Contrary to popular belief
A selection of patently non-obvious insights
Procrastinating is good.
Life is finite. Your hours are limited. You cannot possibly do everything you would like to. Accept this as a fact and make peace with it. Become better at procrastinating (smartly). Spend more time on high leverage tasks that give you maximum returns, and put off doing the rest or do it only as well time will allow you to without compromising on what’s most important. Resist ‘the allure of middling priorities’ in order to feel immediately good. Be comfortable neglecting things that only give the appearance of incremental progress but can only be done at the cost of what's most important.
Another view (using procrastination synonymously with holding off): Rushing to a solution often misses satisfactorily gauging the scope of the root problem. Procrastinating offers the time and remove needed to consider a problem deeply and let the best ideas for solutions mature.
Steer clear of perfectionism.
The plans of our imagination are perfect because there are no constraints in our visualization. Fantasy hands us limitless control. It does not hesitate to include mutually exclusive things. Reality brings out the disagreement between them. It expects us to trade off. We can imagine ourselves having the career of our dreams, being the perfect parent and spouse, and being there for ageing parents. But in reality we cannot don all of those identities at the same time. In our heads we can be anything and everything at the same time. In real life, we can have anything you want, but we can’t have everything. Priding ourselves in rendering what’s in our brain absolutely faithfully in the real world means being okay with compensating for this excess of attention with a deficit somewhere else.
Negative visualization leads to success (and happiness).
Acknowledge that success is probabilistic. List out all blockers on your chosen path and work out a plan to overcome them. Don’t derive your confidence from the hope that only good things will happen. Let your confidence be rooted in having planned for bad things along the way. You may not always succeed but you will fail less and certainly encounter fewer surprises.
Stoic take: There’s dissatisfaction in life because of a gap between what we want and what we have. To close this gap would be to attain contentment, yet it’s impossible to do so because we’re on a ‘hedonistic treadmill’. The Stoics’ trick to beat this trap is to want what you have. And the specific strategy employed for the same is negative visualization. Put crudely it works like this: Think of the people, relationships, things you value in your life. Entertain for a few moments thoughts of circumstances that cause them to not exist in your life. Imagine your life without them in some detail. Come out of this exercise. You’re likely to find yourself sitting with a new perspective. The process of having imagined the pain of the absence of your loved ones, for example, will make you cherish their presence. Perspective changes everything without changing the facts.
Settling is a prerequisite for great.
To always keep the option of something better open means to never settle for something. Settling necessitates locking an option down and committing to it. Sometimes the biggest cost is incurred by being unable to make up our minds and being deprived of the value of our choice in the fullness of time. To make something great, we have to choose it first. We can always strive for better once we have settled, but if we can only see the advantages of keeping options open, remember that that too is a choice and it has consequences. To not settle because we continually believe something better awaits us is to choose to go perennially hungry because a better meal is round the corner. Not choosing is a choice.
Your beliefs are not about you.
If you say you believe the sun revolves around the earth, it would be pointed out to you that you’re obviously wrong. Your belief can be falsified. Turns out for a lot more things than we would think there is a spectrum of confidence between 0% and 100% that can be attached to their occurrence. That is Bayesian probability at work. By forming hypotheses and then proving or falsifying them, we can figure out what we could reasonably expect to happen. There’s an X% chance that Y will happen. Doesn’t mean Y will definitely happen, or Y will definitely not happen. If you harbor either extreme belief, it may not be updated with reality. Also, circumstances change and with it changes the best estimate for an occurrence. Those who see the world as binary and unchanging are blind and to math and science, and to reality. Any belief you hold is outward-facing. It is reflective of a truth about the world. It is not a matter of personal taste. Who you are does not change it. You not updating your view when confronted with disconfirming evidence is your burden. No one can help you carry it. You’re entitled to your opinion as long as you don’t state it. Once you do, you’ve a responsibility to back it up.