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In optimizing health and efficiency, “marginal gains” assert that a 1% daily benefit triples your effectiveness by the end of the year.
The opposite is equally true, where “marginal error” slowly migrates off course.
Consider a building, and as each story is built, it is only 1% off in each measurement, but without correction over time, the building will topple sideways. This is also the tipping point, not of success but destruction.
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Having a spine, taking action, and not being pushed around are lauded as stable until someone stumbles into the wall of your will and breaks their agenda. Then you are stubborn.
Some stubbornness is contrarian: “I will do it my own way.”
Some stubbornness is rebellious: “I do not submit to your authority.”
They can be active or passive-aggressive, but both stem from a default antagonistic reaction.
An excellent way to be stubborn is in your stabilizing process:
When you do act, it is solid, not a whim or momentary manipulation.
The conundrum with this process is that once you have reached a decision, you have (typically) done more work than the person wanting you to budge or expend yourself. This leaves you frustrated, prone to sunk-cost fallacy, and often in possession of a richer grasp of the situation than your interlocutor, which leaves you better equipped to act on their behalf. Still, you do that too often, and you are unstable.
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“How could you?” is answered with “That’s no excuse!”
People forget that an explanation is not an excuse; it is not a justification. Explaining the mechanics is not appealing to morality.
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Being bad is a value judgment; being wrong is making an error. (A recipe can be “bad” without being wrong, i.e. you can follow the recipe without a mistake and still make a lousy soup.)
To be wrong is to be incorrect (such as selecting the wrong answer), while a bad decision is intentionally harmful (to decide not to study for the test).
This distinction (and most language distinctions) matters because those who re-label a “bad” (moral) choice as a “mistake” (incorrect/wrong) will allow them to dodge responsibility.
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The self arises, and we act. Occasionally, we can examine the emotive urge before enacting the impulse, but when we explore where the urge came from, the self recedes and dissipates, leaving us confounded.
The urge to define (capture) “the self” is scientific. The compulsion to examine is the same urge that euthanizes butterflies and pins them to a board for cataloging.
But of course, this captured “self” cannot contain the whole self, the leftover self is still studying and reacting to context, flitting away from the collection of facts pinned down.
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Sympathy is to merge and completely identify with another.
Empathy is to "go with" someone without losing yourself.
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Goalsetting is several small steps (micro goals) that are focal points on the longer path.
As you near the completion of your goal, called the “goal gradient,” you push harder.
Interestingly, a “sunk cost fallacy” drives us forward: the closer we get to success, the harder we try to achieve it, doubling and tripling our effort.
The exponential effort can work unless your goal is constantly vanishing in front of you.
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To distinguish between "want" and "wish" is typically easy, but parsing between "desire" and "pleasure," or "obligation" and "commitment," reveals a profound distinction: your motivation and expectation.
For instance: An obligation is something you must do whether you want to or not. A commitment is a promise you keep out of a sense of honor. You are "obligated" to go to work tomorrow. You "commit" when you say your wedding vows.
For instance: "Desire" is a compulsion to seek. "Pleasure" is finding enjoyment in the present.
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Can we invoke reality with effort? If you perform the correct steps at the precise moment and the formula will yield results.
We all live this bizarre way: we have encoded responses that attract and manifest reality.
These behavior patterns, or dance steps, are lifelong coping mechanisms that play out subconsciously.
The question isn’t "do you believe you manifest your reality" but "can you change your dance to create something different?"
