How to Be Great? Just Be Good, Repeatably
Highlights
- Perhaps “great’, is just “good”, but repeatable. (View Highlight)
- Note: I think this hits the nail on the head when it comes to my recent feelings of unproductivity. I’m too often drifting into mental and emotional mediocrity and expecting bursts of greatness to lift me up. When instead, I should put in the (potentially difficult) effort to be consistently good, good, good, good until it hurts to be good anymore. That’s how long it’ll take for me to become great. Becoming good means signing up for things and actually going through with them. Being good means promising myself I’ll do something and actually doing it. Being good means recognizing that I’m going down spirals of online distraction (which I don’t even have much left of by the way, because I’m starting to get sick of Reddit and none of my other online distractions are that great), and pulling myself out and doing something else with my time. All these things involve me being just “good”, and I’ve consistently failed in doing them recently.
- Moreover, being “great” is not about being better than someone else. It is about being dependable and disciplined, and ultimately it is earned. (View Highlight)
- “Until you work as hard as those you admire, don’t explain away their success as luck.” - James Clear, Atomic Habits (View Highlight)
- “If you cannot do great things, do small things a great number of times”. (View Highlight)
- It’s easy to wake up whenever you “feel like it”. It’s hard to stick to a routine of getting up at 6AM. It’s easy to pivot from side project to side project, focusing on the new shiny object of the month. It’s hard to stick with a side project for years, many of which may not be profitable for a long while. It’s easy to give up on someone when you hit a roadblock or the next potential partner becomes available. It’s hard to be faithful and invest in a relationship for decades. (View Highlight)
- ’the addiction to having success is what makes you feel unsuccessful at the times when you’re not feeling the immediate dopamine hit of your work ’succeeding’ at that precise moment.’ (View Highlight)
- “The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over. You have to fall in love with boredom.” - Atomic Habits, James Clear (View Highlight)
- If you invest time into solving for what leads to success continuously, you will reap those benefits for years to come. (View Highlight)
- Note: I have noticed this again and again and again. When I set myself up for success down the line and see that my preparation has helped me in whatever situation I’m working on, that genuinely feels like it’s my competitive advantage. It also makes me more willing to continue to work on setting myself up for success.
- “Moving fast and breaking things” is not a strategy, unless you are clearly defining a process of learning so that in the future, you can “move fast and break less of the same things”. (View Highlight)
- There is one thing to clarify: this habit of progression must come with the right inputs. Being consistent with something leading you in the wrong direction, will unsurprisingly lead you in the wrong direction. So if this is the way you are constantly moving (excluding short periods of local minima), pivot until you determine what the right inputs are. (View Highlight)
- If you’re struggling to identify the right path, create more nodes of optimization. For example: if you’re making changes every year, you only have maybe 80 in your entire life to make. Instead, try testing things intentionally every month or even every week. Pilot a lot and then double down when you have found your path towards “good”. (View Highlight)
- And that’s exactly the point of continuous improvement. Since I believe that we can only ever see “two levels out”, we can’t discover these new inputs without slow, but repeatable change. We must explore 58 and then 59 and then all of a sudden, 61 will appear as this new array of opportunity we had never considered before. (View Highlight)
- “To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.” - Henri Bergson (View Highlight)
- The interesting outcome of the experiment was that the best photos were produced not by the quality group, but by the quantity group. Why? While the quality group spent their time speculating what perfection may have been, the quantity group took action in testing what was truly great. “It is easy to get bogged down trying to find the optimal plan for change: the fastest way to lose weight, the best program to build muscle, the perfect idea for a side hustle. We are so focused on figuring out the best approach that we never get around to taking action” - James Clear, Atomic Habits (View Highlight)
- Note: This article is a really interesting counterpart to Atomic Habits.
- Reading to improve is like watching someone else workout — it does almost nothing for you. To run better, run. To paint better, paint. To write better, write. To build better, build. (View Highlight)
- Note: This is what I’m doing right now. It’s a delicious form of structured procrastination.
Date
February 22, 2023