The universe is in constant flux, and to finish, you must for a moment hold matter in place and declare, It is done.
But finishing doesn’t require superhuman discipline. It merely requires experience.
If you want to be someone who finishes what they start, start by finishing the fun stuff. Pick a project, any project, as long as it’s fun, and finish it. Then do that again, and again.
Maybe it’s a blog post about your favorite subject, a song that’s an inside joke with your friends, or a social media account run by your dog.
An under-appreciated benefit of doing fun projects is you eventually gain the confidence to finish things that aren’t as fun.
If you want to learn to do a pull-up, do a weight-assisted pull-up first. If you want to finish stuff, finish fun first.
Aphorism: “Men [get glory and riches] by various methods; one with caution, another with haste; one by force, another by skill; one by patience, another by its opposite; and each one succeeds in reaching the goal by a different method.” —Niccolò Machiavelli
Cool: The Flint Router (Amazon) makes it easy to set up a router-level VPN.
Best, David P.S. I’m giving away twelve paperback copies of Mind Management on Goodreads Giveaways. Enter to win.
If you can’t finish what you start, look at your project approach.
You can see a poor project approach in one of my favorite movies, Office Space.
Tom Smykowski is obsessed with his idea for a Jump to Conclusions Mat. It’s just a mat with different “conclusions” written on it, that you can “jump” to.
When Tom first tells his coworkers this idea, he’s a needle-shaped creator.
Think of the flow from ideas-had to projects-completed as like a funnel. Needle-shaped creators have a needle-shaped funnel.
The top of their funnel is thin. Tom has only one idea. The bottom of their funnel comes to a point. Tom has never executed that idea.
The main problem a needle-shaped creator has is they’re too quick to fall in love with their first idea. Like Tom, they spend years fantasizing about that idea, and never taking action.
Tom eventually makes the first Jump to Conclusions Mat, but executing the idea hasn’t made it any better. Now he’s a straw-shaped creator. He has one idea, and one execution.
Chances are, the Jump to Conclusions Mat fails. Would Tom be better off had he never executed it in the first place? That depends upon whether he changes his approach after that failure.
When you’re first following ideas, it’s normal to be a needle-shaped creator. You’ll follow better ideas if you widen the top of your funnel.
Aphorism: “Always start with too much material. Then give your reader just enough.” —William Zinsser
Some people say writer’s block doesn’t exist. It does, but it doesn’t have to.
If you don’t know what to write, the most common root cause is, you don’t know the information. So if you don’t know what to write, it’s usually because you don’t know what you’re trying to write.
That begs the question, What makes you think you can know what you’re trying to write before you write it?
There are two kinds of writing: deductive, and inductive. Deductive writing is writing what you know. Inductive writing is writing to find out what you know.
Imagine you have two pens: One is blue, and you know it writes in blue. Another is white, but you don’t know in what color it writes.
With the blue pen, you can write, “This pen writes in blue,” because you already know that. But with the white pen, you can’t say what color it writes in, because you don’t know. If you wait until you know the information to start writing, you’ll be waiting forever. Once you write, “This pen,” you’ll know what color it writes in. Then you can write the rest.
Writer’s block is often caused by trying to take a deductive approach to what’s better served by an inductive process.
You’re expecting to write something true. But to get to the truth you have to be willing to first risk writing something false.
Aphorism: “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.” —Thomas Edison
LLMs such as ChatGPT have replaced books. In some ways.
I personally love using ChatGPT for research. The information I get is custom-tailored to the question on my mind in that moment. So it fits my level of interest and knowledge.
I still read plenty of books, but the reason I read books has changed. I used to read non-fiction books even if I had a specific question about a subject. It either required a lot of patience to wait until I read the answer to my question, or a lot of searching within my e-reader or the index to find what I was looking for.
Now when I read a book, it’s mostly because I don’t have a specific question at the front of my mind. Reading a book is now less of a scavenger hunt and more of a stroll through the landscape of a subject.
