For a long time, I've recognised that I should be spending more time learning to code.

Programming lies at the intersection of many of the things that get me excited: solving hard problems, creating value, working independently while surrounded by the support of others.

It's not just reasoning that tells me this too. Whenever I've spent time learning and experimenting in a text editor (from school to YouTube tutorials to online courses in web development and data analysis) it has been incredibly exciting, fun and rewarding, making hours fly by seamlessly as I get lost in the thick of things.

I recognise that software is, has been, and will continue to be eating our world, know that programming would be a rewarding passion for me, and accept that it it is the natural thing to direct my need-to-do-something energy towards, but in spite of that, something stops me from being a part of that world.

Talking to friends and hearing the advice of others online, I understand what I would need to do to dive deeper: (1) find something that I want to build (2) look for the 'how' through the abundance of resources online and (3) ask for help from others when I get stuck along the way.

Obviously though, knowing all of that isn't a substitute for actually doing the thing.

Clearing the Fog

When it comes to achieving the goals that we set for ourselves, knowing what to do is rarely what holds us back.

To get good grades in school, you simply have to have a good understanding of everything on the syllabus. To build habits, you simply have to commit to consistency and show up everyday. To develop a healthy diet, you simply have to - as author and researcher Michael Pollan puts it -  "eat food, not too much, mostly plants."

All these examples show us that the path to achievement is simple (but not easy). Sure, those single sentence explanations aren't clear roadmaps that we can follow, but they do provide us with 80% of the 'how' that you need to know - of which, the remaining 20% can be found in a book or a few Google searches. The problem lies not in whether we know how to do the thing, but in getting ourselves to do the thing.

Working on anything worthwhile is hard in the sense that it requires persistent effort and temporary discomfort. At some point, we have to "eat the broccoli."

As the writers from Farnam Street remind us:

"anything really worth doing is probably hard work, and will absolutely require you to do things you don’t currently do, which will feel uncomfortable for a while. This is a “hard truth” we must all face. If it was easy, everyone would already be doing it."

Recognising that the problem lies within ourselves can be hard to swallow. Yet, there's a comfort to be found in recognising that those huge, frightening undertakings that we tell ourselves we are incapable of are not all that.

Stepping back to clear away the fog of cognitive dissonance that stops us from starting, we can look up to see that those huge mountains were really just hills all along.

Just as Packy McCormick says of his one year growing the Not Boring newsletter, succeeding at the things we want is "neither as impossible nor easy as it looks."

Thanks to my friend Taimur for giving me a wake up call over Zoom. This is me committing to taking programming seriously this year.

In the eleventh grade, Wednesday mornings meant English class. Every week I would walk in - usually half-awake - and sit down on the old cushioned sofa at the back of the classroom to start the twenty-five minutes of reading that each lesson began with.

The problem was I didn't like reading.

Since young, I had been convinced that as a path to the dopamine I craved, reading was inefficient and required far too much work and patience when compared to something like mashing buttons on a controller.

It also puzzled me why kids who read were praised by parents and teachers. Spending hours watching TV for the escapism and excitement of getting sucked into another world would lead to scoldings and screentime limits, but staring at words on a page instead of an LCD screen for the same reasons was considered worthwhile. It didn't make sense and all the quoted statistics about 'intelligence' and ‘success’ didn't do much to convince me of anything.

After graduating from The Hungry Caterpillar, I never went on to read Harry Potter or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. What was the point?

And so that is what left me searching each Wednesday morning for something in our class library to read and pass the time. I would pick a book that stood out on the shelf, read the first 30 pages and return it at the end of the twenty-five minutes just to start over again with a new book the next week.

Eventually though, I ran out of new books to try and all those studies about reading started to weigh on my mind. I wanted to give reading another shot but after failing to find anything to sink my teeth into and not knowing where else to look, I approached my English teacher for help.

She recommended 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle', one of her favourites, she said and trusting her judgement, I loaded it up on the old Kindle to bring into class the next week.

Some combination of the loveable averageness of Toru Okada (the book's protagonist and narrator), lines like "I had no more plans for the afternoon than a migrating bird has collateral assets" and the absurdity of a story about free-will and the corruption of one’s identity that hinges on a missing cat sucked me into the world of Murakami for the next few weeks of English class. It became something to look forward to, and even when the holidays started, the book made hour-long commutes to a Summer internship fly by.

‘The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’ was my gateway drug into reading. It gave me the chance to get lost in another life. It made me introspect about my personal convictions, aspirations and the story I wanted to live out. It allowed me to find joy in something I had always seen as a chore or something to do to please others and it opened up the opportunity to learn and lead a more colourful life.

In the years following, I would go on to read another nine more of Murakami’s novels which would lead me to a whole slew of other writers and eventually to the world of non-fiction and autobiographies: books like Atomic Habits, Meditations and A Mind for Numbers which have changed how I think about life, learning and myself.

For doing so, I owe my English teacher, ‘The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’ and Haruki Murakami a great deal of gratitude.

Thank you Mr Murakami.

On Second Reading

Thinking back to those Wednesday morning English lessons, I decided to revisit ‘The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’ at the start of this year and loaded it back up on my Kindle for a second reading.

Jumping between the Russo-Japanese War, a well in the backyard of a 'hanging house', an otherworldly hotel with faceless inhabitants, a zoo in Manchuria, and a wig factory in Northern Japan, it was comforting to find that three years later, Murakami's 8th novel still holds a special place in my heart.

His elegant prose and storytelling brought me back to those Summer train rides, keeping 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle' at the top of my list and immortalising it as the first book I’ve read twice.

I read the story with a new set of eyes - being a very different person than I was in the eleventh grade - and, not having to anticipate what would come next, I found myself stopping to smell the roses more and taking the time to pick-out exactly what left such a strong impression the first time around.

What makes the story so great in my eyes is its emphasis on storytelling and perspective.

Murakami leaves a lot of blank space to be filled in as emotions and events (not so much explanations) dominate the narrative. The reader is put into the shoes of our protagonist Toru Okada as he struggles to understand how his mundane life unravelled into chaos and has to rely on the stories of others (all connected by a bird that makes the sound of a winding spring) to make sense of what greater power is at work.

In that way, the book becomes a collection of short stories, each one speaking to the unique problems that every one of us encounters in our lives. Struggles that aren’t always seen by the people who enter our lives at different stages and who we might shield from them. Struggles that shape who we are and craft a lens through which we see the world differently from those around us.

As Tiago Forte puts it well, stories are powerful:

"The deepest assumptions can only be revealed through experience and stories, not by reading books or having intellectual arguments. We do these things through the same old lens, and thus cannot examine the lens. It takes another free mind, reaching up and taking off our spectacles, to show us the cracks and the foggy areas."

As a testament to that and the way that the book moved me, here are just seven quotes from 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle' that left a strong impression the second time around.

