karnage on Nostr: The biggest impact on my life over the last year or so has been shifting from a ...

The biggest impact on my life over the last year or so has been shifting from a goal-oriented or streak-oriented thinking / goal setting, to a simple "on / off" switch thinking.

Maybe it sounds stupid, but it's been life-changing for me in material ways.

For example, instead of thinking: I have this goal to work out 3x a week, or "I can't break my workout streak", I now think: Can I pick up this dumbbell or not? The answer is always yes. And once I pick it up, it aint so bad.

Another example: Instead of overwhelming myself with the grand vision of my products, or setting a goal to get x done by some date... I just think: Can I add this new feature right now that I think will make the app better? The answer is always yes. Then I think, can I go ahead and wrap it up today and submit it? The answer is almost always yes too. This has helped me ship a ton of apps. Now, most of them won't amount to anything, but they are experiments to gauge interest, or something that I might use myself.

I was probably already a leg up on most people before this switch though because I always applied the "can I do it in 4 minutes?" rule. Meaning, if something I am procrastinating on takes less than 4 minutes to do, I go ahead and do it right away. If I think it will take much longer, I might put it away for later. These 2 behavior hacks have been super helpful!

Prior to this one change I'd get tired and demotivated more often thinking about large goals and what it would take to get there.

I guess the lack hack if you wanted a 1-2-3 list, would be, I now think everything is possible if its in the realm of possibilities and just try to steer into that direction.

Brian Greene thinks there is no such thing as free wheel (your particles follow the laws of physics to do what they must do, and you have little control over that). While that does sound rational, I still think what he says is broadly true, but not locally true. Meaning, locally, there is just you, and you can steer your actions whichever way you want. But, broadly speaking on universal scales, there are particles that resemble you and technically speaking they will play out different paths so in that sense you don't have free will. But, I don't live on the scale of the universe and there's only the local me (that I know of).