Even more important than the subject covered by a book is the way the author thinks. When I talk to an AI, my own brain is in the driver’s seat. When I read a book, the author is in charge.
In this way, reading a book is like trying on a brain. The same way I will act differently wearing a tuxedo than a bathing suit and flip flops, I will think differently based upon whose brain I’m trying on.
And if I wear it long enough, it will change who I am.
Aphorism: “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” —Franz Kafka
If I’m eating by myself, I’m naturally inclined to supplement my meal with media: a podcast, YouTube video, book, etc.
This is a bad habit.
Because there is no time when my mind is more reliably flooded with ideas than during or right after eating.
I don’t know exactly why. I’d guess it has to do with the rush of glucose and dopamine, the activation of the parasympathetic nervous system, the repetitive motion of chewing, or simply pausing to do something relaxing. From a primal perspective, it makes sense that after you’ve found food, a great use of your newfound energy would be to think of inventive and energy-saving ways to find your next meal.
So now instead of a phone, I keep a notebook or small whiteboard next to my plate. I don’t try to come up with anything, but if something occurs to me, I write it down. That usually leads to writing another thing, then another.
Try it and you, too, might have some of your best ideas. Instead of media with your meals, be creative as you consume.
Book:Tiny Experiments (Amazon) is Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s guide on how to live freely in a goal-obsessed world.
There used to be only one “micro-blogging” platform. Now there are several.
It’s a schadenfreudic flavor of amusement to watch people migrate off X, to Bluesky, Threads, or Substack Notes, while proclaiming that finally, they’ve found a place that isn’t full of toxic, vitriolic, and hyperbolic snark, misinformation, and melodrama. The situation has the energy of someone who, after divorcing the eighth time, proclaims they’ve found “the one.”
It’s impossible to copy the “Twitter” format, open it to all of humanity, and not end up with pretty much the same thing as Twitter. You still have a feed full of snippets of text, competing with one another for attention. You still have an algorithm with no better way to decide what’s “good,” besides likes, comments, and reposts.
Those short snippets of text still need to interact with human wetware. We still scan that feed, and what stands out stops the scroll. So information of the ugliest emotional tenor always wins.
Maybe one platform will have a different political leaning or psychographic difference than another. Maybe one platform can make a subtly different algorithmic tweak, but it will still be the same. So if you expect your feed to consist of only well-reasoned, intellectually rigorous and honest civilized discourse, delivered with a friendly, light-hearted, and humble tone, you will be disappointed.
As Marshall McLuhan said, “The medium is the message.” As the eight-time divorcee should hear, “It’s not them, it’s you.”
As we need to learn, “It’s not the algorithm, it’s us.”
Aphorism: “Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live.” —Gustav Flaubert
Cool:Searching for Sugar Man is a documentary about a musician who became a star, without knowing.
An hour a day of sitting and doing nothing seems like an absurdly long amount of time. The natural response to the idea is, “Who can afford to meditate an hour a day?”
We’ve long been in an age in which a huge amount of information is coming at us. If you spent one minute on social media, then stepped away to consider the consequences of all the information you encountered, including asking yourself why it caught your attention, you would be busy the rest of the day.
Yet daily, we encounter hundreds if not thousands of times more information than that. As this info-tsunami has swelled, it makes sense that meditation has become more popular. Some silence and self-examination goes a long way in helping sort through it all.
But now we’re adapting to the rapid introduction of the most powerful information tool to this point in history. It’s now possible to do in mere seconds many informational tasks that might otherwise take hours.
Using that tool to simply do more is a race to the bottom. The less-obvious and more challenging path is to use that extra time and energy to make better decisions about what to do with our tools. The better question is becoming, “Who can afford to not meditate an hour a day?”
Your mind is like a body of water, which must circulate. If your mind doesn’t meditate, it stagnates.
Book:Purple Cow (Amazon) is Seth Godin’s classic about the ever-growing importance being remarkable.