On Identity

"Is it possible, finally, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another? We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close are we able to come to that person’s essence?"

On Meaning

"Nothing so consumes a person as meaningless exertion."

On The Ebbs and Flows of Life

“It’s not a question of better or worse. The point is, not to resist the flow. You go up when you’re supposed to go up and down when you’re supposed to go down. When you’re supposed to go up, find the highest tower and climb to the top. When you’re supposed to go down, find the deepest well and go down to the bottom. When there’s no flow, stay still."

On Fate

"A person’s destiny is something you look back at after it’s past, not something you see in advance."

On Hopelessness

"There is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for."

On Having Perspective

"What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world. We get into the habit of thinking, This is the world, but that’s not true at all. The real world is in a much darker and deeper place than this, and most of it is occupied by jellyfish and things."

The first step is always the hardest, but once you're in motion, the subsequent ones becomes easier as momentum carries you forward.

At first, uncertainty, fear and energy-conserving algorithms in our brain tell us that we're better off staying put.

The activation energy required to jump over that first hurdle in our path keeps us rooted to the ground and holds us back from the things that we want to do deep down.

Even once we generate the willpower to begin, a need for credentials - baked into our thought processes by society and schooling - causes us to endlessly scour the internet for second-hand knowledge and the permission to start.

No one is going to give you that permission and you don't need it anyways.

As James Clear says:

"You can plan, delay, and revise all you want, but trust me, what you have now is enough to start."

All those barriers that your brain uses as excuses to not start, they don’t exist.

The context-dependent advice of others can only bring you so far and the fastest way out of that Dunning-Kruger pit is through experience.

Start now.

As a kid, my Summers would begin with a 16 hour plane ride. Visiting family on the other side of the world, my siblings and I would strap ourselves into our row of three chairs and prepare for takeoff in the metal box with wings that would carry us over the ocean.

Flicking through the catalog in the seat pocket in front of us, we would excitedly share with each other our plans to watch every one of the new movies and shows on offer and as soon as we were up in the sky and the seatbelt lights were off, it was go time. With our first and second and third choices lined up, we would relish the excuse to binge the latest Disney Pixar films and seasons of Friends on the small notebook sized screen in front of us.

Sadly, we were only small people with big ambitions and after two or three movies, we would inevitably reach a point of saturation. With another 10 hours of flying still ahead of us, my brother and sister would fall back on their secret weapon for killing time: sleep. They would turn off their screens, pull out their pillow and in moments would drift off till we touched ground again.

This left me - after cycling through every permutation of pillow position and exhausting the entirety of my playlist trying to fall asleep - alone in my quest to kill time. I’d play a few games of Solitaire or Tetris (which got boring pretty quickly), look through the selection of songs (even with my iPod in my pocket) and start and stop a bunch of shows (that I didn't really want to watch). Looking for the magic time machine that would make the hours pass by quicker, all roads would lead me back to the same place: the flight path screen.

With it's Google Earth-like curved map, the flight path screen showed you what part of the world you were suspended over in that moment and how far your little plane on your screen was from its destination. After each new activity, I would find myself back on this screen staring at that little plane and watching the 'flight hours remaining' in the corner of the screen slowly go down.

In those hours, I was existing for the moment where that number would drop to zero and left in a state of waiting, I agonised over the ticking clock that moved slower the more I watched it.

The Perils of Time

We all have our flight path screens. Events that we’re waiting for and goals we’re trying to reach faster.

For me, after those long flights it was school, waiting for holidays and wanting to grow up and be ‘free’ as soon as I could and after school it was the mandatory two years in the army where I would count the days to the end of each training phase. I was convinced that these things that I had no control over were the problems themselves and as a result, failed to address what was really at the heart of that dissatisfaction: I didn’t know what to do with all that time.

Often times we tell ourselves that our problems will be solved if we can just reach that end in sight and in doing so, we give up being present and let the finite seconds we’re born with slip by. We take the worst part of goals - the postponement of our happiness to future externalities - and buy into the promise that the passing of time will somehow make everything better.

Instead of dealing with our underlying fears - being alone, not being good enough or not enjoying what we’re doing - we free ourselves from the heavy responsibility of being in control of our own happiness and convince ourselves that it’ll all be better when X happens.

The reality that we’re scared to face is that our problems go much deeper than the stories we tell ourselves and when our waiting is complete, we realise that we still haven't found the missing piece we thought would be there.

There are no external solutions to internal problems.

Journey Before Destination

If you had a fast forward button would you use it?

When thinking of all the doctor's offices, long lines and red-eye flights, it’s easy to answer yes. The things that we want demand sacrifices that often boil down to time or effort and a shortcut to bypass that is tempting.

That is, until we realise that each one of those moments skipped by are part of the increasingly small handful that we start our lives with. Each of them represent a possibility, to explore a passion, think about the problems that we’re avoiding or even just write a message to thank an important person in our life.

Trying to overcome this issue, I've found it useful to apply inversion to my thought process and think not about the endless hours ahead, but instead of what I would do if I only had a few moments left.

A palliative care nurse by the name of Bronnie Ware shared - after her experience treating patients at the end of their life -  the biggest regrets of the dying, the last of which being “I wish that I had let myself be happier.”

I think a lot about what that means for me and how I choose to live my life in every moment. When viewing things through that lens, every moment feels precious.

As the stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius says:

“We must make haste then, not only because we are daily nearer to death, but also because the conception of things and the understanding of them cease first.”

Time is precious and all the moments spent living in the future are ones that you'll want back.

What uncomfortable truth are you avoiding? What passion could you be exploring? How can you let yourself be happier?

Don't let days go by where you're waiting for the next one to come.

Don’t wait for the plane to land, enjoy the ride instead.

We're told that the key to accelerated growth is fast feedback loops - quick signals that inform us whether our current efforts are producing the results we want.

As children, we rely on these fast feedback loops to rapidly develop skills from repeated failure. Every fall trying to stand up brings us closer to taking our first steps just as every cheer from our parents gets us to speaking our first words.

Fast feedback loops are tennis ball launchers that allow us to adjust our swing each time the ball lands on the other side of the court. Each failure prompts us to change approach and each success makes us remember what to repeat.

As impulsive people looking for instant gratification, we have a tendency to let immediate consequences guide our actions. Without these navigation systems in place, we can feel like ships lost at sea, unsure of which way is forward.

But looking for fast feedback encounters one big problem when it comes to making long-term change:

"Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits."- James Clear, Atomic Habits

When it comes to adopting new routines in our lives - everything from exercising regularly and eating better to spending less money or learning more - the results that we're looking for are rarely instantaneous. In cases where feedback is more like a signal from Mars than an echo off the wall, we can be led astray by sustained silences as we pursue efforts that only see benefits over the long-run.

At the start, we find ourselves at the flat portion of an exponential curve where results lag behind what we expect and feeling like our hard work isn't paying off can cause us to throw in the towel before we reach the critical mass required for things to point upwards.

