We’ve got to get rid of the stigma attached to correction. People who self-correct early on have an advantage over those who spend ages fiddling with the perfect set-up and crossing their fingers that their plans will work out. There’s no such thing as the ideal training. There’s more than one life goal. There’s no perfect business strategy, no optimal stock portfolio, no one right job. They’re all myths. The truth is that you begin with one setup and then constantly adjust it. The more complicated the world becomes, the less important your starting point is. So don’t invest all your resources into the perfect set-up—at work or in your personal life. Instead, practice the art of correction by revising the things that aren’t quite working—swiftly and without feeling guilty.
<aside> 👉 Nothing is written on stone! Don't look for perfection. Adjust your steps and strategies as you go on! [Adjust>Addidus shoe]
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When it comes to important issues, flexibility isn’t an advantage—it’s a trap. Cortés, the dessert-averse CEO and Clayton Christensen: what all three of them have in common is that they use radical inflexibility to reach long-term goals that would be unrealizable if their behavior were more flexible. How so? Two reasons. First: constantly having to make new decisions situation by situation saps your willpower. Decision fatigue is the technical term for this. A brain exhausted by decision making will plump for the most convenient option, which more often than not is also the worst one. This is why pledges make so much sense. Once you’ve pledged something, you don’t then have to weigh up the pros and cons each and every time you’re faced with a decision. It’s already been made for you, saving you mental energy. The second reason inflexibility is so valuable has to do with reputation. By being consistent on certain topics, you signal where you stand and establish the areas where there’s no room for negotiation. You communicate self-mastery, making yourself less vulnerable to attack. Mutual deterrents during the Cold War were based largely on this effect. The USA and the USSR both knew that a nuclear strike would mean instant retaliation. No deliberation, no situational weighing up of pros and cons. The decision for or against the red button had already been taken. Pressing it first simply wasn’t an option.
<aside> 👉 Avoid decision fatigue,inconsistence and surprise by making pre-planned rules,strategies and mental models [Flexible>>Flux]
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“Nothing is more fatiguing nor, in the long run, more exasperating than the daily effort to believe things which daily become more incredible. To be done with this effort is an indispensable condition of sure and lasting happiness,” wrote mathematician and Nobel Prize winner Bertrand Russell. This is an exaggeration, of course, because sure and lasting happiness does not exist. Yet Russell is correct in his observation that self-deception is incompatible with the good life. Accepting reality is easy when you like what you see, but you’ve got to accept it even when you don’t—especially when you don’t. Russell follows up with an example: “The playwright whose plays never succeed should consider calmly the hypothesis that they are bad plays.” You may not write plays, but I’m sure you can come up with examples from your own life. Perhaps you have no talent for foreign languages? Not a natural manager or athlete? You should take these truths into account—and consider the consequences. Radical acceptance of defeats, deficiencies, flops—how does that work? If we’re left to our own devices, it’s a bit of a chore. Often we see other people far more clearly than we see ourselves (which is why we’re so frequently disappointed by others but rarely by ourselves), so your best shot is to find a friend or a partner you can rely on to give you the warts-and-all truth. Even then, your brain will do its best to soft-pedal the facts it doesn’t like. With time, however, you’ll learn to take seriously the judgments of others.
Alongside radical acceptance, you’ll need a black box. Build your own. Whenever you make a big decision, write down what’s going through your mind—assumptions, trains of thought, conclusions. If the decision turns out to be a dud, take a look at your flight data recorder (no need to make it crashproof; a notebook will do just fine) and analyze precisely what it was that led to your mistake. It’s that simple. With each explicable fuck-up, your life will get better. If you can’t identify your mistake, you either don’t understand the world or you don’t understand yourself. To put it another way, if you can’t spot where you put a foot wrong, you’re going to fall flat on your face again. Persistence in your analysis will pay off. Side note: black box thinking works not only on a personal level but also in the business world. It ought to be standard practice for every corporation. By themselves, radical acceptance and black box thinking are not enough. You’ve got to rectify your mistakes. Get future-proofing. As Warren Buffett’s business partner Charlie Munger has observed, “If you won’t attack a problem while it’s solvable and wait until it’s unfixable, you can argue that you’re so damn foolish that you deserve the problem.” Don’t wait for the consequences to unfold. “If you don’t deal with reality, then reality will deal with you,” warns author Alex Haley. So accept reality—accept it radically. Especially the bits you don’t like. It might be painful in the moment, but it’s got to be done. It’ll be worth it later on. Life isn’t easy.
<aside> 👉 Create logs on your actions and analyse them..... [BlackBox]
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Do you remember when digital cameras came on the market? Liberation! At least, that’s how it felt at the time. No more expensive film, no more waiting for it to be developed, no more unflattering photographs—you can easily take a dozen more. It looked like a huge simplification, but in hindsight it’s a clear case of counterproductivity. Today we’re sitting on a mountain of photos and videos, 99 percent of which are superfluous, without the time to sort through them, yet compelled to schlep them all over the place in local back-up drives and in the cloud, visible and exploitable by large internet corporations. On top of that is the time you now have to spend working on the images, the complex software that periodically demands updates, and the labor-intensive transfers required when you buy a new computer. The upshot? Technology—usually heralded as full of promise—often has a counterproductive effect on our quality of life. A basic rule of the good life is as follows: if it doesn’t genuinely contribute something, you can do without it. And that is doubly true for technology. Next time, try switching on your brain instead of reaching for the nearest gadget.
<aside> 👉 Cut off the things and persons that don't add any value to your life! Rather waste your times! [TimeWasters>>Clock]
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