“When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you don’t have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy. You can be satisfied anytime your system is running.”
Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress.
Once your pride gets involved, you’ll fight tooth and nail to maintain your habits.
The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game. True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking. It’s not about any single accomplishment. It is about the cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement. Ultimately, it is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress.
The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom. We get bored with habits because they stop delighting us. The outcome becomes expected. And as our habits become ordinary, we start derailing our progress to seek novelty.
It is easy to get bogged down trying to find the optimal plan for change: the fastest way to lose weight, the best program to build muscle, the perfect idea for a side hustle. We are so focused on figuring out the best approach that we never get around to taking action. As Voltaire once wrote, “The best is the enemy of the good.
Progress requires unlearning. Becoming the best version of yourself requires you to continuously edit your beliefs, and to upgrade and expand your identity.
Habits reduce cognitive load and free up mental capacity, so you can allocate your attention to other tasks.10
Happiness is simply the absence of desire.- When you observe a cue, but do not desire to change your state, you are content with the current situation. Happiness is not about the achievement of pleasure, but about the lack of desire. It arrives when you have no urge to feel differently. Happiness is the state you enter when you no longer want to change your state.
As Caed Budris says, “Happiness is the space between on desire being fulfilled and a new desire forming.”
As a general rule, the more immediate pleasure you get from an action, the more strongly you should question whether it aligns with your long-term goals
Peace occurs when you don’t turn your observations into problems. The first step in any behavior is observation. You notice a cue, a it of information, an event. If you do not desire to act on what you observe , then you are at peace.
Craving is about wanting to fix everything. Observation without craving is the realization that you do not need to fix anything. Your desires are not running rampant. You do not crave a change in state. Your mind does not generate a problem for you to solve.
He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.
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