Shifting our Sights Ahead

In order to avoid this, there are a few things we can do to remind ourselves to keep showing up in spite of doubts:

• Look beyond the horizon: when it comes to procrastination, Piers Steel tells us that the problem lies in the fact that "we view the present in concrete terms and the future abstractly." The same can be said for our short-sighted self-improvement - viewing things in too short of a timeframe can cause us to feel disappointed when we don't see quick results. Instead of thinking of habits as get-rich-quick schemes, we should see them as long-term investments and picture ourselves two months or a year from now in the future where we committed to consistency.
• Don't check everyday: Since results take shape over the long-run, metrics are meaningless until enough time has passed. Checking your weight, your bank account or investment every day can be defeating and cause you to draw the wrong conclusions. Instead of checking your progress everyday, give it a week or two and take note of the broader trend. You're playing the long-game anyways.
• Give yourself fast feedback: in absence of a fast feedback loop, we can still positively reinforce our effects by reminding ourselves of small wins. Every successful repetition is, as James Clear tells us, a vote for the kind of person that we want to become and that alone is something to celebrate. Congratulate yourself because what is rewarded is repeated.

Think of Bamboo

One last thing that helps me whenever I feel like giving up on something I know will pay off in the long run is thinking of bamboo.

Bamboo can barely be seen for the first five years as it builds extensive root systems underground before exploding ninety feet into the air within six weeks.

I find comfort in thinking of myself as a little bamboo shoot growing its roots under the soil in waiting. It keeps me coming back knowing that things will turn upward if I just keep showing up.

If we are too focussed on results, it is easy to give up on things that require commitment but when we view things through the lens of lagging indicators, we can find comfort in knowing that we simply need to shift our perspective further ahead:

Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits. Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits. Your clutter is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. You get what you repeat.

For more on this and other ideas relating to habit formation, you can check out James Clear and his book Atomic Habits.

The beaming face below belongs to a liar.

At the start of the year, I started this blog and told myself that I would publish one post a week as a commitment to the consistency necessary to do anything important.

In the past two weeks, I've published a total of 0 posts.

My reaction to that fact is splintered in two as I simultaneously feel guilt and disappointment while also still encouraging myself to be more charitable with myself.

It's such a hard balancing game when it comes to holding yourself to the targets you set.

Beating yourself up when you come up short doesn't achieve much to change anything and more often leads to a downward spiral of self-depreciation that can tip you over into completely conceiting.

But on the other hand, providing yourself with too much leniency makes you okay with walking back on your word and stops you from putting as much effort in as you could with the comfort of an undisturbed conscience.

The James Clear / Jerry Seinfeld "Never Skip Twice" motto is a good way to balance charitability and accountability but even to that end, I am failing.

I like to tell myself it's because I'm busy. I have a full-time 'job' in the army, have been arranging calls almost everyday with the amazing people I'm meeting online and have been taking steps back to reassess priorities.

But all of that seems fake the deeper I dig into it. When you look at it on paper, time is ample and I have already decided for a multitude of reasons that this is important to me.

In reality, I've been sitting on 2 or 3 drafts of thoughts that are trying to become coherent blog posts but as it goes so often, the longer I spend on them, the more discomfort accumulates around revisiting them for the umpteenth time to try and work things through.

This discomfort stops me from writing and posting and not writing and posting makes me work on these projects more out of guilt than enjoyment which in turn leads to more discomfort.

These feelings make it impossible to enjoy the process and has created a loop that I need to escape from.

That need brings me here - an exercise in just putting in the reps and an attempt to follow my own advice on perfectionism.

This twenty minute brain dump rights all the wrongs and cleans the slate. I'm resetting the timer, marking my first cross on the Calendar and jumping back on the consistency wagon.

See you this Thursday!

Our networked world is one abundant with choice.

The internet brought us the collective knowledge of humanity to our fingertips. It expanded what was possible for an individual to do at any waking second of the day and gave us access to the world beyond our previously small bubbles.

With an unlimited access to information, we believe that we can minimise regret by systematically finding all the best decisions. We look to others for answers by performing one of the 3.8 million Google searches made every minute, searching for "what to do when [blank]?", "the pros and cons of [blank]", "the best [blank] out there".

What is thrown back to us by the far-reaching hands of underwater fibre optic cables is a library of opinions and information that root us in place as we compare endless matrices of pros and cons. Each search provides us with a lifetime’s worth of content and if we fall too deep down the rabbit hole, we can come out on the other side feeling anxious, exhausted and uncertain.

More choices and more information promises to provide us with more freedom but often it just makes us slaves to a new master: analysis paralysis.

Some Choices are More Equal Than Others

Our lives are defined by choices. Without them we are nothing more than atoms compelled by the laws of physics (which a determinist might say that we still are).

Each decision we make represents a branching path where our life differentiates from the alternate one in which we went left instead of right, took the train instead of an Uber or chose University abc over University xyz.

But in reality, not every choice is made equal and not every decision is worthy of the time or attention we spend deliberating on it.

As Tim Ferris explains, deliberation comes at a cost:

"Every second spent performing complex mental simulations to imagine whether this or that choice would be better for us subtracts from our pool of attention units that are necessary for both attainment and appreciation: that is, both accomplishing more with our time as well as enjoying experiences in the moment."

Time and attention are the necessary ingredients for any action and every choice eats into the limited reserves that we start each day with. Research has even shown that too many choices, and the overthinking that comes with them, can negatively effect our cognitive ability, willpower, creativity and happiness.

The question then, is how can we avoid these costs and overcome analysis paralysis?

If we recognise that (1) not all choices are worthy of our time and that (2) considering our options for too long limits what we can do with our attention, the task becomes:

1. Recognising decisions worthy of our time
2. Reducing the tax of unworthy decisions for more time and attention (and by extension more accomplishment and appreciation)
3. Approaching worthy decisions systematically to avoid analysis paralysis

What's the Worst That Could Happen

When it comes to prioritising and deciding which of our many decisions are worth thinking long and hard on, it is necessary to put things into context. That is, to envision the future outcomes that our options present us with.

You might be thinking "well yes, envisioning future outcomes is what decision making is and is the root of the analysis paralysis problem" and you'd be right. But the important add-on is that we need to limit the future outcomes we look at by focussing on one side of the spectrum: the one where things go wrong.

We spend so long trying to make the best choice for the best outcomes, but the likely possible downsides of a wrong choice tell us whether looking for that best choice is really a good use of our time.

Why should we try to maximise when the cost of that maximising (time and attention) is higher than making the worse choice?

The quick and efficient heuristic is to ask yourself "what is the realistic outcome of a ‘wrong’ decision?"

If the wrong decision leads to a not-so-bad outcome, that means that the cost of making a quick choice is similarly not-so-bad. In that case, just trusting your internal barometer is a better choice than staying stuck.

