Why you should always choose action

This is a dumb meme from the office. But it actually serves as a potent reminder to me from time to time.

How many times have you not done something because there wasn’t time to “do it properly”? Or perhaps you didn’t have time to finish something entirely, so you just didn’t do it.

I started becoming aware of this weird mental bug recently. The realization hit me when I was researching Zone 2 cardio. Long story short, the article mentioned that the optimal session length should be 50 mins, at which point I realized I only had around half an hour of free time that day so I was about to drop it off my list. That was until I read the end of the paragraph that said: “But remember, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Any amount of Zone 2 cardio is beneficial”

That’s where it struck me. I was about to choose no exercise (aka absolutely zero benefit) just because I wasn’t able to do the full recommendation. Whenever you’re faced with a similar dilemma, remind yourself that any amount is better than nothing. Whether it’s reading just 2 pages, jogging for 5 mins, or writing one line in your journal, there is always a benefit. These small but consistent actions also help to form your identity, which allows you to stick to the habit long-term. Showing up is half the battle.

Learn to quit when you’re bored

It’s a paradoxical lesson, but in order to do more, we must be willing to quit when it no longer serves us.

Most of us possess a strange completion bias - a compulsion to finish what was started even when it becomes irrational. This is most prevalent in book reading. Many people start on a book, get bored halfway, struggle to pick up the same book, and eventually stop reading. They refuse to pick up another book because they haven’t completed their previous one. Net result: they stop reading for years. Our ever-decreasing attention spans coupled with an obsession with completeness have caused an epidemic of non-reading.

Do we stop ourselves from quitting a youtube video halfway or reading an online article? Obviously not. So why create a weird artificial constraint around books?

We trap ourselves in a version of “perfect” (finishing everything that we started), that becomes an enemy of good (stopping at the point of boredom). This attitude creates inertia around starting new things in general, ironically making us less productive overall. There’s a flip side where some people end up starting many different things and giving up too early to go anywhere, but most people tend to fall into the first camp and never even try. Life is too short to be limited by such a tragic bias.

As James Clear put it: Start many books, quit most of them, and re-read the best ones.

Improving your luck surface area

Can you make yourself more lucky? You can’t control luck in a single instance, but what you can control is the total exposure to probabilistic events, essentially increasing your overall odds of being lucky. This is known as your luck surface area, and you can expand it by making new connections, learning/building things, and putting it out there to the world. If you feel like opportunities don’t come by often enough, you can’t expect your luck to increase by maintaining the same lifestyle. Even if it’s painful or exhausting, you have to put yourself out there to increase your luck surface area.

So as Michael Scott once said, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take”. Approach life with a bias to action.