sidrell

Hesitation usually comes from outcomes you haven't accepted yet, so accept them before you start and you'll act more freely. It helps to work out what a loss would cost you and what a win would change, and to be fine with both (and mean it). Then you can start and think about the work instead of the outcome.

If you're researching something you could test in an afternoon, test it. When you can't tell how it will work, try it. Thinking can only answer the questions you already know to ask. Nobody reading about bread thinks to ask how sticky the dough should feel until they've made some. Sometimes you'll waste time on things that don't work but the ones that fail usually teach you the most.

When you decide you only get one chance at something, the pressure goes up but your odds don't. You probably decide that because you care how it turns out. But the pressure will make you do worse than you would if you'd treated the attempt as one of many. So plan on other tries. If this one goes badly, you'll try again.

Learning a skill used to mean practicing, then it became reading about it, and now it's mostly saving posts to read later. Each change made it cheaper and each still felt like you were learning though you got less out of it every time. But if you want the skill, even a good post can only describe the work. Of the three, practicing is the only one I'd call learning.

Rewards you didn't earn make you want to work less. Each one seems like pure gain since you were handed something for nothing, but being glad to have it doesn't give you much reason to work, and getting it can leave you with less reason than you had. If a reward comes without work, you tend to be less willing to work for the next one, and probably for anything at all because once you've seen things show up on their own, effort starts to look optional. A reward that makes you work less isn't much of a reward.

If you try enough things, some will go badly. And some of those will embarrass you when you remember them. The embarrassment mostly wears off because other people forget and you eventually do. Anyone who's tried much has a few of their own. But what you never tried tends to bother you longer and harder. A failure is over once you know what happened. Something you never tried is never over and you can usually imagine it going better than it would have gone. So if you're unsure, lean toward trying even if you might fail or look foolish. Failing usually costs less.

Every hard thing gets done with help and yours will be no different. The ones that look like solo work tend to have people behind them because most help happens out of view. Help usually comes as advice or someone's time or an introduction to whoever knows the answer. If you let people see the work while it's still rough, you'll get unstuck sooner and probably finish more of the hard things you start. Most people are glad to point out what you've missed.

The better you handle things, the less anyone checks on you. That's because checking takes time so people mostly spend it on whatever looks wrong, and when you handle things well, nothing looks wrong. So if you need something, don't wait for anyone to notice.

People who get results rarely lack effort. But effort is only as useful as what it's applied to and that usually gets decided without much thought. Being a hard worker makes that worse because doing something has always worked for you. The most useful thing you can do is pause on purpose even briefly, so your effort goes where you meant it to.

You know some of your habits are bad and suspect some new ones would be good. What differs is how sure you are, since we tend to be more certain of what's hurting us than of what would help. If you know what's going wrong, stopping it is usually an easier place to begin than starting something you're unsure about.

Falling short seems to hurt mostly because of the rule you hold yourself to. A B+ is a bad grade to one student and a good one to another. Whether a nine minute mile is slow depends on who's running. Two hundred dollars saved is a bad month if you wanted five hundred. Some results are bad under any rule though.

You don't have to decide whether something that happened to you was good luck or bad luck. If the outcome was mostly random, deciding which it was tells you nothing and it doesn't change what happened. All it does is give you a second thing to deal with on top of the first. If it was partly your doing, that's different because then there may be something to learn. So when something happens that you couldn't have controlled, you can leave it at that. Things tend to go easier.

Every choice you've ever made was a prediction. You just made it before you could see the result. Taking a job is a prediction that you'll learn something there or that the money will be enough. Buying a house is another, and so is picking a college or deciding whom to marry. In each case you were guessing. You had a handful of facts and a general sense of how things go. If you want to choose well, it helps to ask which mistake you can afford. You can't see how things will turn out, but you can usually see what it costs if you're wrong. Some predictions are cheap to get wrong and those are the ones to make quickly.

If what you most need to know about yourself is whether you can take a bad outcome and keep going, then failing at something and getting through it probably tells you more than anything else. Success can't answer the question because nothing went wrong. Neither can thinking it over, because you'd be guessing how a person would act in a situation you've never been in. The failure doesn't have to be big. But it does have to be something you cared about because otherwise being fine afterward doesn't prove much. And once you've been through one, you know something most people only guess at.

Most of the limits on how you behave are ones you set yourself. They don't look that way because you can't remember setting them. Each time you did something, it got a little easier to do again. Each time you avoided something, it got a little harder to imagine doing it until you stopped thinking of either as a choice. You can undo these limits the way you made them, though it takes just as much repetition.

The easiest way to start something hard is to cut back on quick rewards. I think whether something feels worth doing is relative to what you're used to. If most of your day pays off right away, a task that pays off in months doesn't seem slow so much as pointless. It's like trying to eat dinner after an afternoon of candy. The work didn't get any less worth doing. You just got used to quicker rewards.

Nobody you meet starts out hoping you mess up. Most of them haven't thought about you at all. So when someone seems cold, it's probably something else in their day. Assume they mean well until they show you otherwise. If you can't tell, ask before you decide. Trust people first. Disliking you takes a reason and being nice doesn't.

How much of what happens to you do you actually decide? Probably less than it feels like. Most things depend on other people, and on luck and timing, and your choices are only part of it. I'd be careful about reading too much into how any one thing turned out. If you could rerun the last ten years with other people and timing shuffled, I'd guess a lot of what looks like your doing would come out differently.

Spending your time on the few things you're already good at beats trying to raise everything to average. You can only get good at so many things and the time you spend making the rest okay has to come from somewhere. The shop people drive across town for is usually the one that's best at one thing. And hardly anyone gets remembered for being fairly good at everything. When you've got an hour, spend it where you're good. It goes further there.

Most people make enough to feel better than they do. The trouble is they keep spending it on things that don't help. Each purchase is cheap enough and the letdown mild enough that you never quite conclude it doesn't work. You just assume the next one will. But I don't think what's wrong is something money can fix. If a new phone didn't fix it, a better one probably won't. A lot of what people buy does nothing except make them feel like they've done something.