Choosing the wrong dish for dinner may leave you with some slight dissatisfaction or maybe envy when you see your friend digging into a nice juicy steak but it’s hardly an important decision with far reaching consequences. On the other hand, dumping your life savings into a stock that some faceless internet dudes told you to buy for reasons that you don't understand could end up pretty badly and you should probably take a few minutes to think about the investment.

Remember to be realistic. With enough time and imagination, I could wrongfully employ the butterfly effect to tell myself that choosing the wrong font for my essay will cause everyone I care about to abandon me but even Comic Sans is unlikely to do that.

Apply Constraints

Constraints direct our attention towards the most salient pieces of information and allow us to cut away the extraneous.

One study from Columbia and Stanford psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper found that:

“people are more likely to purchase gourmet jams or chocolates or to undertake optional class essay assignments when offered a limited array of 6 choices rather than a more extensive array of 24 or 30 choices. Moreover, participants actually reported greater subsequent satisfaction with their selections and wrote better essays when their original set of options had been limited.“

This is what psychologists Barry Schwartz calls The Paradox of Choice: the idea that having an abundance of options can overwhelm us and induce stress, anxiety and a feeling of paralysis. Schwartz goes on to explain that considering too many choices not only overwhelms us, it also means that even when a decision is finally arrived at, we can walk away feeling self-doubt rather than content as we wonder whether option 2 or 3 or 67 was better than the one we chose.

What the Paradox of Choice tells us is that when it comes to decision making, we can do more with less.

By applying constraints, we can limit the data that we have to process and limit the taxing effects of both small and big decisions. We can make our choices quicker and more satisfying by:

• Limiting the options we allow ourselves to consider in the first place (if we follow the results of this study, that would be about 6).
• Framing the options (as Schwartz recommends) by grouping them together based on similar outcomes. For instance, choosing accommodations for a vacation through the lens of what type (hotel, motel, hostel) or what part of the city you want to be in.
• Filtering the options through the lens of goals, money or time.

Goals

The Southwest Airlines CEO Herb Kelleher once responded to a journalist that his decisions are made simple by asking one question. “Are we the lowest cost airline?”

A clearly defined goal - like offering the lowest prices - gives us a first filter to limits the options we consider. Instead of being distracted by all the unimportant selling points that each option presents to you, choose what it is you are looking for and cut through the noise.

Think about your goal. Make sure it's the right one. Limit your options to those that achieve that goal.

Money

Tim Ferris talks about how he applied financial thresholds to lessen the number of business decisions he had to make. He gave the simple instruction to his assistants that they should make the call if the decision or the potential outcome would cost less than $100.

Now, while you might be working under different limitations, this same principal can be applied to your own life when you’re tossing and turning over whether a purchase is worth making.

Time

Parkinson’s Law causes the time we take to complete a task to expand and fill the time given. The same is true for our decision-making. We will deliberate until we are forced to commit.

After considering what the wrong choice would lead to, think about how much time you think is worth devoting to this choice? Answer that question for yourself and set that deadline.

But just saying that you need to make a certain choice by a certain time is often not enough without strict self-control. Being another thing that we have a limited supply of, discipline isn't a reliable source of applying constraints, so better yet is to rely on an external force. Reinforce your deadline by getting others to hold you accountable. For example:

• Set a forfeit with a friend or family member if you fail to make a decision by a certain time (eg. “I’ll pay you 100 bucks if I don’t settle on this by tomorrow”)
• Create the social pressure of somebody waiting on you: for instance by calling the waiter over before you’ve settled on what you want to eat or telling somebody that you’ll get back to them by a certain time of the day.

This is Always the Wrong Choice

Overwhelmed by fear and anxiety, we might be tempted to just remove ourselves from choice. We say that we'll decide later but just end up putting things off until they're out of our hands.

We do this to be free of responsibility but end up causing ourselves harm by leaving things to chance or the will of others. What we need to remember is that not choosing is in itself a choice and one which is almost always the wrong one.

As David Schwartz says in the Magic of Thinking Big:

“Action cures fear. Indecision, postponement, on the other hand, fertilise fear.”

Overcoming Analysis Paralysis comes down to identifying what is important and eliminating what isn't.

The abundance of choice doesn't have to be a problem. More information and more options open up more possibilities for us to pursue. We just have to change the way that we approach them.

In game theory, a zero-sum game refers to any situation where one’s gain is offset by another’s loss. When the total losses and gains are added up they equal zero, hence zero-sum. In sports we have losers and winners, in the stock market we can only overperform when others underperform and in gambling our winnings are somebody else’s losses. A positive-sum game on the other hand represents a win-win situation instead of a win-lose one. Both parties are netting positive from the interaction. In life, we should seek out positive-sum games that benefit everyone involved. Some examples of positive sum-games to pursue include:

• Generosity: Kevin Kelly puts it best: “Perhaps the most counter-intuitive truth of the universe is that the more you give to others, the more you’ll get. Understanding this is the beginning of wisdom.”
• Collaboration: find ways to work with others and become better as a whole than as two parts. The best partners are experts at the things you struggle with. They compliment your skills and together you form a team with emergent properties. Collaborations, when done right, lead to great things for all parties involved.
• Teaching: Studies have shown that teaching is one of the best ways to learn and test your own understanding. Teaching something requires a thorough understanding of your content and applies the generation effect to help us commit knowledge and skills to memory.

Daily Highlights

Make Time introduced me to the idea of a daily highlight which has helped me focus on my own priorities during the day. A highlight represents an intermediate between a goal (which is too far-off and hard to take action on) and a task (which is too insignificant and fleeting). The idea is to imagine looking back at your day and asking yourself what you accomplished to make it a successful day? What was your highlight? Our highlight should be something that is either urgent, fills us with a sense of accomplishment or brings us joy. For instance, a highlight might be:

• Finish that essay due tomorrow
• Publish a blog post
• Treat yourself

We then make this highlight a focus that we fit into our busy schedule to ensure that each day ends as a success and brings us closer to our goals. Every morning I define a highlight as part of my daily reflection practice which keeps me focussed on my own priorities instead of those that others might impose on me during the day.

If this idea interests you, definitely consider picking up the book Make Time for a whole list of practical tools to decide, stay focussed, stay energised and reflect on your daily highlight.​

Start With a Win

On the subject of wins, I’ve come to realise that the best morning routine incorporates a small win into it. This might be exercise, writing, cooking or reading but the idea is to start your day off with something that gives you confidence and a sense of accomplishment that sets you off on a path to more wins. Committing to this idea, I’ve decided that this week I’ll be focussing on waking up early every day and starting off the morning by writing and walking.

3 Favourite Saves

​Make Time is a book from two ex-Google product designers discussing how we can draw from tested tools to build a life that prioritises what is important to us. I picked the book up this week and have already started implementing the advice in my own life.