I went on a birdwatching tour and our guide insisted on counting the number of species we saw. I thought birdwatching was supposed to be relaxing!?
It’s hard to argue that measuring doesn’t make civilization run more smoothly, increase our standard of living, or increase life expectancy. Which makes what I’m about to say even harder to explain.
I challenge you to, for one week, stop measuring things. This will probably be impossible, but for sure you will notice how every facet of our lives is ruled by measurement.
Measuring gives us an illusion of control and having an answer, often at the expense of whatever we’re not measuring. How many backpackers who were measuring the weights of their water bottles by the gram are now estimating the quantity of microplastics they’re consuming through their Nalgenes?
Choreographer Twyla Tharp sometimes spends a week telling herself, “stop counting.” She avoids looking at anything with a number on it, such as bank statements, bathroom scales, clocks, and royalty reports. “The goal,” she explains, “is to give the left side of the brain – the hemisphere that does the counting – a rest and let the more intuitive right hemisphere come to the fore.”
Yes, measuring allows us to set goals, formulate plans, and evaluate our attempts to achieve those goals, but measuring also distracts us from experiencing life. It numbs our powers of observation and teaches us to distrust our senses.
There’s a maxim in business, “What gets measured gets managed.” Sometimes, what gets measured gets mangled.
Aphorism: “Paint what’s in your head, what you are acquainted with.” —Georgia O’Keeffe
If you’re organizing a closet, you’ll only get so far rummaging and rearranging.
That shoebox of old photos is held in place between your uncle’s worn baseball glove and the stack of wigs from Halloween costumes past. One wrong move and you’ll be buried under family heirlooms and unused hobby supplies.
When organizing our hearts and minds, we run across thoughts and emotions and end up stuffing them where they’ll fit. We end up with such tangled knots of unresolved issues, the easiest course seems to avoid opening that door again.
It’s no surprise that when we attempt to journal, we end up disappointed. Our writing, as a reflection of our inner world, doesn’t look like the well-organized closet we’d envisioned, where you can as easily grab a winter coat as your beach essentials.
The way to get there is spread it all across the floor, throw out what you don’t need, then put everything in its place, maybe with the help of a sturdy framework designed for the purpose. You won’t get it right the first time, and keeping it organized will be an ongoing practice.
That is how you organize a closet, and that is how you journal.
Aphorism: “Truth has its own definite boundaries, but that which arises from uncertainty is delivered over to guesswork and the irresponsible license of a frightened mind.” —Seneca
Self-discipline has a reputation as a battle of wills.
Supposedly, the self-disciplined person doesn’t want to do various unpleasant things, but is strong enough to overcome that.
People who know me well think I’m disciplined. I write books, run a business that requires self-motivation, stick to a strict diet, and keep an exercise routine.
But I don’t think I’m any better at doing what I don’t want than anyone else. If anything, I’m worse.
One source of “self-discipline” I’m pretty good at is self-knowledge. That is, I’m pretty good at predicting how and why my actual behavior will deviate from my intentions.
So, I set intentions I have a pretty good chance of following through on. I know what I like and don’t, how various activities sap and replenish my energy, and my threshold for burnout. I pick goals within those limits.
But I also know that even when I work within my limits, I won’t always do what I intend. So I don’t beat myself up over it, and design my environment and schedule so that when I mess up, the damage will be limited. For example, the “grippy and slippy” tools and weekly energy-based schedule I talk about in Mind Management, Not Time Management.
Self-discipline isn’t doing the unpleasant through force of sheer will, but rather knowing oneself well enough to predict where you’ll fall off-track, then setting up the right guardrails ahead of time.
Aphorism: “The rate of interest is a quantitative measure of the general discounting of future pleasures. If the prospect of spending $1000 a year hence were as delightful as the thought of spending it today, I should not need to be paid for postponing my pleasure.” —Bertrand Russell
