Author: Imperfectly Practical

At work, I spent last month analyzing how customer spending changed on one particular product when they took a certain action. I had done this before with decidedly subpar results: I was taking too long, and my boss pulled in someone else to help. This time looked unfortunately similar. After weeks of stumbling around I had discovered that we were missing some of the data for the product I was analyzing. I asked around; apparently we wouldn’t be able to get it either.

And I felt relief.

Not disappointed because I wouldn’t finish. Relief. Because the project couldn’t go forward. And it wasn’t my fault.

I had been spending the past few weeks discouraged and disengaged from that project. I hadn’t enjoyed working on this type of project before, and that hadn’t changed with this new project. I couldn’t see a path to complete it. 

I put in superficial effort on completing the project, and my full effort into finding and building up each obstacle. So, instead of trying to solve the problems I ran into, I magnified them up. I tried to overcome them, and tested different solutions, but that wasn’t to solve the problem. That was to make sure my excuse held up well enough to end the project.

Why did I look for excuses instead of solutions?

Because I didn’t enjoy constantly struggling, and I wanted to move onto my next project (which was something I would enjoy). Because after my first few setbacks, I didn’t think I could complete the project. Because I was comparing myself to my coworker (who I respect a great deal), I thought I was destined to fail (by comparison). Because I was afraid of failure, and I worried about how I would be judged (by myself most of all).

I reached out for help, but I could have done so earlier, and more often. But before I did so, I wanted to add something to the project, to move it forward in some way. Because if I didn’t then I would feel like a failure.

Because I thought that everyone was judging me. Because I was definitely judging myself. And I was afraid of what failing would mean about me.

I spent my time protecting my ego instead of completing my project.

I can see how the actions that I took led to the results that I got. And I can see what I should have done instead. But to switch between the two, that is not an easy thing. Simple yes. Not easy.

Because asking for help and accepting it requires courage. It means acknowledging my inadequacies. And worse yet, sharing them with other people. And so this time, I have a plan. Each night I’ll write down the areas I’m struggling with, and ways that I can look for solutions in the form of an email. The next day, I’ll try all of my solutions. If by the evening I still haven’t solved them, then I’ll send the email I wrote asking for help.

When I fail, it hurts. I have a serious look at which actions I took and their consequences. And that tends to help me refine my actions. But I don’t do this when things are going well. During those times, I tend to withdraw into the things that I know that I can do. I fall into a comfortable routine that produces known results.

To understand why this happens, first we need to understand it’s easier to improve after a failure. When that happens, I’m unhappy with my results. And they happened. I can’t deny the consequences that I have experienced. Unhappy enough to justify self examination. Because self examination is a painful process. It requires one to look inwards and question not just your actions, but also your beliefs about yourself. Are you really capable? Did one of your actions cause your own failures? Or are you helpless to affect your circumstances? Once you see the problem in your thoughts or actions, it will nag at you until it’s fixed.

So when things are going well, I tend to avoid looking into my thoughts and actions. I have the results that I want, so maybe I’m doing everything correctly. The best, and easiest way to change this is to put yourself in a situation beyond what you think you can accomplish. Instead of smooth sailing, you’ll find storms.

Even if I reflect, if I haven’t failed recently, it can be hard to find a way to improve. Because when I fail, I assume that I made mistakes. And when I’ve been successful, I assume that I did everything right. So whenever you examine your actions, assume that you made mistakes. Assume that you can improve in some way.

If you are like me, there is a gap between your intentions and your actions. It’s probably been around for some time, and you’ve been aware of it to varying degrees. Lately, this has been a nagging issue. Ultimately, I’d call this the main source of my frustration.

What causes this gap?

Sometimes I set my intentions without a clear understanding of what I’m trying to do, and it turns out that what I wanted is not possible in the timescale that I had expected, or using the methods that I had planned. This does not bother me. No, what frustrates me is when I have a reasonable plan, but I simply don’t apply myself. I procrastinate until I’m in a time crunch, and I have to rush through everything (or drop tasks). Or I watch tv while I’m working, and let my productivity slow to a crawl.

