Hey, where was the newsletter last week?
I’ll tell you where it was — floating around in my head, obstinately refusing to flow out into my computer so I could schedule it.
Last week, I had to make the decision. Do I force myself to write a subpar newsletter in the rushed inbetween minutes of countless meetings? Or do I miss my first newsletter in over a year?
And, as you might have noticed, I chose the latter.
So there it is. Out in the open. Judge me if you must.
🤷 It Happens
No matter how much you prepare and how disciplined you are, there will come a time when you miss a deadline.
Missing a deadline can happen for a bunch of reasons, and to be honest, the reason isn’t important. Whether it’s a genuine issue like a friend in hospital with a broken foot needing a ride home or because you got caught up binge-watching Instagram or TikTok or YouTube.
The first thing to do is: chill out about it. Let yourself off the hook. The next thing is:
🥷 Get Vigilant
Right after missing a deadline (or breaking a habit streak), you are approximately twenty times more likely to break it again in the next three days.
It’s like having a cigarette while out drinking after a successful month of quitting cold turkey. Or having a cheat meal during a specific diet, or boozing during Dry July.
After slipping once, we have the urge to cast the entire plan out the window and surrender to our base desires. It’s a bizarre fallacy that breaking the streak equals ‘failure’. It doesn’t at all. It just means ‘not a perfect record’.
Why do we think having one cigarette is the same as smoking a whole pack? Or that missing your word count for a single day means that you may as well stop writing altogether?
It’s because we’ve been trained to believe in the tenet of All or Nothing.
🎯 All Or Nothing is Stupid
Perfection. A completely unrealistic target to have, right?
A lucky few appear to have achieved some degree of perfection. Celebrities who look ‘perfect’, Olympians who have enjoyed ‘perfect’ runs, and some people would argue that Back to the Future is a ‘perfect’ film (I am that some people).
Perfection is boring. It’s the most convincing argument against AI-generated art. Soulless. Bland. Lacking the imperfections that show authentic authorship.
Many studies have linked the pursuit of perfection to depression. The official term is Maladaptive Perfectionism and is defined as ‘setting excessively high standards of performance, alongside a tendency to make critical self-evaluation periods.’
… Yeah, that’s what I do all the time. I set high standards of achievement and performance, and I use various trackers to constantly evaluate myself. When I miss a day of Duolingo or writing, I castigate myself. It’s not cool.
What are we really looking for here? What is the elusive (and frankly, make-believe) concept of perfect? What are the metrics? A perfect diet? Hitting an arbitrary number of Hours Worked? Awards? Medals? Accolades?
What happens when you finally hit that magic mark? Will we be satisfied? Apparently not.
I’ve talked to people who’ve achieved a massive goal but they can’t look back fondly because to achieve it, they had to act in a way they aren’t proud of. They drove collaborators too hard, or they had to follow a strict work or training regime, or while pursuing their goal they were perpetually tired and didn’t spend enough time with family or friends.
Let’s say we worked super hard, prioritising our achievements above all else, and we finally reached our magic goal. What happens then? Chances are, we’d spend the rest of our lives looking back on that one moment and feeling a mixture of three things: intense pride that we did it, regret that we sacrificed activities that we deemed ‘of lesser importance’, and depressed because it’ll likely never happen again.
Perfection is an illusion, not a target.
📊 What Do We Aim For if Not Perfection?
Mediocrity. Not a very sexy concept, is it?
AUREA MEDIOCRITAS
“The Golden Mean”. Aristotle came up with this back in his Stoicism days, and it’s a simple concept that has contributed greatly to my sense of contentment and overall joy in my life.
The Golden Mean is the concept of aiming for a balance between two extremes, whether an attitude or lifestyle.
Think about the concept of anger. If you’re too chill, you run the risk of being complacent or a pushover. If you’re on the other extreme, you rage all the time and people start to know you as the person who flies off the handle when the cafe doesn’t have aioli. The golden mean of anger is assertiveness. The ability to maintain a healthy temperament without blowing your top at the smallest inconvenience, while also pushing back against injustices.
Likewise with fear. To not be afraid at all would be nuts — you’d walk out into the road or get in fights with people twice your size. But to be too afraid is to be perpetually terrified and paranoid.
In work, find your Golden Mean.
Get busy, sure, and try to keep your habit streak. But don’t become the obsessive person who can’t take twenty minutes for coffee because you have an immovable deadline.
Life is about more than work. We’re told this all the time, but it’s a difficult pill to swallow when we’ve been raised in hustle culture and are taught to ‘grind hard’.
Today, I went out for lunch with a good friend and he told me about a funeral he attended earlier in the year. “There were like, two hundred people there,” he said, shaking his head. “And it just drove it all home: it’s all about people. Nobody there was saying how amazing he was at his job.”
📣 Shout Out to: KOReader
KOReader is an open-source app that you can load onto your e-reader to open up more controls for your reading experience.
You’re able to add a more details status bar to the bottom of your page:
And view the book in this radical ‘book map’. The dark bars are the time it took me to read those pages.
And the reading statistics are SO NERDY, I love it:
It’s fully free and simple to install.