As a result, he pushed himself just enough to make progress. This process repeated itself over the course of days and weeks. However, if there was a time that Sukumar didnât want to do a lot of push-ups, he didnât force himself. He did two and felt good about keeping the habit alive. Part of this skill is knowing when to back off and do only the baseline.
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Of course, if we were able to watch a great athlete training, or a great writer writing, or a great coder coding, we would see that honing a strength is hard workâit is by no means easy to find that incremental margin of performance when you are already operating at a high levelâand that a strength is not where we are most âfinishedâ but in fact where we are most productively challenged. Yet we are told to resist the temptation to âjustâ play to our strengths, and instead to work constantly on our weaknesses. In common parlance, we are told to avoid ârunning around our backhand.â This betrays, perhaps, a misunderstanding of what a strength actually is. It is not, for each of us, where performance is easiestâit is where performance is most impactful and increasing.
What I liked about this conversation was talking about mindfulness as doing nothing. So many people get into trouble with it because of their desire to always be in control. The line between helpful discipline and rigidifying control is not always so clear, and when there is a tendency toward perfectionistic striving, meditation can be recruited into serving that master. I didnât want Fred to fall into that trap. His superego did not need a boost from meditation.
When we match ourselves with behaviors that we already want to do, not what we think we should do, there is no need to fuss with motivational tricks or techniques later. We take the Motivation Monkey out of commission.
Notice that Krieger and Systrom nailed the motivation component by choosing a behavior that people already wanted to do. According to the Behavior Model, they were already in good shape. That alone might have brought them some success. But what they did next catapulted them into the pantheon of Silicon Valley demigodsâthey made their Golden Behaviors easy to do.
Sukumar was questioning his negative notions of self that had once seemed so solid - identities that had caused him pain and frustration. If he could change those parts of himself, the ones that had seemed set in stone, he reasoned that he could change anything he wanted.