Make life fun again
sunday 🌶️ take: you'll do the best at things you a) enjoy and b) do for decades.
— matt palmer (@mattppal) August 18, 2024
the easiest path to a) & b) is to make those things fun. yes, life can be fun.
make life fun again.
Most of us know that intentional practice is the path to mastery. Even if you've never heard the term "intentional practice," it's instinctive that "focusing" looks different than glancing at your phone every five minutes while you pretend to work.
Forming the electrical circuitry in our brains and reinforcing those connections takes quite a bit of time, patience, and attention.
For the best performers, that often means tireless practice, intense routines, and a life full of what appears to be self-loathing, unreasonable expectations, and missed social opportunities.
Except, what if it doesn't?
I posit there are two main reasons for the misconception of the "grind to be the best" mindset:
- There are a select few who do this and end up very well off, even if only temporarily.
- Most people have a laziness problem. So the "just grind" mindset moves them closer to being not-lazy and simultaneously provides justification for their own lack of achievement.
The issue is that if you don't have a laziness problem and adopt an extremely rigid, overly-disciplined mindset, it can lead to some real issues. I'll be the first to tell you about those.
The idea that you need to lock yourself in a room, isolate from friends and family, and hate your life to become the best isn't just stupid—it's dangerous.
It's dangerous because it can lead to a terrible relationship with your passions.
Yes, you absolutely need to focus intentionally to get better. And you absolutely need both intuition and creativity, but there are ways to do that that enrich other parts of your life, not destroy them.
Yes, if you want to be a top-tier CEO, you'll probably have to make sacrifices, but there's no reason you have to sacrifice everything.
When you see people posting on X about Red Bull-fueled sprints that last two days, what does that look like? Forty-eight straight hours of work, only 20 of which are (maybe) productive, then a two-day crash, a messed-up sleep schedule, and possibly stupid decisions elsewhere due to fatigue?
What if you just did 9-10 hours of productive work for five days, then a few on the weekend if you felt like it? Hmm...
Things aren't true just because people say they are.
No, you don't actually have to pull all-nighters to get good grades in college.
No, you don't need to work 12 hours a day (and I'd argue 12 or even 10 hours of intentional practice is not possible or sustainable).
No, running a marathon or going to Italy will not improve your ability to sit alone with yourself.
That's a disquieting fact, but it's also an optimistic one. Because it means you can find things you truly enjoy, not ones society tells you to enjoy.
And if you "hack" your brain to reward focus, creating, and shipping, you'll literally make yourself happy by practicing.
If you find cool people you can do those things with, working and focusing will feel a lot like hanging out.
Then if you show up more days than not and take appropriate breaks, continuously pushing for a bit more, but backing off when appropriate, in 5, 10, 15 years, you'll be doing amazing things.
And it will feel like living, not like being chained to a desk. At least, that's my goal. I don't claim to be there, but I'm a lot closer than I was a few years ago.
— Matt