But why?

Why do I do this to myself? I certainly don’t intend to inflict misery on myself. And I can clearly see that my actions will lead to a great deal of stress. If I know this, then I can only conclude that my actions are because I can’t afford to worry about the future. Even a few hours or days is too far away to care about. And if this is true, then I must feel truly desperate when I’m delaying these tasks. 

Feelings are not truth.

They are an interpretation of events and their consequences. Why would I feel so desperate about certain tasks? They have not, and probably will not greatly affect my material outcomes. Therefore, they must affect me emotionally. Specifically working on these tasks makes me question my understanding of myself, my identity.

This is not an easy thing to deal with. Even so, I haven’t dealt with it at all, instead I’ve avoided it. What should I do? I need to be present when I question my ego. I need to ask if my thoughts about myself are a reflection of reality, or a distortion. And then I need to let go of whatever is false, whether that is a thought, or part of my ego.

If you listen to the weather you’ll hear them describe days as either rainy, or sunny. As if the Sun takes rainy days off. Which is of course ridiculous, the Sun shines every day, whether or not clouds show up. Because the Sun is so incredibly consistent, most people don’t think about it. When you know that something is going to happen every day, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to mention it when you are communicating. Entirely sunny with heavy thunderstorms is shortened to just heavy thunderstorms. So this incandescent star somehow fades into the background.

Much like with the weather, people focus on the changes in their life and ignore consistent circumstances. But the steady, boring circumstances of life are far more important than the occasional changes. When things take a turn for the worse, people laser in on what’s changing. On what things are becoming worse right now.

It’s worthwhile to take a step back. See what things have not changed, and take a moment to appreciate them. Secondly, it’s worthwhile to understand the long term effects of current challenges. Without rain, you wouldn’t see any flowers.

How have my current problems benefitted me? If this seems like an odd question, it’s worth considering why you are working on them. If you don’t gain something important for your efforts, why are you working on them?

I recently read a book that touched on the idea of value driven decisions, and it stuck with me. It seemed so obvious. Everyone has values, so of course they should act according to those values. But that naturally led to a storm of questions. Was I acting according to my values? What exactly are my values? What does acting according to them even look like?

What is a value?

A value is a quality or objective that is an end in itself. In other words, a value is something that is worth pursuing for its own sake. It does not need to have any supporting reasons or secondary effects. In other words, any action that needs to produce something else to be worth pursuing is not a value. If a secondary effect is not a value, it will need to affect one of your values to be worth the effort. Taking this one step further, all actions need the justification of one or more values (however tentative their connection).

How to identify your values

Focus on the things that irritate you. Especially the things that bother you more than other people. And then dig into why it affects you. Did you start yelling at that person who cut you off? Why are you mad about it? Is it because that person is disregarding the safety of others? Or disrespecting their fellow drivers? Do you get frustrated when you spend all day watching TV? Is it because you don’t feel in control of yourself? Or are you upset because you are setting a bad example for those closest to you? Continue asking why until you struggle to come up with an answer. That’s when you’ve hit a value. Once you get a list of these things that bother you, you can flip them around to see what things you value.

Alternatively, you can directly list the things that are important to you, or try to understand events that made you happy. While this can be used to collect a list of values, people generally remember negative events more clearly, so I’d recommend starting that way.

Connect your actions to your values

Now that you have your list of values, take a look at your previous actions over the last week or so. For each action, you should be able to point to at least one value that justifies it. If you can’t find a value behind a given action, don’t start beating yourself up just yet. It’s more likely that you missed one of your values (joy and self care tend to be criminally underrated). Take a few minutes to consider what values someone (not necessarily you) might use to justify that action. Once you have ten or so, think back to how you felt taking that action and see if any of them stick.

