Habit-building isn’t about striving for “the perfect day.”
It’s about making sure that even on the imperfect day when nothing goes your way, you still do enough things that fulfill you.
It’s about making the hard things easier.
And it’s about stacking the deck in your favor and making it inevitable to do things that align with who you want to be.
We naturally move towards pleasure and away from pain – with one exception: painful comfort.
If you’re used to believing that you’re bad at languages, there’s painful comfort in struggling with languages.
If you’re used to negative self-talk, there’s painful comfort in negative self-talk.
If you’re used to working 12-hour days, there’s painful comfort in working 12-hour days.
If you’re used to constant conflict, there’s painful comfort in constant conflict.
If you’re used to neglect, there’s painful comfort in neglect.
Painful comfort is keeping you comfortable AND hurting you.
Years of conditioning have given it an irresistible pull – until you decide to take a leap of faith and start believing that you, too, can change.
Where are you perpetuating painful comfort in life?
Giving up on your intentions once doesn’t mean you’ll always give up.
Quitting a workout routine or diet once doesn’t mean you’re doomed forever.
Giving one clumsy speech doesn’t mean you’re a bad public speaker forever.
Learning from the past is good. But predicting the future based on a small set of isolated past experiences is overcalibration.
Knowledge transfer always implies time collapse. Because learning an insight from someone else usually takes less long than figuring it out yourself.
Take books. The writer usually spent considerable time researching and distilling the topic and coming to good insights (time I might not be able to dedicate).
Thanks to that writer, I can now consume that knowledge in, say 6-12 hours of reading the book. A considerable time collapse…
But when does time collapse go to far?
Can I read a 1-page summary of that book and truly say I grasp the topic?
When your brain gets space to breathe, knowledge grows and nuance shows. It needs time and repeated exposure to absorb information, make connections, and discover new insights.
So a one-page summary isn’t necessarily too shallow… On the contrary: it collapses time so much that information becomes very dense.
What with the evolution towards short-form online content? The primary purpose of TikTok videos and Instagram reels might be to entertain, but the trend is clear and spills over into education, our attention span, and knowledge transfer: shorter, more shallow, yet more dense.
Too little time collapse and we can’t make progress.
Too much time collapse and knowledge collapses with it.
Maybe tomorrow will be same old, same old.
Maybe all will change.
It doesn’t matter.
Because come what may, whatever happens around you, you can always do what matters to you.
You don’t have to feel certain to start taking action.
You take action to start feeling certain.
You don’t need to be calm to do yoga.
You do yoga to become calm.
You don’t need to have a quiet mind to meditate.
You meditate to cultivate a quiet mind.
You don’t have to speak Spanish fluently to have a conversation in Spanish.
You have a conversation in Spanish to learn to speak Spanish fluently.
You don’t need to know how to love to start loving someone.
You start loving someone to learn how to love.
And while this chain of causality sounds logical, sometimes the logical things are the hardest to remember.
When everything is urgent, how do we know what to do first?
One solution is adding more nuance:
What’s the most urgent?
What’s the most important?
Breathing is urgent.
A crying child is urgent.
A toilet visit can be urgent.
Sending that email out tonight right before bed instead of tomorrow, maybe not so much?
Here’s the important question:
If you’re going to prioritize the urgent matters anyway, why stress yourself out by calling everything urgent in the first place?
Making everything urgent devalues truly urgent matters.
Because when everything is urgent, nothing is urgent anymore.
