#500 It never gets old

ByLukas

Some may say you’re disciplined to a fault.

But acting in alignment with who you want to be never gets old.

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    #86 Practice daily, measure progress on average

    ByLukas

    The article I publish today may be worse than one I wrote 2 months ago.

    I may struggle today with a guitar piece I played effortlessly last week.

    And when I meditate today, my mind may be all over the place, even though last week it was calm as water.

    On any given day, I may feel that I’m making progress, that I’ve reached a plateau, or even that I’m going backwards.

    But it doesn’t matter.

    Progress isn’t always visible in daily practice. But without daily practice, there is no progress.

    If I stick to daily practice, on average, I’ll get better. I’ll start having more good days than bad. And slowly but surely, my ‘bad days’ will start being better than what I consider a ‘good day’ right now.

    Progress, averaged out is what it’s all about.

  • #390 Make the daily practice easy

    ByLukas

    The trick to successful habit-building: make daily practice easy.

    We often do the opposite: we make weekly practice hard.

    If I tell myself I’m going to post one long blog post every week, I’ll find a million reasons not to write for the first six days until I have no choice but to write.

    But if I tell myself I will post daily, the longest I can procrastinate is… 12 hours?

    And after a week, I’ve practiced my publishing habit 7 times.

    So it goes for meditation, yoga, running, and any skill or habit.

    Make the daily practice easy.

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    #8 Musenküsse

    ByLukas
    klimt-the-kiss-musenkuss
    Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss (1907-1908).

    der Musenkuss (German) The kiss of the Muse

    Creativity becomes much easier if you see it as a game of finding new ways of describing what has always been there.

    Observing, rather than inventing.

    It’s liberating. Because now the game changes from pulling ideas out of thin air to a game of discovery. Observation. Paying attention. Building upon what’s already discovered, then connecting the dots in way nobody else has.

    Most of all: listening, when the muse finally arrives and visits you for a kiss.

    There’s this voice in my mind
    Impossible to ignore
    And yet I fill my head with noise
    Drowning out
    What deep down I know to be true
    Do I even want to admit
    That this song in my heart
    Is not about me
    But about you?

    P.S.: I’ve observed the same principle in language learning (and wrote a book about the consequences of this mindset shift).

    Which begs the question…

    Where else would we do better if we observed a bit more, rather than trying to invent from scratch?

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    #295 When dreaming is enough

    ByLukas

    Do you really want to write a book? Or do you actually want to dream about writing a book?

    Do you really want to drop everything and move to a sea-side town? Or do you want to dream about dropping everything and move to a sea-side town?

    Both are fine. Both can be fulfilling, because often, having a dream is enough.

    But both are not the same.

    Only you will know if it’s the dream that makes you happy, or the action you want to take.

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