Figuring out what you’re willing to “give up” to achieve your goals can be misleading. It’s typical guru advice to think about what your goals are and then consider what you have to change or give up in order to meet those goals.

This is actually close to being good advice, but needs a slight tweak.

Short and sweet – people don’t know what the process is to achieve a goal when they come up with the idea. Want to become a muscly monster like Jay Cutler? It’s not going to the gym 5 hours a day like you may think. It’s taking tons of roids AND actually only going to the gym 1 hour a day. Want to have an ultra lean physique? It’s not just “drop drinking soda,” but eating extremely carefully and rarely deviating from a set diet.

The reason people don’t finish courses on things is they didn’t know what they had to do to succeed. – Truthcake

Gurus sit back and call everyone lazy for not “taking action.” But if you don’t know what action it is you have to take, then that’s not particularly fair to the people that go through courses.

The number 1 thing you need to know about a goal is knowing what it takes, specifically, to achieve it. Not just “hard work” or nebulous nonsense. Once you know what the work is, then you can decide if you want to do it or not.

Splitting a goal up into 2 parts is an easy way to think about it: 1) What is the work, and 2) Will I do the work?

Most people focus on the 2nd part, or they focus on what goal to set to begin with. But they would find themselves much more productive if they focused on knowing what specifically is the work?

What’s one goal you “gave up” on, not because you didn’t like to work, but because you discovered the type of work it required and realized that it wasn’t something you’d feel comfortable doing?

Meeting your objective sometimes doesn’t make you good.

I’ve mentioned in many other articles that practice isn’t helping you get better, and how solutions that can’t be executed properly aren’t solutions. This time I’m talking about when a solution causes a new problem and seldom do people think about their perfect execution of a solution is actually creating more harm than good, but on the backend of things.

I saw someone power washing a house, and the guy was trying his best to clean everything possible, but the more successful he was at cleaning (his objective), the worse he was destroying the side of the house by making water infiltrate the house by spraying in certain areas that should never be exposed to water.

Most success in one thing, creates failure in another. – Truth Cake

If you don’t know where the failure is, or could potentially be, you’re not seeing the full picture. Whether it be power washing a house, or making a pile of cash (at the detriment of your health due to working excessively, etc), there’s usually a downside somewhere even when the goal has been met.

It’s not about trying to find solutions that have no downside, but simply being aware of them so that you can either a) avoid them and get even better, or b) be aware of them and accept them.

What thing have you succeeded at but didn’t realize the negative consequence of until it was too late? If you were made aware of the downside, could the downside have been easily prevented?

“Do your best!” – Random guru.

Good advice turns into bad advice when it’s incomplete. And this piece of advice is very incomplete.

You need to do your best within a specific time frame. You’re better every new day, therefore, your best work is always tomorrow. If you wait until tomorrow, obviously, nothing ever happens and you can placate yourself by saying that you’re only doing your best.

You should absolutely do your best…within a specific timeframe that has a deadline. – Truth cake

If you don’t have the 2nd part of that advice, then you do your best, which means you actually will do nothing – because your best is always tomorrow.

This isn’t about being against perfectionism exactly as discussed in another post I made – it’s about TRYING to be perfect, to the best of your ability, giving it a deadline, and launching it even though it’s not perfect.

Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn founder) was reported to say that, “If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” This isn’t good “advice” per se, since it could accidently lead people to just do awful stuff, but he’s not giving advice. Reid is explaining a scenario that happens when you’re:
1) Doing the best you can,
2) Launching before it’s perfect,
3) Getting better every day and sticking with something (this 3rd part is what creates the embarrassment he refers to since when you look back on something, you’ve gotten so much better over time).

What thing have you been putting off because of the fear of not doing your best but instead you should just do the best you can today and move forward?

“Never ever quit!” – Random guru…

I’ve discussed in the article on Shiny Object Syndrome being beneficial and knowing when to quit. However, another important point is when to ‘quit’ your environment.

You can quit anything if you try hard enough. – Truth Cake

Sometimes you’ll see people struggle with trying to solve their relationships with toxic people, or dealing with terrible coworkers, or whatever.

It’s probably an easier AND faster AND more effective strategy to change your environment.

Want to know how I handle talking to toxic people? I don’t talk to them.
How about how to handle a terrible boss? I quit.
Dealing with getting a partner to stop being so terrible? I break up.

Sometimes, moving on is the answer. A lot of people think they’re ‘stuck’ in a situation – they HAVE to deal with their boss, they HAVE to handle their ex, they HAVE to deal with their toxic relatives.

No you don’t. Look at that – just saved you a weekend guru retreat for you to understand. It’s worth saying again,

You can quit anything if you try hard enough.

Obviously, sometimes fixing the problem is better than abandoning the problem, and it’s been said that you can’t escape problems no matter what, but you CAN chose what types of problems you want to solve. There’s an art to know when to change your environment vs fixing the environment that will be addressed in another post, but in the mean time you should consider this question:

What problem are you trying to solve that would just make more sense for you to get out of that scenario / environment, rather than trying to ‘fix’ the problem you’re encountering within that environment?

Tom Bilyeu, the co-founder of Quest Nutrition, believes with practice that you will always improve with time.

You won’t.

