coexist

<ul>
<li>Everyone has a model in their head of how they think the world works. That model is built mostly from what you've experienced and what people you trust have told you. But everyone has different experiences and a different set of people, leading to different models.</li>
<li>We also believe something if our income or approval in a social circle depends on believing it.</li>
</ul>
It is then essential to understand that no one thinks independently. We all suffer from some degree of blindness.

People believe what they want to believe

An important lesson from history is that big events are more complicated. It makes forecasting difficult, politics nasty, and lessons to learn from it harder. 
We may demand simple answers to explain outlier events. However, it's almost impossible for something big to happen because of one event, person, or group. Unrelated things often culminate into something significant. For example, the Great Depression was the result of a stock market crash, a banking crash, a real estate bubble, an agricultural disaster, and an inadequate policy response. When all these things happened at the same time, it was a catastrophe.

Important things rarely have one cause

The risks we talk about are seldom the most important in hindsight. The real risk is what no-one sees coming. For example, September 11th, Pearl Harbor, The Great Depression. These events surprised nearly everyone and instantly shoved the world in a new direction.
When we are caught off guard, two things happen: One is that we are vulnerable. The other is that surprise shakes our beliefs in a way that leaves us paranoid and pessimistic.

Risk is what you don’t see

The Big Lessons From History · Collaborative Fund

The matrix consists of a square divided into 4 quadrants:<ol><li>Important/Urgent quadrants are done immediately and personally;</li><li>Important/Not Urgent quadrants get an end date and are done personally;</li><li>Unimportant/Urgent quadrants are delegated;</li><li>Unimportant/Not Urgent quadrants are dropped.</li></ol>

Eisenhower Decision Matrix

President Dwight D. Eisenhower was the 34th president and a five star general during World War II. He won his first presidential election by a landslide, built the Interstate Highway System, and created NASA. Which is to say, he was pretty productive. Let&#39;s take a look at a few of his best tricks for getting all that done.

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

Christopher C.
@christopher_gc

Why Perfectionism Stops Us from Creating New Habits - zen habits

How to Collaborate with a Perfectionist

How Much Do You Need to Know Before Getting Started? - Scott H Young

Ethics - Introduction to ethics: Ethics: a general introduction

There are 5 kinds of clutter — which one is filling your life?

Bite-sized knowledgeto upgradeyour career

Christopher C.@christopher_gc

Why Perfectionism Stops Us from Creating New Habits - zen habits

How to Collaborate with a Perfectionist

How Much Do You Need to Know Before Getting Started? - Scott H Young

Ethics - Introduction to ethics: Ethics: a general introduction

There are 5 kinds of clutter — which one is filling your life?

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

Christopher C.
@christopher_gc