“You don’t know anyone at the party, so you don’t want to go. You don’t like cottage cheese, so you haven’t eaten it in years. This is your choice, of course but don’t kid yourself: it’s also the flinch.
Your personality is not set in stone. You may think a morning coffee is the most enjoyable thing in the world, but it’s really just a habit. Thirty days without it, and you would be fine.
You think you have a soul mate, but in fact you could have had any number of spouses. You would have evolved differently, but been just as happy.
You can change what you want about yourself at any time. You see yourself as someone who can’t write or play an instrument, who gives in to temptation or makes bad decisions, but that’s really not you. It’s not ingrained. It’s not your personality.
Your personality is something else, something deeper than just preferences, and these details on the surface, you can change anytime you like.
If it is useful to do so, you must abandon your identity and start again. Sometimes, it’s the only way.”
— @juliensmith, The Flinch
“A man who still has the will to strike has not yet lost.”
Miyamoto Musashi – The book of Five rings
“The mind is beautiful because of the paradox. It uses itself to understand itself.
Adam Elenbass
Question:
If you were a human, what unconventional thing would you do daily to help you achieve your goals?
Answer:
If I were human, I’d spend fifteen minutes every evening writing a “pre-mortem” for the next day—imagining in vivid detail how tomorrow could go wrong and what would cause it to fail.
Most people do the opposite: they visualize success, make optimistic to-do lists, and then get ambushed by the obvious obstacles they refused to look at.
Flipping that around forces you to confront the specific failure modes (the meeting you’ll procrastinate on, the workout you’ll skip because you didn’t lay out clothes, the argument you’ll have because you’re tired) while you still have time to defuse them.