​Practical Discipline gives us a few ways to take steps towards changing our behaviour. My favourite piece of advice was to nudge our desired choices with our previous choices: “If you want to buy, say, gym shorts and groceries (as I did a few days ago), do it in that exact order. That way, you’re primed to make healthier choices.”

​Practice Failure builds on the words of Amelia Earhart and the way that pilots intentionally stall their planes to practice failure in a controlled environment. Learn by designing intentional failures when the cost of failure isn’t too high. “If we don’t practice failing, we can only safely fly on sunny days.”

3 Quotes to Think About

“We don’t remember days, we remember moments” - Cesare Pavese

“Only experience counts when there is no time to think a process through.” - Amelia Earhart

“Our greatest fear should not be of failure, but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter.” - Francis Chan

Up until this point, I’ve always hated giving advice. When asked for my opinion from friends and family on the choices they were making, I often took the non-committal route of redirecting questions back to them and avoided making a recommendation on what they should or shouldn’t do.

Being someone who looks inward instead of outward for the answers to my problems, I believed it was best to give the conservative response of “you should do what feels right” or “follow your heart.”

This came from a place of doubt and fear. I felt unqualified. Why should my opinion matter on this or that topic and how could I really be sure that what I told others was the right thing for them to do. I feared that my advice would lead them in the wrong direction and couldn’t live with the responsibility of having somebody make a mistake based on what I had told them.

These fears came up this week when I was asked by a younger friend of mine for advice on what courses he should take come next school year.

Having been in his place just a few years back, I asked him a few questions including what his desired outcome was, what reservations he was having and what thoughts had come to him so far. I listened to what he had to say and told him what I thought he should do based on my experiences and what others had told me. I didn’t think much of it.

It was when he mentioned something about hoping to get the same grades as I did that I felt a great deal of responsibility. I realised that being someone who had done well in school, my words would likely weigh heavily on his decision. It scared me.

I thought of the people in my life who I looked up to and how everything they told me felt like sacred wisdom. Knowing that I could have the same effect on somebody else, I came away worrying that I had said the wrong thing.

Having time to think on the walk home, I thought back to how choices in my own life were influenced by the (sometimes not asked for) opinions of others and working through it all helped me come to this conclusion:
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When giving advice, taking a hard stance risks having the receiver go off in the wrong direction but taking no stance only assures that they go off having gained nothing.
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The conservative choice assures the chance of no significant negative outcomes but it does so at the expense of removing significant positive outcomes. This is the case with everything from business and investing to sports and relationships. Not asking your crush out assures that you don’t have to face the embarrassment of rejection. It also means removing the chance that you’ll be with the person you want to be with.

We add value to others’ lives by contributing a different perspective on the world. People look to those around them for advice because they want to escape the repetitive noise of their own thoughts and look at their problems through the eyes of another.

Of course, you shouldn’t give advice on something you know little to nothing about. Providing things like financial or medical advice should remain the responsibility of those who have some domain expertise and shouldn’t be taken lightly. But for most other things, your insights have value so long as you are (1) looking out and considering the best interests of the person seeking advice (2) explain where you’re coming from and (3) caveat the advice as an opinion to be weighed with many others and one’s own judgement.

Your words can help others see new insights, overlooked points and holes in their thinking. Whether or not they agree with what you tell them is up for them to decide. If they agree, they will have come away with a new answer to their problem and if they don’t, they’ll come away with a stronger conviction.
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Don’t fear giving advice, fear not providing value to others.

Imagine you're a doctor. The doors to the ER fling open and in enters a stretcher carrying a patient whose lungs are in critical condition. Medication isn't working and the best solution would be to transplant a functioning replacement. The problem is that the wait list for a donor runs long and finding an immediately viable replacement on short notice isn't going to work.

Faced with this issue, you wouldn't walk away thinking "oh well, if only we had a lung donor", you would get them on a ventilator in the meantime. Sure the ventilator isn't the perfect solution: it's uncomfortable, it's inconvenient and isn't a replacement for functioning lungs, but what's certain is that it does more good than just standing around waiting.

This is how many of us should embrace better solutions instead of perfect ones and yet many of us succumb to the Nirvana Fallacy that keeps us searching or waiting for the lung donor to arrive.

The Nirvana (or perfect choice) Fallacy is a cognitive bias that causes us to reject imperfect ideas. It is the flawed belief that because a solution to a problem isn't perfect, that it isn't worth pursuing. This bias creates a false dichotomy in the belief that our only choices are to find the perfect solution or accept the current reality when in fact, we can choose the middle path and settle for an improvement.

Here are three examples of the Nirvana Fallacy that might cause harm in your own life and how you can reframe these issues to avoid the costs of searching or waiting for perfection.

"I don't know how to ___"

It's easy to let the excuse for not doing something be that we're not knowledgeable or skilled enough to do it:

• "I don't know what to do at the gym so I'll wait till I develop the perfect routine."
• "I need to learn how to cook before I make dinner for my girlfriend."
• "I'm not an expert so I can't write online."

Reframe: Doing a few pushups, breaking a few eggs and sharing a few thoughts is not only better than doing nothing, it's an essential part of the learning process.

Pushing Down Our Ideas

Doubting an idea because it still has flaws can make us back away from taking risks and suppress our thoughts in group settings. It's valuable to share your ideas whether it's in a business meeting or with a friend seeking advice.

Reframe: Acting on your ideas even though you foresee problems lets you fail faster, learn quicker and do more. Your imperfect but better solution has value and sharing it with others opens up opportunities to fix those flaws. Not speaking up kills confidence and promotes self-doubt and fear.

Searching Instead of settling

There are many cases where we might pour time into searching for the perfect solution. This is an investment that yields diminishing returns and comes with a high opportunity cost. We might spend hours, days or weeks researching the best note-taking app or task management system or morning routine instead of just settling on something that works.

Reframe: Continuing the endless search for the ideal solution is rarely better than just starting with what works. Go from an endless search to an improving system, as the book Make Time tells us: pick, test, repeat. Iterate and improve.

Incremental improvements are what drive growth that compounds over the long term.

Recognise when the ventilator is better than waiting for the lung.

Choose progress over perfection.

I remember writing the draft of my first university essay. It was a new experience of trying to sell myself to others. I thought I had a good grasp over what traits I should accentuate to make myself a desirable candidate - whatever that meant - and after showing not telling how I was a persistent, creative, community-oriented, multi-faceted, passionate student, I used one word to sum up the way I approached my work. I called myself a perfectionist.

Now, while I can't remember anything else that went on during my next meeting with the university guidance counsellor, what is burned into my memory is the big line going through the word 'perfectionist' and the comment that read "this isn't a good thing."

"Perfect is the enemy of good"- Voltaire

Perfectionism is a trap. It strings you along with its promise of achieving an attainable end. It tricks you into thinking that your efforts will bring you to the light at the end of the never-ending tunnel.

