you can just do things, you should do (good) things (duh), but should is bad, so ideally, you want to do things.
a potential reader remarks: “but I don’t want to do the things that I should do”
Whatever! There are things you do want to do. They’re called fun. Do those things. Much better than not doing any thing. The last thing you want is to punish yourself for doing things. Reward yourself more when they are closer to the things you should be doing, perhaps.
On Doing Everything
“If you do everything, you’ll win.” - Lyndon B. Johnson, according to Caro.
I find myself pretty confused by this at the moment. Like, it’s clearly true in some ways that I care about: when I look at successes (both outside of my own bubble and my own wins), it’s easy to map them to having done a lot of different things in service of the goal. Even when I fail, I can point to specific things I should have done in hindsight, and had I done all that I did and more, including those specific things, I would have “won”.
And yet, I think narrowing ones scope is important! My friend Jason says Do Thing, Do One Thing. Which is also eminently reasonable. When I look at some organizational or individual failures of mine, they come from trying to tackle too much at once.
One resolution I want to consider is that you should choose one problem to solve, and then do everything needed to solve that problem. But this kicks the can down to defining the scope of your problem. Maybe a response here is to scope the problems you aim to solve such that you can do everything necessary to win, then scope it a little bit narrower than that, and then execute on it.