Now that you’ve connected your actions to your values, you’ll be able to judge your actions more easily. Some of your values will be missing (oops!). And some of your actions won’t be very helpful for the values that stand behind them. This has a rather unfortunate tendency to be painful, especially if you haven’t done it before. You’ll see values that are barren of actions, and values where your actions are laughably ineffectual. That’s good. If you have big, obvious, and painful problems, then you’ll likely have big, obvious, and effective ways to improve.

What about you?

Do you have any values that surprised you? Did you notice any values that were missing from your actions? What did you do to more closely align your actions with your values?

Lately, I’ve been trying to improve my productivity. Specifically, I’ve been trying to spend more time working on advancing my goals, instead of playing games or reading fiction. And it went pretty well for several months. But then it stopped improving. Not only that, I started doing worse than the previous week. That trend continued for several weeks until I finally took a step back to assess what happened.

After hitting my goals out of the park for a while,

I stopped making progress. After each week, I’d review what I did recently, and think about how to change things. As I continued to struggle, I started to make everything about my character instead of my actions. The problem was that I was lazy, or unmotivated. It wasn’t that I had stayed up too late the night before, or that ate an unhealthy meal. I stopped thinking about ways to change my actions. Why would I? They weren’t the problem. The problem was my character.

This is of course crazy. I needed to change my actions, and as I stopped thinking about ways to do that I faltered and then crashed. How could I continue working when I was constantly calling myself lazy and pathetic? Who would work under those conditions? Not me. I started feeling disgust at my failures. That led to me pushing my past self away, instead of trying to understand what about that situation had contributed to my failings. 

Once I stepped back,

 I started to walk through the actions around my mistakes. I tried to feel the things I felt in the past as I repeated my past actions in my mind. I had felt harried, and stressed, and afraid. I just wanted to avoid thinking about my goals because that brought on more feelings of inferiority and helplessness. I realized that I had a great deal of emotional baggage weighing me down. And that there was no reason to continue holding onto it.

I started to look at the past in a new light. I assumed that I was not the problem. Because that required me to really look at my failures. I could no longer push them away and be done with it. Once I started looking, I found a few ways to improve my actions.

Each week had become an evaluation where my soul sat on trial. Any failures were devastating, and led to me becoming disheartened. I needed each week to become an experiment, where I tried various methods to see how well they helped me accomplish my goals. I needed to judge my actions and processes because these are things that I can change.

What about you?

Are you stuck on anything? If so, do you look for ways to improve after you fall short? Do you make everything about your character or your actions?

But I keep struggling to do it. And that feels utterly miserable. I have my clearly laid out plan, ready for action. Only I fail to act. That’s ok. I don’t expect perfection, so sometimes I’ll mess up. Only it isn’t sometimes. I keep making the same mistakes, in the same situations. It’s infuriating. Why can’t I just do that one simple thing? I’d broken my plan into simple steps with clear benefits.

I kept trying, and I kept failing.

And I grew more frustrated and then more dejected. And then I asked myself, if I keep failing, do I really know how to do this? If I kept doing the same thing, and failing despite my efforts, why did I keep trying? I never blamed my plan. It was always the fault of my actions.

And so I asked myself, why did you fail?

Subconsciously, I’d asked myself this many times before. And my answer had always been some flavor of ‘you are a failure.’ Once I realized this, I also realized that I had been just accepting it as truth, and I felt the need to challenge it. So, I held the question ‘why did you fail?’ in my mind for a few seconds, and started to peel back the underlying questions.

Why was it difficult (not for others, but for me)?

The action I was trying to take was not physically challenging, or mentally taxing. But emotionally, it was hard. I had to wrestle with my emotions every time I did it. And what was making it emotionally difficult? I had convinced myself that I needed it. That I must do this specific thing to relax or stress would overwhelm me. But this didn’t help me to relax. In fact I felt more stressed after doing it because I would always fall behind. That my life was dull and lifeless without it. But that wasn’t true either. It was entertaining, but I had enjoyed years of my life without it. After questioning the assumptions that I held around this, I felt my need to do it subside.

What did I learn?