The existence of the word makes us believe that such a thing exists while in fact the entropic forces of the universe are doing all that they can to move us towards disorder. All the dance dance revolution machines in their various forms flash us with the word when we do something good but there is a lack of sincerity in their approximation of the good to the perfect.

Ideals are ideals because they exist only outside of reality. They are unattainable conceptions of perfection. They are asymptotes on our graphs of improvement that will never be reached no matter how high up we go.

Waiting for perfection keeps you rooted in the state of pre-action. It's an excuse to avoid doing the thing that we fear the most: failing.

What perfectionists fail to understand is that somehow, better could be worse - that time spent striving for the ideal form of something is merely time wasted.

This series intends to unpack the science of perfection and share the mental models that can help to avoid its siren call. Each issue will explore how we can understand the words of my guidance counsellor and embrace failing faster, learning quicker and doing more.

I'm no expert, only a recovering perfectionist who struggles to recognise when good enough is good enough, but in the words of a programmer (the biggest community of anti-perfectionists): sometimes worse is better.

The philosopher David Hume described our minds with the metaphor of a theatre - one with an ever changing cast of opposing thoughts and perceptions. In Hume’s eyes, this denied the existence of a persistent 'self' that could be tied down and attributed to an individual. In his eyes, we were all just bundles of perceptions.

Take aside your belief in the nature of our identity and there’s a truth to be found in the way we are governed by change. As humans, we’re characterised by changes in the way we feel, think and act. Subject to biases and the sway of emotions, we are in a constant state of flux.

Furthermore, as we explore and dip our toes into new contexts, communities and streams of information, our thought patterns are constantly evolving to match our new model of the world around us. Change is a part of being.

How might we find something consistent to hold onto while our internal and external conditions are constantly shifting?

The answer: our core values.

Like many of my other Asian friends, I grew up learning to play the piano. It was just one of the facts of life that every Thursday after school I would attend lessons, play for an hour and come back home. A default condition that I never questioned. It wasn't something that I cared much for but I also didn't hate it and again, it just seemed like one of the facts of life that me, as a know-nothing kid, shouldn't question.

The problem was that I never felt like practicing. I had gotten by for a few years on just the weekly one hour lesson which was fine when it came to learning hot cross buns or Fur Elise, but when the piece of sheet music in front of me slowly started to fill up with dots, dashes and squiggles, the problems with my practicing habits became clear. I suddenly had to start exercising my fingers at home with more than just video games and was forced to sit down to play the same scales and pieces over and over again till they could be called upon by muscle memory. Playing piano became a chore to me and I dreaded every time I would need to sit down and practice. Yet still, it was just one of the facts of life that me, as a know-nothing kid, shouldn't question.

With the piano practice equivalent of night-before-the-exam-cramming-session's, I managed to pass the piano exams I was taking every year and continued to progress up the grades just barely scraping by. I couldn't figure out why I couldn't cope with things getting more difficult. Why was it so hard for me to sit down and play for 30 minutes a day? Why did I put off practicing at my own expense? Why was I going to piano lessons half the time not having played for the whole week? "Well anyways", I thought, "it was just one of the facts of life that me, as a know-nothing kid, shouldn't question".

It took me a while but I figured it out, the reason why year after year my progress was slowing and my stress increasing was that I just didn't want to play. I didn't care. I wasn't excited about the fact that I was creating music or that all those dots, lines and squiggles in front of me were a language that my fingers could translate into melodies. As I saw other kids around me choosing to spend their time playing video games or building robots, it struck me that maybe this wasn't just one of the facts of life and maybe it didn't have to be a fact of mine.

My parents gave me a freedom that I couldn't be more grateful for. They believed in giving us ample opportunities but not deciding anything for us. They never forced anything on me or my siblings and we always had a say. So when it came to telling them I wanted to quit, that was that. It was done.

I had my last lesson and walked out the door knowing that I would no longer be subject to the torment of hating something and sucking at it because I hated it and hating it more because I sucked at it. I realised the default conditions weren't set in stone and was free to fill time spent on piano with the things I actually wanted to do.

But what did I actually want? What would I fill my Thursday after school's with?

I take long walks to slow down, clear my mind and escape from the suffocating trash compactor of external and internal pressure. Walking gives me time to breathe, time to listen to the ideas that seem so abundant when you're outside and time to find joy in the world. I consider walking to be an essential part of my life and today was proof of that.

It was the early afternoon and I was strolling without purpose along the river near my house when my eyes landed on something across the water that made me pause - a man skipping.

Bald, shirtless and wearing a pair of bright orange shorts, the one thing that grabbed my attention was his passion. He was handling his skipping rope with an intensity that I hadn't seen before, spinning it at great speeds and performing all sorts of jumps, tricks and flourishes. The skipping rope was an extension of his body and he was in full control as it flowed around him: over, under, backwards, forward, in front, behind and to the side. I was entranced by his skill and watched in awe as I thought to myself "this is a man who knows something."

I was facing him from the opposite side of the water but up ahead there was a bridge which would lead me to his side of the world. My feet carried me over on their own and I found myself standing meters behind him, his speaker on the floor blasting pounding hiphop music to the disapproval of a few passerby's. I wasn't sure what I wanted to say, but I was sure that there was something I could learn from him.

When he took a break for a sip of water, I walked over and the first question that came out was: "how did you become so great at skipping?"

He didn't even pause to think. It was clear that this question was core to who he was and that his answer was deeply ingrained into his belief system. Without a beat, he responded with a few words that played over in my head as I thanked him and carried on with my wandering:

"I've been doing this for a longtime man, you just have to keep doing it everyday... You have to live it and believe in it before you become it."

Many of us have experienced the magic effects of a well-designed space. Somewhere that flips a switch inside of you as soon as you set foot in the door. There's a rhythm in the air of these spaces that induce flow states, mood changes and creative output. Sitting down, you feel a powerful wave of calm and focus overcome you. Thoughts of avoidance, distraction and self-doubt fade into the background as you set to work on moving the mountains in front of you.

This is the power of context - the spaces we find ourselves in shape our capacity for doing. Harnessing this power means applying contextual leverage to our lives - small changes in the design of our environment that deliver outsized returns in how we act.

When it comes to mastering our behaviour, our output and our creativity, it is important to heed the words of writer Stephen Johnson:

"Our thought shapes the spaces we inhabit, and our spaces return the favour."

Broken Windows & The Power of Context

Our body is primed to perceive cues. Signals given off by the things around us are reflected back onto our thoughts and actions in ways that we aren't always aware of. Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point aptly describes this as the power of context:

"we are more than just sensitive to changes in context. We're exquisitely sensitive to them."- Malcom Gladwell, The Tipping Point

In his book, Gladwell tells a great story about New York City crime in the 1990s. In the 80s, New York City crime ran rampant. In a single year, there were over 600,000 serious felonies and 2000 murders committed in the city and yet, by 1996, felonies were down 40% and homicide rates halved. Why was this?