For tasks where you don’t know what you’re doing wrong, practicing will just make you consistent, not better. Tom is a fantastic guru in general and many times practice DOES make us better like Tom says, but if you’ve seen someone try at something for years without ever succeeding, you can immediately realize intuitively that he’s wrong.

Practice is only a feedback loop. If you get bad feedback, practicing to get better no longer works and usually just leads someone to doing more of the same things and/or more consistently.

If someone cat calls women at the club, and one of them actually seems receptive, it’s unlikely that the guys ‘game’ is going to get much better if that’s all he’s doing.

Bad behavior can often be rewarded and reinforce bad habits, making practice useless. – Truth Cake.

Practicing stock / crypto trading will not likely make you better. Practicing poker will not make you better. Many things you can practice but because you don’t know if your behavior was actually good to get a reward or not, makes it VERY difficult to get any value from practice.

Only study will help you get better in certain tasks. Only doing / practice will help you get better in other tasks. – Truth Cake.

So how to know whether to practice or study?

Muscle memory things with immediate feedback that is reliable should be practiced. Things like singing, playing instruments, gymnastics, driving a car, etc. Studying and reading books won’t help you here because you almost immediately know definitively on whether you did something right or wrong.

Mental things with immediate or delayed feedback where the feedback may not reflect whether you did something right or not, requires study. Anything where bad behavior has a chance to be rewarded (ie playing the lotto, chess, poker, stocks, etc) is going to render practice almost useless.

Of course, many things are a combination of both, such as cooking since you have physical aspects as well as mental aspects to learning how to cook.

Merely doing something over a long period of time, under the guise of practice and thinking you’ll be better, is simply not going to be true.

What things have you practiced and didn’t get any better before realizing that you should have been studying?

Random gurus will tell you to drop the shiny object syndrome that a lot of people have when it comes to their life direction.

Thinking of something as entirely good or bad is probably an example of muddled thinking. – Truth cake.

Shiny object syndrome actually helps you realize different paths to your ultimate goal and actually is a marker of adaptability.

Say I’ve decided to have a million dollar net worth, and I decide that I’m going to be LASER FOCUSED on working at my job and saving that cash. Meanwhile one day someone offers me a guaranteed winning lotto ticket and I can’t be bothered to pick it up b/c of my extreme focus on my job…well, this is moronic, not admirable.

When your focus becomes intent on the next step (work at my job), as opposed to the ultimate goal (get a million bucks), the result is being unadaptable. Darwin is often misquoted as saying, “Only the strongest survive,” but the real quote is, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent; it is the one most adaptable to change.”

Shiny object syndrome is your ability to adapt. Too much adaptation and switching from one thing to the next without a solid reason to change course, is of course not favorable. But knowing when to give up on one thing for something else better, with a logical reasoning behind it, allows you to stay focused when needed as well as adapt when needed.

Sometimes it’s ok to lose focus of the steps of the goal and change course as long as focus on the ultimate goal remains. – Truth Cake.

Is shiny object syndrome helping you focus and benefitting you, or making you unadaptable and blind to better opportunities?

A lot of time there’s talk about how to not let trolls upset you. Or how they’re “hurting inside” and need compassion.

That sounds great, but trolls are actually useful and shouldn’t be ignored, nor psychoanalyzed. Trolls don’t need my compassion. Trolls don’t need to be ignored. Trolls are just tools.

Sometimes trolls help you get better, but sometimes they don’t. Also, this is NOT a take “take it as constructive criticism” piece of advice.

The secret is this: Trolls are NOT used for getting better at what they’re complaining about, they’re used for helping you understand optimization better.

Trolls help you determine your optimization points. – Truth Cake

The more optimization points in a subject, the more trolls. The most notorious of trolls are found in the construction industry. Are all the people in construction just terrible ‘hurting’ people and that’s why there’s so many trolls? No. It’s because that in construction there’s several optimization points. Those points are: 1) Safety of Individual, 2) Quality of work, 3) Speed of work, 4) Cost of work, 5) Skills required / Ease of Execution, 6) Beauty of finished product, 7) Functionality of finished product, and 8) Durability / Longevity of product.

Notice how I didn’t mention Accuracy or Correctness in there, that’s because…

Being ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ is a philosophical debate, not a factual one. -Truth Cake

You could say it’s “wrong” to not use safety glasses, but that speeds up work. And you can say it’s “wrong” to be overly cautious and safe because you’ll never get anything done (ie. slower Speed of Work). You could say it’s “wrong” if people don’t follow building code, but someone may be optimizing for Cost of Work because they’re broke and can’t afford the marginal added safety of using a bracket for the massive savings in time and cost.

Getting stuff done fast? “Sloppy craftsmanship and dangerous!”
Making a flawless product? “They’re going way over budget and taking forever!”
Using the best building practices and skills? “No one can freehand a straight line like that!”

You can’t win against trolls – and you shouldn’t want to. Trolls just help determine the list of optimization points so you can become crystal clear in regards to what attributes of your task matter most, so you can clearly optimize for certain points. Also note that optimization points are not binary where they only optimize for one thing and then nothing at all for everything else, it could be that someone optimizes for A, B, C primarily, a bit for D, E, and none for F, and G.

What criticism have you heard that you took personally but should have just realized that they were optimizing for different attributes than you were?