If you are struggling to do something that you think should be easy, you are ignoring what makes it difficult. Something is tripping you up, and when you say that it’s easy, you aren’t giving yourself permission to look for it. And if you don’t look for something, you won’t find it. We can generally recognize physically or mentally difficult problems, but rarely account for  emotionally difficult ones.

Your emotions don’t rise out of the ether. They are built out of beliefs based on your interpretation of past events. Although we can see that the beliefs of others may be inaccurate, it’s very difficult to apply this to ourselves. If you are struggling with your emotions, ask what you must believe to feel this way? What assumptions do your emotions require?

Unhelpful emotions often rest on a mistaken understanding of the world, because if your understanding of the world were accurate, it would help you interact with it more beneficial.

P.S. If anyone is curious, the action I’m trying to change is reading webnovels less often.

What does a day need to become a good day? I asked myself this recently. Only I didn’t have a clear answer. Instead of knowing the type of things that I should pursue, I’ve just been floundering in the general direction of my goals. Without a clear understanding of what I need to do to have a good day, I haven’t been able to prioritize those things.

Kittens and Alligators

So I started looking at the last few good days that I had. What exactly did I do that made them good? I felt in control of myself, and I made progress towards my goals. What did I do on all of these days? I exercised, and ate healthy food. I worked towards my goals in the morning and during the evening.

But was that enough? Were there any days where I did these things (or at least started doing them) but didn’t have a good day? Yes, there were many. I could start out well, but turn my good day into a bad one in a lot of different ways. A frustrating meeting would work. Or a steady stream of interruptions. Or avoiding an important task with less important ones.

That reminded me of an article I read a while ago. The basic idea is that life has alligators (things that make you miserable), and kittens (things that bring you joy). If you have both you’ll always focus on the alligators, so you should try to get rid of those first.

What are my alligators?

This insight changed my question a bit. What actions could I take that would inevitably lead to a bad day? I took out a sheet of paper and wrote down all of the ways I had made myself miserable recently. For some items, I didn’t write down a specific action (e.g. poor diet). In those cases, I listed the specific actions I most often took to cause that result (overeating junk food, over snacking). Then I condensed them into two major themes: personal hygiene (sleep, exercise, diet), and acting intentionally (confronting problems instead of avoiding them, focusing on my goals).

And my kittens?

I now have a list of ways that I can use to ruin my days. Or more accurately, a list of things to avoid doing in order to have a good day. So I rewrote their opposites as specific actions. So ‘overeating junk food’ became ‘purchasing small portions of junk food,’ and ‘avoiding important tasks’ became ‘start on your most important tasks.’

What about you?

What things cause you to have a bad day most often? What specific action can you take to make sure that this does not sink your days?

Desire is the most common emotion in most people. It’s about longing for things that we do not have. We all want things. Some of these things are fairly common: money, prestige, emotional connection. But some things that we want vary wildly from person to person.

Desire does not spring from the ether fully formed. It starts with a little bit of interest. Maybe curiosity. Or the need to be accepted. Or maybe the warm glow of praise. Once desire has been sparked, it’s merely a passing interest. It needs to grow before it can develop into a desire.

How does it grow?

The things we want are the things we glorify. Spend each day singing the praises of an unreleased video game, and you’ll grow to want it. Alternatively, if you criticize the alternatives, that will have the same effect. Complain about your job constantly, and you’ll want to find a different one. Consider a few of the things you want desperately. How often do you praise them in your mind? Or bemoan the alternatives? Consistently, and intentionally treat something in this way, and you’ll develop your desire.

But desires are not just emotions.

They are beliefs about how you will respond to different circumstances. You want a new car? Then you must believe that a new car will do something for you or change your life in some important way. And this is always something very specific. Maybe that a new car will help you fit it, or give you the freedom to travel to new places. You want a new job? Then you believe that your current job is making you miserable. These beliefs are the foundation of your desires, for without an underlying belief, your desires would collapse.

And sometimes, we hold onto a belief that simply is not true. Despite our desperate wishes, or our striving, obtaining what we desire often does not make us happy. What beliefs fuel your most tightly held desires? Have you ever stopped to identify them? To question them? Have you tried them out in some way, or are you assuming that they’ll work out?