Gladwell explains that on a broad scale crime levels in the US were decreasing over this period as the economy improved, the population aged and the crack trade declined but what made for such a significant drop in New York compared to the rest of the US was the implementation of the Broken Windows Theory.

Building on the work of Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo (famous for designing the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment), George Kelling and James Wilson posited the Broken Windows Theory which linked crime with context:

"crime is the inevitable result of disorder. If a window is broken and left unrepaired, people walking by will conclude that no one cares and no one is in charge. Soon more windows will be broken, and the sense of anarchy will spread from the building to the street on which it faces, sending a signal that anything goes."

As one study in the Netherlands found: “One example of disorder, like graffiti or littering, can indeed encourage another, like stealing.”

David Gunn, as head of the New York Transit Authority, started a campaign to eliminate subway car graffiti which he saw as "symbolic of the collapse of the system." William Bratton, as New York City police commissioner, began cracking down on fare avoiding turnstile jumpers and behaviour like public drinking and street prostitution through the introduction of the “quality of life" initiative.

By the late 1990s, these policies built on the Broken Windows Theory had worked to drive down New York City crime rates, having a knock on effect far beyond the small infractions they were targeting. Both Gunn and Bratton’s unintuitive decision to focus on petty crime instead of seemingly more pressing issues worked to eliminate signs of disorder from the streets and subways and as result, triggered the tipping point of New York crime.

What this story and the Broken Window Theory tells us is that our internal decisions are subtly influenced by our external realities. If broken windows, graffiti and turnstile jumpers can shape the levels of crime in a city, then it is certainly not a stretch to suppose that where we decide to sit down, open up our laptop and get to work can measurably influence the quality of our output.

The question then is how can we be intentional in applying this power of context for our benefit?

Habits & Controlling Cues

Habits are the unconscious responses that are key to making desired changes in our lives. Good habits are the "compound interest of self-improvement" and make up the systems that steer us towards our goals. Mastering our habits is mastering our output. This is why the first aspect of contextual leverage is designing our environment to create good habits and eliminate bad ones.

In Atomic Habits, James Clear provides insights on how we form habits: the four step process of cue, craving, response and reward. Based on this, he shares how we can effectively build good habits and break bad ones through strategies distilled in the Four Laws of Behaviour Change, the first of which states:

"Make cues for good habits obvious and make cues for bad habits invisible."

We know from the Broken Windows Theory that the impetus for certain kinds of behaviour comes from the cues around us. To take control of our behaviour and habits, we must make take action to control the cues in our environment. Eliminate cues that work against you and create cues that work in your favour.

As Clear tells us in his discussion of law one:

"Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behaviour"

Here are some examples of this advice put into practice:

• If you want to drink more water, keep a full water bottle on your desk that reminds you to drink every time you happen to glance at it
• If you want to build a daily journalling practice, keep your notebook and pen on your bedside table
• If you need to take your vitamins every morning, put the bottle next to your toothbrush
• If you want to play video games less, keep the console outside of your room or in a sealed drawer
• If you want to stop reaching for the cookie jar, take it off your kitchen counter and fill the newly liberated space with healthier alternatives

The most powerful and low effort example of this for me comes from managing my smartphone use. After hearing about a study which showed the 'brain draining' effects of just having a smartphone (whether on or off, face down or face up) on your table, I was prompted to make changes in how I worked.

Since then, whenever I prepare for focussed work, I place my phone somewhere out of reach and, more importantly, out of my field of view. By hiding my phone away in my bag or another room and actively controlling my environment, I (1) remove the stream of distracting notifications that threaten to pull me away from progress and (2) eliminate the possibility of seeing my phone and reaching for it when my mind begins to wander.

But what's even more powerful about this ritual is that the act of removing my phone from the environment has in itself become a positive cue that gives me focus and tells my brain it's time to work. This is an example of how cues become associated with good habits and others report the same positive effects: gaining sudden focus when putting in their earphones or feeling energised when changing into sports clothes.

Ultimately, it is our relationships with the objects in our environment and not the objects themselves which can influence how we act. Control over our environment allows us to form unrelated cues which trigger our desired behaviour.

Segmentation

Segmentation is another important tool in applying contextual leverage which involves splitting up our spaces based on how we plan to use them.

It is important that we allocate a place for focus, a place for play, a place for creativity and whatever other needs we may have. Through consistent action surrounded by the same environmental cues, this primes our brain to respond to each space in a consistent way, effectively allowing us to inspire action by shifting locations.

Premeditating on the purpose of different spaces allows us to influence our behaviours when we transition between them. It also avoids non-compatible areas of our lives mixing together and producing conflicting signals:

• Your bed should be a place to sleep, not to scroll through social media
• Your office shouldn't be a place to play video games
• Your living room should be a place to relax and not bring the stress of work

Even just segmenting different areas within the same room help us to establish clearly defined areas of work. Having a designated chair in the room for reading overtime will make just sitting in that chair become a cue for picking up and focussing on a good book.

"Think in terms of how you interact with the spaces around you. For one person, her couch is the place where she reads for an hour each night. For someone else, the couch is where he watches television and eats a bowl of ice cream after work. Different people can have different memories—and thus different habits—associated with the same place."- James Clear, Atomic Habits

Priming Your Senses and Emotions

Related to habits and cues, our senses influence our emotions which have a cascading effect on our behaviour. We can apply contextual leverage in the design of our working environments to take advantage of this and improve our creative output.

Applying the Pareto Principle to look for the 20% of changes that can provide 80% of the benefits, our focus should fall on these things: visual minimalism, lighting, sound and scents.

Visual Minimalism

As humans, sight is our most developed sense and shapes the way we think. Large portions of neural tissue in the brain are devoted to processing visual information. By limiting that stream of information, we can focus our bandwidth on what is essential for our desired action.

As our attention wanes, both our mind and eyes starts to wander away from our work. The objects around us can either provide us with a kick of motivation to get back on track or lead us down procrastinating rabbit holes.

Eliminate distractions and pair down what is in your workspace to only things that inspire. Remove the phone, the toys and the mess, organise those piles of papers, return tools to their proper place. Set aside time for reorganising and restoring order to your space.

For me, I dedicate every Sunday morning to my 'Sunday Reset' practice where I take care of the maintenance overhead in my life - cleaning and reordering both digital and physical spaces.

Another great habit you can build is to make sure that your space has been sufficiently reordered before transitioning from work to pure entertainment.

A clean space is like the blinkers race horses wear, restricting their vision to only what is in front of them. Applying constraints allow us to direct our limited attention towards what is important to us.

Lighting

We are becoming more aware of the effects of blue light on our health and wellbeing. But even more striking is recent research that points to the ability of blue light to promote brain activity, reaction times and attention. Lighting has also been shown to influence our mood and act as potential treatment for seasonal affective disorder, anxiety and premenstrual depression.

