#321 Maintain the momentum

There’s nothing wrong with striving for excellence when you’re passionate about something.

But being passionate doesn’t come with an obligation to be – or even try to become – good.

It’s fine to write for the sake of writing, not to write a bestseller novel.
Paint for the sake of painting, not to be the next Picasso.
Run for the sake of running, not to finish a marathon.

I don’t need to be good at this today.

And some things I just never need to be good at.

You always have a choice.

The outcome is not the book.
The outcome is not the marathon.
The outcome is not the successful business.

The outcome is not even the daily habit you form, even though they’re the stepping stones you need.

The outcome is the embodiment of the changes we’ve internalized, the growth we’ve experienced, and the evolution we’ve undergone, allowing us to say, “This is what I now stand for. This is what I believe is possible.”

The outcome is the identity.

Maybe it’s less about “What do I want to achieve?” and more about “What do I want to believe?”

A memory is what we decide to remember from an experience – and what we decide to delete and forget.

Intuition is the instant hunch we get after we’ve repeatedly created memories from experiences; the moment we don’t need the conscious memory anymore.

A small (or unrepresentative) sample size leads to inaccurate intuition.

If I’m betrayed three times in my life and have created strong memories around that, my intuition whenever meeting anyone else may be that they’ll betray me too. Three bad experiences have shaped, and skewed, my relationship to billions of others.

How to develop accurate intuition?

The more memories we create, the bigger the “sample size” for our intuition to emerge from, and the smaller the weight of “outlier events” (like being betrayed).

The more deliberately we create these memories, the more deliberately we hone intuition.

Create more memories. And create them deliberately.