When enough adenosine builds up in our brain and spinal cord, we start to wear out. Caffeine gets in the way of that process because adenosine receptors think caffeine molecules are super cute — they bond and hold on more efficiently than adenosine.

Never mind your opinion about caffeine itself — the point is, all caffeine is doing, if it were sentient, is finding a way to interfere with a process that makes us less efficient. It’s not actually “fixing” anything or adding anything awesome to the mix, it’s just running a little interference. That’s not a terrible metaphor for influence in our world, if you think about it.

I parked behind a guy standing next to his open door with his phone. A woman across the street was aiming her camera through her car window. I walked 20 feet to the edge of the snow, crouched down, stuck my phone out there, and spent the rest of the drive wondering about the sweet spot between the amount of time we invest and the results that time brings us.

All three of us invested about the same amount of time, but we left with very different results. The woman shooting through her window is probably telling her friends about the sunset and complaining about the camera in her phone. The guy standing next to his car is glad he stopped — he’s got a ranch fence and utility pole in his shot, but he captured a beautiful moment. I added 30 seconds and 20 steps to the task, and I’m sure it doubled the payback.

It’s not perfect — I could have pushed ahead, trudged through 8 inches of wet snow to improve the foreground in my shot, but that would have doubled the effort and only marginally improved the result. Last night, I found the sweet spot.

It’s not usually so obvious. We’re not supposed to settle for “good enough,” and we spend huge amounts of effort pushing toward results that won’t really help us make a meaningful contribution.

Should you be a B student with time for friends and family, or an A student who earns accolades on campus?

Should you stay up all night working on details your audience, peers, or students will never notice? (“But I’d know, and that’s what really matters.” Is it really?)

It doesn’t have to be one or the other. Sometimes, we’re 20 feet and 30 seconds away from a breakthrough–we put in 70% when 75% would have doubled the impact. Sometimes, we’re up to our necks in details that will barely register a change–we double our effort chasing after the last ten percent.

The sweet spot is there, but it’s hard to recognize.

(Want to see what last night looked like through some really skilled eyes? My friend Brent put himself in just the right place and nailed it.)

The reality is, there is always more than one right answer.  If I tell myself I already know the answer, how open am I to new answers? You may have been given a right answer by your parents, your social group, your congregation, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best answer for you. The right answer for you today might not be the right answer for you tomorrow.

Knowing that we know feeds our ego. It tricks us into spending our time justifying our actions and beliefs instead of spending our time moving through life on purpose. We feel threatened and annoyed by answers that aren’t our right answers. We cling to our beliefs. Clinging feels safe, but when we are sincerely seeking truth, we let go every time.

A little leg work is a very good thing. A lot of leg work (especially when your toilet is the only thing that’s ever seen you squatting) is going to hurt. More than a lot.

This is his first time at the gym.

Sometimes, moderation makes sense. It’s intuitive. When we mess it up, we hobble around for a week, but we understand why.

Most of the time, moderation is hard. Society praises the standout successes (did Michael Jordan bring a moderate approach to basketball?) and we misinterpret. Obsessive dedication worked for him, and it should work for me. If I don’t take it to the extreme, I’m doing it wrong. In a “go hard or go home” world, most of us go home feeling like failures.

But we don’t have to.  Fall in love with the idea of moderation instead. You don’t have to do P90x to feel like you worked out. You don’t have to run a marathon (or even a 5k) to feel like putting on running shoes. You don’t have to give up sugar or gluten or meat to eat better. You don’t have to donate ten per cent of your income to be generous.

When we buy the marketing messages and cultural pressure that go along with self improvement, we start to believe we’re only worthy if we’re extreme. So don’t buy it.

How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams
(kindle or real book)

One of his central ideas is that our personal energy is the most important thing to pursue, and that goals often sap that energy. If we hang our success on some future event (“run a marathon in less than 4 hours”) we spend 99% of our time in a state of pre-success failure, even if we ultimately reach the goal. He suggests instead focusing on systems.

“For our purposes, let’s say a goal is a specific objective that you either achieve or don’t sometime in the future. A system is something you do on a regular basis that increases your odds of happiness in the long run. If you do something every day, it’s a system. If you’re waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it’s a goal.”

“Systems have no deadlines, and on any given day you probably can’t tell if they’re moving you in the right direction.”

