Despite my realization yesterday that the same messages and patterns keep repeating, it still fascinates me when I see them pop up. This morning, I was reading Effortless, and McKeown writes, “Our brain is wired to resist what it perceives as hard and welcome what it perceives as easy.” This is exactly the message Kahneman had in Thinking Fast and Slow about the two systems of thinking in our brains. System One is impulsive and intuitive (i.e., takes the easy route), and System Two takes time to reason and is cautious. Even though this was the connection I made, it wasn’t how McKeown labeled it. Both posit that because of evolution, our brains attempt to find the easiest way, even if it leads us down the wrong path.
Moving Away from Perfectionism
Another thread that keeps popping up, which I have been listening to more closely in recent months, is the positive effect of moving away from perfectionism. So much of what I have done in my life has been performed through the lens of perfectionism and overachieving. Over the past year, I have read/heard message after message about how “perfect is the enemy of good” attributed to Voltaire. Just about every author, speaker, and expert I follow has said some version of this—yet, I hadn’t been in the right mindset to hear it. I think I’m finally on my way to letting go of perfectionism. As I sit here and write this, I have the Grammarly app turned on, and there are all kinds of things highlighted in this post that it wants me to fix. The way I used to approach things would be to go back and fix every single little thing Grammarly identifies as an issue. Now, I’m letting it be what it is and reveling in its imperfections.
*Note about Grammarly - for anyone who cares to know, I started using the app because I have chronic migraine, which is a complex neurological disease that affects many aspects of my body. One of the more problematic symptoms I have is something called transient expressive aphasia—which basically boils down to: I know the words I want to say/write, but I can’t retrieve them and sometimes substitute the wrong word. So, I started using Grammarly to help catch those things when writing anything for our business because most people don’t know about this issue. If you are interested in using it and want a free month to try it out, email me, and I can send you a referral code (full disclosure: it also gives me a free month for the referral).
Ponder This
- What techniques have you found effective in moving away from perfectionism?
- Have you noticed patterns or messages that repeat in your life, helping you to make positive changes?
- How do you deal with cognitive ease and the tendency to take the easy route in your decisions?
Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments below!
Books
- Blink
- Effortless
- Misbelief
- Thinking Fast and Slow
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