3-2-1: On Why You Shouldn't Fix Your Weaknesses, Habits As Muscles, and Life In 1895
3-2-1: On Why You Shouldn't Fix Your Weaknesses, Habits As Muscles, and Life In 1895
Wisdom Wednesday #22
Hey fam,
It's time for your weekly does of wisdom.
Here's 3 ideas from me, 2 quotes from others, and 1 question for you to mull over this week.
3 Ideas From Me:
I.
Don't fix your weaknesses. Outsource them.
I outsource my mediocre emotional stability to habits/systems.
I outsource my mediocre memory to schedules/automation.
I outsource my mediocre social skills to my girlfriend.
I outsource my mediocre sales/marketing skills to my clients.
I outsource my mediocre business sense to my business friends.
You will never be amazing at everything and you weren't designed to be. Find people whose strengths compliment your weaknesses (and you, theirs), and use technology for the rest.
II.
Every habit is like a muscle. It atrophies when you don't use it, but it grows back much quicker the second time.
Building good habits is hard. Keeping them is even harder. Often we will do well for weeks or even months, but anything put in to "maintenance mode" eventually loses momentum.
And more often than not this is actually a good thing. No one has the time or energy to consciously build and maintain a dozen habits at once—we must focus only on the most important.
It is normal for an old bad habit to eventually become problematic enough that it once again deserves our conscious focus.
Thankfully, if you’ve done it once, you can build it back up again with half the effort.
III.
Seek not to stop bad behaviors but simply to redirect them.
It's easier to follow only productive pages on social media than it is to not use social media.
It's easier to replace Game of Thrones binging with documentary binging than it is to stop watching TV entirely.
It's easier to allow video games only after you've completed your priorities for the day than it is to not play them at all.
Redirecting "negative" behaviors requires tens times less energy than trying to stop them. Stop fighting. Start leveraging.
2 Quotes From Others:
I.
Jordan Peterson on what life was like only a century ago:
Human history is simple: things were terrible before 1895. The average person in the west lived on less than a dollar a day—which is half the rate the UN today considers abject poverty. [Women] were pregnant from the time [they were] eighteen to the time they were forty—and the chances [they] were going to live through that was like zero.
Your parents were going to be dead—at least one of them. You were going to lose at least half your children. [And] you were going to spend the vast majority of your time doing backbreaking work.
Life was hard—hard in a way that modern people can barely imagine. There's been an economic miracle of unparalleled significance in the last 150 years. And we have so much more than we had then that the world isn't even vaguely the same.
Source: This rare Jordan Peterson Interview
II.
Roman Philosopher, Lucius Seneca, on anxiety and and life priorities:
Life is very short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future.
Source: On The Shortness Of Life
1 Question For You:
And finally, here’s one question to ponder this week:
What are five things I am grateful for?
That's all for today!
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Catch you next time,
Matt