Woolgathering #158: Systems, Habits, and Half-Measures
Why no system will really work for you, PLUS: the ideal planning/doing ratio, the neurology of goals, pictures of people that don’t exist, and the importance of lateral moves
There’s this monologue I love from the show Breaking Bad. It’s about half-measures. You can read the whole thing here (warning: it’s a bit profane and grizzly).
The gist of the speech is that the speaker, Mike, used to a cop. He and his partner would regularly be called to the same couple’s house for domestic disturbances. The really large, abusive husband would regularly knock around the thin, fragile, scared wife. But each time Mike and his partner arrived, she would refuse to press charges against her husband.
One day, Mike got the call without his partner. He showed up alone. He’d had enough. He threw the husband in the back of a squad car, drove off to some isolated place, and threatened him. If he ever laid a hand on his wife again, Mike would kill him.
Two weeks later, Mike and his partner were called to the same house. But this time, it was for a homicide. The husband killed his wife. Mike laments as he delivers the story’s lesson:
“The moral of the story is: I chose a half measure, when I should have gone all the way. I’ll never make that mistake again.”
Boy is that ever true when it comes to personal development. No half measures.
Of course, it’s not a life and death matter, like Mike’s story.
Or is it?
Read This
8 Decent Tips on How to Be a Better Listener
I once heard someone say that listening is like kissing: everyone wants to be good at it, everyone thinks they’re better than most at it, but most of us aren’t really that good at it. So in the spirit of getting better at it, here’s a decent article with eight useful tips to help you become a better listener.
What’s the Ideal Ratio of Planning to Doing?
I continue to be fascinated with the question of how much one needs to plan in order to be successful. It seems that there is a delicate balance when it comes to the answer. Not enough planning can lead to inefficiency, sub-par work, and burnout down the road. But as this article points out, too much time spent planning can actually prevent you from doing the very valuable beginning stage work – which actually can serve as a kind of planning-as-doing.
Reality Has a Surprising Amount of Detail
I’ve always loved that saying: the devil is in the details. But this essay breaks down why the devil lives there. The things that we think are so simple will often prove to be very complicated and nuanced once we look at them in greater detail. And this is important because we end up looking at that detail only when the stakes are very high. And the greatest, and often most intractable disagreements come at that level of detail.
John Salvatier’s explanation of why the boiling point of water is actually much less clear than we think is worth reading in and of itself. What an enlightening piece of writing.
Listen to This
Here’s an excellent podcast episode from Huberman Labs on goals. It’s an extensive guided tour through the neurological roots of effective goal-setting, as well as effective mindsets for working toward goals. The takeaways abound. Including:
The 85% rule for learning by failure
4 areas of the brain related to different aspects of goal pursuit
2 kinds of personal space, and how they relate to motivation
much, much more!
Something Weird:
“This Person Does Not Exist”
Before AI ends up taking over the world and extinguishing the flame of humanity, we can have some laughs about it, can’t we? This crazy site provides exactly what it claims to: people who don’t exist—but look like they do.
The underlying AI is called a Generalized Adversarial Network (GAN), and it uses the data from millions of photographs of people to generate unique human photos. It’s crazy.
A Question to Think About
Do I have a lateral move available?
Especially when we’re wrapped up in the pursuit of a goal, we tend to see anything that’s not progress as a setback. If we’re not gaining ground, we’re losing it.
As a result, we can end up making risky moves in an attempt to achieve some sort of progress. But we may end up only wasting our energy, and not even gaining ground—or even worse, losing it.
It can help to take a cue from American football, and consider the merits of lateral moves. The rules of football dictate that the ball cannot be thrown forward from one player to another beyond the line of scrimmage—which is the line from which the play began. So once a player begins running the ball past that line, it may seem like their only option is to keep running. And when they encounter opponents, they may try to simply plow through them.
But the rules of football allow for the ball to be thrown sideways or backwards. And while that in and of itself doesn’t provide forward progress, it does open up opportunities that weren’t available before. It just takes some patience and vision to see how it can work.
When we encounter opposition on our march of forward progress, we should be willing to consider lateral moves. They’re the moves that don’t immediately look like progress, but can help put us in a better position to move forward later.
And that’s the real kicker—the thing that keeps many of us from considering lateral moves. We lack the patience to wait for “later”. We lack the vision to see how that lateral move can accelerate progress in the future.
This is why patience is a truly unsung hero of the virtues. The world continues to move more quickly. And it seems to demand that we do so as well. But it is in the face of such acceleration that it might pay off to question the prevailing momentum.
A Quote
“I stay cool, and dig all jive,
That's the way I stay alive.
My motto,
as I live and learn,
is
Dig and be dug
In return.”
- Langston Hughes