My Desires

Retirement: I’ve spent a lot of time learning about investing in the past few years (specifically asset allocation). The early retirement community has been a great resource for financial education. It also constantly praises the freedom of retiring, and the constraints of work. Combine that with my exceedingly stressful last job, and retiring early transformed into one of my desires.

But I’m not working in that last job anymore. My current one is much less stressful, and much more engaging. And although I value the freedom of having fewer time constraints, the main reason I want to have more time is so that I can work on self development more. I don’t spend as much time on that as I’d like right now, but retiring wouldn’t necessarily fix that. Self development is hard work, and I often slip into entertainment instead. That’s something that I could work on now, and I worry that my focus on retirement is a way to avoid that.

Self Development: I’ve taken up learning and self improvement as one of my core aspirations. More than that I have a system, and I’m currently working on it. My main goal with this is to become more intentional, to spend more of my time pursuing my long term goals. This rests on the belief that much of my unhappiness comes from making poor choices (often due to not paying attention). And that much of my joy comes from working on hard things where I have a good reason to do so. When I look back over the past days, weeks, and even years of my life, I’d say both of these beliefs ring true.

This week, I came down with a case of busyness. I had too much to do and not enough time to do it. Life was coming at me faster than I wanted it to. Faster than I could handle it. I was barraged with new tasks. Under that fire I started to wither. I’d start working on something, but I wouldn’t set down my other concerns. I’d worry about all of the other tasks that I was responsible for. And what about the new tasks that were bound to come up? How long would it take me to complete all of them? Who was waiting on that? How long could I keep them waiting?

What does it mean to be busy?

Busyness is feeling like you cannot complete all of the tasks you’ve accepted responsibility for to the level of excellence that you expect of yourself. It’s your mind’s early warning system saying “you’ve set yourself up for failure.” And it’s worth listening to. Because you kind of have to. If you try to ignore it, all of your existing worries spring up whenever you try to focus on a problem. And that will crush your focus, which in turn will crush your productivity. When you feel busy, you won’t be able to work at your normal levels of productivity, which ensures you’ll fall behind your expectations.

What I want to do when I feel busy

Work faster. That’s my favorite busyness solution. Focus more. Spend more time. Or more effort. Those are some of my other preferred options. Only they don’t work. It’s hard to focus on something when you know that you are going to fail at it. Why work at all when it won’t change the outcome? It’s hard to justify the effort. Even when I understand that not all failures are the same, and that the quality of the failure matters.

What I really should do instead

So, instead of trying to fail well, try to succeed poorly. This, more than anything else, is a matter of perspective. Take the time to step back. Lay out your tasks, and adjust your expectations. This will be difficult because you won’t feel like you have enough time to work through your tasks, much less the time to review them. But it’s worthwhile. Because your emotions are the first and most important tool for productivity. And your emotions are the first and most serious obstacle for productivity.

How long will it actually take you to finish all of these things? How soon do they need to be accomplished? Sometimes your feelings don’t give you an accurate picture of reality. It could be possible to complete all of them because they aren’t as long or complex as you feared. Or maybe one of them doesn’t need to be completed as quickly as you thought it did.

Or maybe things are as bad as you thought. You’ve been trying to fix a month of work into a week of work. And that is not possible. So instead of trying to do that, determine which tasks are most important and strive to complete them. Push off tasks to other people, or delay them proactively. Instead of waiting for you to be late, say ahead of time that you need to focus on other priorities. If anyone pushes back, you’ve got your list of other priorities. And they might be able to help you get additional resources, or help you rearrange tasks into a better sequence.

But you should try to accomplish more than you think you can

If you only try to do things you know you can, then you’ll never grow. So instead of trying to fit a month of work into a week, try to squeeze in a week and an extra day. Or maybe an extra quarter. It should be possible if you work intentionally and with effort. But it should also scare you a little. You should feel like you need to push yourself to succeed.