The biggest improvement to my space has been controllable lighting. Products like the Philips Hue line (or cheaper Amazon alternatives) offer a way to set light to match your current state or prompt a change towards a desired state.

The two Philips Hue Play bars behind my monitor are set to bright white light when I need energy, warm light when I'm reading, thinking or being creative and colourful lights for pure play. In my experience, this has given me more control over regulating my inner state and has stopped me from losing focus on multiple occasions.

As an alternative, consider choosing spaces with abundant natural lighting, such as coffee shops with open windows, for periods of focussed determination.

In controlling our lighting, we take advantage of the neural wiring that evolution gave us to influence our mental states.

Sound

We are all aware of how music can affect our moods. We perceive patterns of pitches, harmonies, rhythms and tempos in different regions of our brain, which all have an effect on the way we feel. Music has even been shown to reduce heart rate, blood pressure, stress and inflammation markers in surgery patients and have benefits for those suffering from depression, anxiety and sleep disorders.

Some suggestions to control the effects of sound on your mood include:

• Matching music tempo with the pace of your work
• Listening to music without lyrics or in another language to avoid distraction
• Playing ambient sounds or white noise if music distracts
• Playing music at a medium volume
• Using noise cancelling earphones to drown out the outside

Scents

I only have two things to say about scents:

1. Buy a candle that you like and light it when you prepare to work
2. A two-bird-one-stone solution is to brew coffee or tea when you're working for a caffeine and sensory boost

New Spaces, New Routines, New Ideas

The first 3 points came down to controlling the spaces we frequent most often and establishing routines around these spaces. That is because consistent exposure to cues leads us to consistent patterns of action.

But when applying contextual leverage, it is also important to consider how we expose ourselves to the new. Our mind responds fondly to new stimulus and we can harness that in controlling how we expose ourselves to new spaces.

A blank slate

Habits and practices are easier to build in new environments free of established cues. They are blank slates for our mind to establish new patterns of behaviour as opposed to familiar environments where we have to actively work to rewrite old bad habits and existing relationships.

Obviously, you can't buy a new house or renovate every time you find yourself falling into a bad habit but you can always reorder your space or introduce new things to reestablish the markers of your behaviour.

Think and list out the functions of a space and the consistent practices you want to build before you use it. For a new office this might include: getting right to work once you sit down and not checking your phone, cleaning your desk after everyday of work, getting up every 30 minutes to walk around or stretch etc.

Use the blank slate to write good practices.

New Stimulus

New spaces inspire new thinking. If you find yourself stuck on a decision, problem, or creative project it often helps to put yourself into a new space to escape the same cyclical patterns of thought.

Obama recently wrote about the process of decision making and how he approached the tough choices that naturally come with being president. This line really resonated with me:

"You also want to create space to think. Remember that dinner and haircut break I took during that marathon economic session? That mattered, too. That was part of making the decision. Even in situations where you have to act relatively quickly, as was frequently the case during the financial crisis, it helps to build in time to let your thoughts marinate."

As you see, hear and feel new things, your mind escapes its routine thoughts. Your exposure to new sensory information lights up new parts of the brain. It allows you to link information in previously unseen ways and approach old problems with new ideas. Just taking a break to walk to the cafe across the road has the added benefit of activating our diffuse mode thinking and helps avoid the Einstellung effect (repeatedly approaching a problem with the wrong solution).

To avoid going to the same Starbucks every time you leave the house, make it a habit to research and write down the next space that you want to go to before you leave your current workplace or develop a rotation system. This will keep things changing and avoid having new spaces become routine spaces.

Explore a new building, a new street or a new part of town and find a place to sit down. Your brain will reward you for stimulating it in new ways.

Make Your Goals Obvious

One last thing to remember is that it can be easy to get caught up in the doing and forget the why. When work gets hard and our determination and attention dries out, it can be hard to do things for our future selves and consider the long term benefits that come from short term sacrifices. One solution is to leverage our environment to keep our goals in mind.

If you want to remind yourself to feel inspired, write down your goals on a sticky note to paste on your computer screen. Better yet, you can hijack your brain's visual reliance and turn these goals into a graphic with images that remind you of your core values and pursuits. Put it up on your wall or make it your computer/phone wallpaper to remind yourself constantly of the why behind what you're doing or the how that you should be following. This has worked really well for me and helps me to remember the doctrines that I seek to follow in my work as well as the importance of what I'm doing.

Another effective change to my digital space has been reminding myself of my long-term goals by including them above my daily reflection page in Notion. I visit this page first thing in the morning and last thing before bed which ensures I wake up and go to sleep every night excited to get to work and take steps that will bring me closer to my goals.

Also remember that choosing good things to do is step one to doing good things and is essential to avoid falling victim to busy work and illusions of productivity. Constantly revisit the why's in front of you and question if what you're doing is the right thing.

Keep your goals, systems and beliefs in your mind and they will carry you down the path you want to go.

Perfect is the Enemy of Good

Voltaire famously wrote "Perfect is the enemy of good." Perfection is an unattainable ideal that we often find ourselves pouring time and efforts into at the expense of doing more meaningful work. The opportunity cost of perfectionism - working with good enough and putting time towards doing, creating and learning more- is too high for the marginal benefits we gain from it.

Gall's Law states that "all working complex systems come from simple systems that work" and this is important to keep in mind as we apply contextual leverage to our lives. Find the simple systems that work for you and iterate on them over time as you experience the feedback loop that drives progress.

Your systems will not be perfect. Instead, they should seek to be improving. Save the hours building perfection and spend them on doing the work you're trying to optimise for. Recognise when good enough is good enough.

Compounding Changes

We often think that what is holding us back from achieving our goals is a lack of motivation. We believe that all we need to do is push a little harder or want a bit more. But our minds are built to follow the Principle of Minimum Energy which tells us to avoid the hard stuff and seek out the easiest form of deriving pleasure. Willpower is a limited resource that cannot be depended on as the only source of making meaningful change in our lives.

Instead of actively fighting the resistance to act, we can passively reduce that resistance by controlling the sensory information that flows to our brain. Small positive changes to our spaces produce 1% improvements in the way we think and act that compound over the countless hours spent inhabiting them:

Intentional environment design reduces the mental friction towards our desired behaviour by creating/removing cues for our habits

Segmenting spaces avoids conflicting signals

Controlling our senses is controlling our emotions and thus our action

New spaces give a blank slate for new practices and promote new thought

Integrating goals, systems and beliefs into our environment reminds us of the how and why behind what we do

Contextual leverage offers us a way to work smarter not harder. It helps us reduce the friction that surrounds the behaviour where our best interests lie. It tells us that we can predispose ourselves for better thoughts through the intentional choices we make in designing our environment. It gives us the chance to make our spaces work for us.

This is the power of contextual leverage.