Default reactions are hard to overcome, precisely because they're our default response to whatever is coming our way. We have to take a moment to stop and do something different. Something outside our natural reaction.
Today is all about looking at our defaults and choosing something else.
The end isn't nigh
Everything about our situation as humans pushes us to overrate the importance of our own era. Apart from anything else, present-day unknowns feel the scariest, because all previous unknowns eventually resolved themselves into knowns (every prior prediction of the end of the world turned out to be wrong) while future ones haven’t occurred to us yet. - The end isn't nigh
Yes things are in limbo for many now. Affordability is at an all time low in many countries. Income inequality is at an all time high. Most of the world is struggling while a few people have billions of dollars. This is a good reminder that we have a tendency to view our current problems as the worst problems anyone has ever faced.
An axiom in news is that if it bleeds it leads. They want to draw you in with tragedy because it keeps you glued to the screen and their ratings go up. You're much more likely to see the bad things than all the good that's happening in the world.
The "easy" way isn't easy
But by continually defaulting to what's easy (texting), we're making communication worse. - We have a communication problem
While Justin is talking specifically about communication, the same principle is true in many situations. We see it in the bike shop I work at occasionally. Someone comes in with a problem they bodged a fix for a bunch of times and now the problem is so much worse.
They took the easy way out instead of just fixing it the right way the first time.
I see it at work looking at 8+ years of technical debt before I got here. When I was learning the layout of our infrastructure and found weird shit that caused us issues in downtime the result of looking into why we didn't change it or do it the right way was always, "it was too much work". We had spent 8 years doing things the easiest way possible instead of the harder, but more robust way.
Now almost 5 years later I'm still digging out of those early decisions that weakened our security and caused daily downtime across the whole platform. I was able to solve the downtime early on, but I'm still working towards making the platform as robust as possible. With 8 years of quick fix decisions, it may take me 8 years of hard work to unravel the debt.
I try to not take the easy way. If something needs to be repaired I ask how a professional would do it, and either learn to do it that way or hire someone. Yes that's often more expensive today, but it removes the build up of known expenses and usually means I never have to think about the problem again.
The Comparison Con
Comparison is a con. It’s a magic trick that works by controlling what you’re allowed to look at. It picks the one axis where you come up short, holds it an inch from your face, and insists up and down, black and blue that it’s the whole picture. - Comparison is a Con
Excellent post about counting what matters to you, not some other "successful" person. You can pick the metric in any endeavour. I could compare myself to a local friend that lost 50lbs and is now faster than me in all the local races where I used to drop him easily. Or how about another friend that earns far more than me running his business with a number of employees. We started at the same time in the same spot and he grew.
The thing that matters to me, even though it's also a source of some irritation as it eats up so much of my time, is that I get to be a dad who's present in the lives of my children. I built a smaller business than my friend, but I know he gets a few minutes with his kids daily whereas I'm always at the kitchen table and walk them to school.
My cycling friend is single so he gets to choose his meals every night, and he chooses to eat the same thing every day to help control his weight. I have kids that won't eat the same thing daily for years. If I make the same thing 2 weeks in a row I'll hear about it. The variety they crave does lead to a few more calories daily and a few extra pounds I could lose, but it also leads to laughter around the table.
What are your metrics for success? The ones you pick that matter to you, not to some outside entity?