Reality Laughs

The Last Resolution Standing challenge has opened my eyes to the power of tiny actions.

My resolution: write for five minutes and publish something every day. Today is Day 16 of following through. Yay me.

It takes five minutes at least to create a simple post like this. Sometimes it can take five minutes to edit and polish a tweet.

So five minutes is not nothing. It’s something. It’s enough to create a small pearl, sufficient in itself. Five minutes enough to create the seed of a larger work (which has also happened—the five minutes can create a jump start and I just keep going).

Never underestimate the effort it takes to shoot for the best you can do—even with a tweet. And never underestimate the power of a small beginning.

Yet to be demonstrated (but I believe it to be true): never underestimate tiny actions repeated over a long timescale. Water dripping on a rock.

Make modest goals that are easily achievable. This is the idea of “baseline goals” and “stretch goals.”

Baseline is “no matter what.” E.g., exercise 15 minutes no matter what every day. Stretch is what you really want. E.g., lift 4x per week is what you want. Baseline you can hit even if the wheels fall off your life.

You have to give yourself the experience of achieving a goal with ridiculous ease. You don’t give up the possibility higher achievements by doing so. In fact you give yourself emotional fuel to go for the gusto and hit those higher goals.

This is how you start to build the mindset of knowing (more than just believing) that you can be relentless and unstoppable.

Everything is achievable given enough time and repetition. We are all impatient and want to accelerate our achievements.

Better to start super small and let time’s gravity work for you to build momentum. You choose direction. Time adds momentum. That yields (ta da, physics) velocity — speed in a specific direction.

Specifically how:

• Set a goal. This is directional. It may be over the horizon in your belief. No matter. Set it anyway. Life is a series of daily marches toward the horizon.
• Look at what you’re doing right now. If you’re doing it you can keep doing it. This is your foundation. (E.g., my nutrition goals start with the fact that I eat oatmeal almost every morning. Fiber, etc. etc.)
• There are probably some associated behaviors around that good thing you’re doing that are not helpful. (E.g., I put maple syrup on my oatmeal).
• Start down the path as-is. Keep doing what you’re doing and you will keep getting what you’re getting. It’s easy because you’re doing it now.
• Slowly, slowly subtract the counterproductive and leave the productive standing. Via negativa, to use Taleb’s concept. (Stop putting maple syrup on your oatmeal).
• Don’t worry. You will expand and evolve from here. The “excellent breakfast” habit will stick. It might morph to scrambled eggs instead of oatmeal. Who knows?

Build an almost imperceptible foundation, known only to you and God. But build it.

Easy does it. But do it.

In the 75 Hard days I lived the life that Bob admonished us to live: reading, daily. “The first thing to go is the reading,” he would say.

Well, the reading went.

That means no more Meditations. No more other stuff. Ten pages a day makes a difference. I’m reading, but haphazardly.

And surprisingly the output here and on the other sites has dropped to nil.

Ah well. Time to start the routine again. I have Meditations on my phone. Let’s do it again.

6374.

The way to compensate for 3 follow-through is to use repeated injections of 7 quick start energy.

Maybe that’s why laststanding.app was instinctively appealing to me. It’s another push on the flywheel. These are the types of activities that use quick start energy to build a pattern of follow-through.

Good morning, Marcus. Today I will read what you wrote while among the Quadi.

My work life is overflowing with stuff. If there is such a thing as an effective executive, I ain’t it.

(Side note: The Effective Executive is in the house, ready to read. It’s time to read the classics. The Lindy books. And it’s time to read them slowly. Reading as rumination.)

I choose to get small.

How? And what does “get small” mean?

At a high level it means to 10X my results by shrinking my input actions by 10.

This seems like an absurd way to approach life and business and all that. But I don’t think it is absurd. I think it will yield qualitative improvements. Stripping away one behavior at a time, one resource at a time, one thought at a time will remove friction and distraction.

This does not mean less work. It does not mean less risk.

It means less confusion. or to put it in a “focus on what you want more of” way, it means clarity.

Just remove. If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out. Etc.

Why? Here is the testable hypothesis behind the idea of getting small. Everything I do, every belief I have exists for a reason. It’s a load-bearing cope. I interact with people the way I do in order to cope with life in a way that is acceptable to my soul.

Let’s remove one load-bearing cope at a time and see what happens. Rather than flit from one place to another in writing, let’s just marinate in this one theme. Via negativa. Remove the obvious. Be sensitive to the impact as the psychic load shifts.

Let’s stare into the abyss, shall we?

Here I sit on Day 2 laststanding.app’s open-ended challenge. I committed to five minutes of writing every day. That might happen here, on my other site, on my other other site, or on my computer on a long form project.

Already the thrill of the new has faded. Already I am negotiating with myself to drop the commitment I made to myself.

On the second day!

How long will this go? How many days in a row will I write for five minutes every day? As currently configured—until I die.

There is only one way to do this: one day at a time.

I can’t do something forever. But I can do something one day at a time, for quite a while.

Lose a limiting belief. Lose tools that are no longer useful. Lose people around you.

Do you want to grow? Get small. Get streamlined. Get lighter.

Via negativa.

I like to tell people that the best things I have ever experienced in life have happened because I met a stranger.

Which is objectively true: everyone you know now was at some point unknown to you.

So the point of that is if you want to grow, go create your own Type 2 Luck. Go meet people.

A corollary is also true: the best ideas I know are because I stopped listening to my own brain and started listening to someone else.

Listen to everyone. Read ancient books written by anonymous authors thousands of years ago. Listen to podcasts from yesterday. Talk to the barista at Starbucks.

Don’t worry. You will develop discernment. You will be able to sort the bullshit from the jellybeans. it is possible to have an open mind and a well-developed filter.

Get outside your head. Get humble.

Think of the number of people who have lived and died since there have been people. think of the number of people who will live and die after you are dead.

Do you really believe that what you see and know and believe is the pinnacle of knowledge and understanding? Sorry to disappoint you. You ain’t that special.

You aren’t even the smartest person in your hometown right now.

Stay humble. Have an open mind. When a new idea comes along it is ok to say “oh, maybe” and keep it alive in your head before deciding to adopt it or discard it.

Let time be your filter, mostly. Time reveals all flaws eventually. You don’t have to prove something right or wrong. Time does that job for you.

Easy. Let’s go about our day, each of us, with lightness in our step.

One hour of learning will get you where?

Ten hours?

One hundred hours?

I believe that competence can be achieved for many areas of knowledge in one hundred hours. That’s two or three foundational books.

This is worth an experiment.

“The amount of serendipity that will occur in your life, your Luck Surface Area, is directly proportional to the degree to which you do something you’re passionate about combined with the total number of people to whom this is effectively communicated.” – Jason Roberts

https://twitter.com/visualizevalue/status/1591439674333069315?s=46&t=331lsDHwXxDTP6bxbycWZg

So it’s not just about splashing about, aimlessly.

Close the loop. There is no forward mom event until you close the loop.