micro

December 2022

Little things are the big things. I apply this philosophy to habits, time, and learning.

Habits beat goals. Society encourages dreaming up ambitious personal goals and spending our lives chasing them. But this has pernicious effects.

Setting the goal becomes an end in itself - you get an initial dopamine hit and don’t take any action. When they do inspire action, goals produce dead-ends. You risk sunk-cost thinking leading you down the same path even after it’s no longer the right one. Heading in the wrong direction is worse than doing nothing. Alternatively, you pick a worthwhile goal and either feel aimless if you achieve it or like a failure if you don’t (regardless of how much progress you made).

There’s no such thing as being stationary in life: we’re always becoming something. And it doesn’t happen in intervals; it's a constant process. Goals trick you into thinking it’s big moments that count, when really it’s how you spend every minute.

You know this already: on your birthday, you’re another year older, but don’t feel any different. You don’t just change when that date arrives. All the personal growth (or regression) happened in the days before it. Day by day, the trends are small; over years, they’re transformative.

Habits are about continuous progress, not a fantasy destination. Designing your life around habits means choosing activities that level you up and you can repeat regardless of where they lead you.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy sums up the habits philosophy nicely in an epic essay, “Growth without Goals.” After reading it, I picked a handful of activities to build my life around: learning every day, working out, and converting dead time to alive time. Reducing all existential future-thinking to these core habits is liberating.

Making good habits is an asymmetric bet: capped downside, unlimited upside. If you choose wisely, it doesn’t matter what twists and turns life takes because you’ll be revelling in the journey. I’ll never regret getting smarter, writing, lifting weights, and listening to amazing conversations. That’s a cool feeling.

Habits also harness compounding. Every repetition leads to improvement and crystallises your identity as the kind of person who does that thing. Compounding over a long time horizon - say a lifetime - generates exponential returns. And exponential returns are where the magic happens.

Life is fractal. Peter Thiel is known for saying that people overestimate what they can do in a decade and underestimate what they can do in a few months. No wonder when most live in the future instead of taking action in the present. If you optimise for habits, you’ll move with more velocity and create optionality so you can live many different lives.

There’s a common tendency to craft decisions around societal milestones like birthdays and new years. I used to think they were the right points for making life changes because they were fresh slates. I found myself saying things like “I’ll start doing that next year,” or “I’ll have that down by the time I’m 30.” But our lives can change at any moment. It starts with making a decision; the rest is commitment.

People put off taking action out of procrastination: at some level, they don’t want to start doing the thing they’re thinking about because they’re afraid of what might happen. Action is the best antidote for procrastination. Lower the bar and commit to some minimal version of the thing. It helps to imagine how your future self will see it: if things go well, you’ll wish you started earlier; if they don’t, you’ll be glad you learnt the lesson sooner rather than later. Being unreasonably impatient with action, while patient with results, is the path to victory.

Learning lends itself to a micro strategy. When getting into new subjects, it’s tempting to try soaking up information from the firehose. But this leads to overwhelm and scatteredness. I prefer figuring out the 20% of concepts that underpin 80% of what matters. Every subject has these; it takes some work to find them, but it’s worth the investment. Josh Waitzkin describes making “smaller circles” as you keep narrowing down your subject to its foundational ideas. Once you understand the basics, you can build everything else on top.