I thought this essay was a wonderful collection of thoughts, ideas, and strategies to get your brain working FOR you instead of against you. Sharing some favorite excerpts below:
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Sometimes I’ll know exactly what I need to do in order to leave the bog, but I’m too afraid to do it. I’m afraid to tell the truth, or make someone mad, or take a risk. And so I dither, hoping that the future will not require me to be brave.
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All of my effort is currently accounted for somewhere. If I want to spend more of it on something, I have to spend less of it on something else. If I’m consistently not getting something done, it’s probably because I don’t want to—at least, not enough to cannibalize that time from something else—and I haven’t admitted that to myself yet.
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A good word for this is puppeteering: trying to solve your problems by controlling the actions of other humans. Puppeteering often looks attractive because other people’s actions seem silly and therefore easily changeable. Funnily enough, it doesn’t feel that way to them
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Parents who want to get their kids into elite colleges have perfected the art of obsessing over tiny predictors. When I gave campus tours, I would run into them all the time: “Should my kid play the timpani or the oboe?” “How many semicolons can you use in the personal essay?” “Can we include dental records to demonstrate a history of good brushing?” The joke was on them, of course: stressing about all those tiny things only makes you anxious