“To put it bluntly, goals are for losers. That’s literally true most of the time. For example, if your goal is to lose ten pounds, you will spend every moment until you reach the goal— if you reach it at all— feeling as if you were short of your goal. In other words, goal-oriented people exist in a state of nearly continuous failure that they hope will be temporary. That feeling wears on you.”

“Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good every time they apply their system. That’s a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction.”

Not every chapter is a winner, but he has a cartoonist’s gift for simplifying and entertaining, and I’m glad I read it when I did. I thought I’d pass it along.

How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams

• Once you’ve established “who you are” in the world, the world expects you to act like that person. This applies to hair style, the color and cut of your shirt, the way you interact with others, even the way you think, feel, and write. It might feel like the world is determined to keep you in a pigeon hole, but we’re not. We’re just used to the person you’ve been letting us see. Call it social inertia.
• Wherever you were when you decided vulnerability matters enough to work on it, you aren’t there anymore. The people you were with, if they were inspired like you, are probably already deciding they’re “nice ideas, but not realistic.” Leaning into vulnerability isn’t easy. Nobody else can get you there.
• You’re going to drop the ball. Learning to be okay with projects, conversations, and relationships that might not work is much of the work of vulnerability. But that doesn’t keep us from flinching when the ball drops. When we let people see us, they’re going to see our mistakes.
• We are going to knock the ball out of your hands.  Your spouse, your kids, your team at work–we’re all going to push your buttons just like we did before. When you let yourself be seen, we might not notice. We might notice and hate it. We might notice and make you feel like an impostor. Being vulnerable doesn’t mean you don’t feel our response to you, it means you’ve decided feeling it is more important than hiding from it.

For context, watch this TED talk from Brene Brown.

http://youtu.be/iCvmsMzlF7o

It didn’t take long for this erstwhile deity to recognize what he had. He saw the ambition and drive for problem solving that would eventually inspire people like Thomas Edison try thousands of times to create tools to make our lives more comfortable.

So he showed humans to his friends. He gained notoriety. His creation was all the buzz, and he became uncomfortable with the praise. It’s said our confidence goes down, not up, when we receive praise for results we know we couldn’t duplicate, and our creator became obsessed by the idea of re-creating the recipe. His attempts were marginally successful. Sometimes he came close (he called those “chimpanzees”) and sometimes he was way off (the wasp was a major disappointment) but after populating a world with tens of thousands of species, he conceded his defeat and disappeared from the limelight in his own world.

Our God became a hermit. Every now and again, his peers ask whatever happened to so-and-so and his amazing creations? You never see him in the news these days.

In despair, he realized that his own creation, humans, were actually more powerful, more capable of creation and progress, than he was. He watched us recognize problems, build, solve, create. “My creations create anything they believe in strongly enough,” he thought. “No obstacle has stood for long against them.”

So he abandoned his attempts to make another species of humans, and instilled in us instead a desperate need for religion. For God. For an omnipotent creator. He is waiting even now for our unbreakable will to instill in him the divine attributes he  so desperately craves.

I guess that’s fine. But I know this couple, and I bet you can think of a few people like them, who seem to have looked into the mirror in 1982 and said, “Yes. This is me. I’ve sorted out my identity. I’m comfortable with this poofy hair, these hand-sewn sunflower dresses, and this exact pair of glasses. This is me.” It’s not that they don’t see the world changing around them, they’re just really comfortable with the person they were in 1982.

I don’t really like that couple. I’m not like them.

Wait, yes I am. I’ve had the same trimmed facial hair for sixteen years.

So I’m going to grow a beard. (I’d go the other direction, but the face in my mirror belongs to a lazy man, and he really hates shaving.) Maybe I’ll start wearing red or orange or pink, too, or buy skinny jeans and ironic glasses and witty post-80s t-shirts.  Or grow out what’s left of my hair. Or wear Fedoras. ²

Not that it matters what color my shirt is, or how I look in a Fedora (bad, just like you), or where the hair starts and stops on my cheeks. (Not those cheeks.) I just think I’m too comfortable with the identity I’ve attached to that form in the mirror, and I don’t want to make the mistake of believing that who I am depends on what I look like.

So I’m growing a beard. Maybe you should, too.

There were three reasons I began the experiment:

1. I want to improve as a writer, which won’t happen unless I write.
2. I want to challenge myself to learn something worth writing every day.
3. I want to develop the ability to publish myself without regard for how it is accepted.

Let’s start with the easiest to evaluate. I’ve published some really useless posts, which is something I would not typically have allowed from myself. Clearly, I am willing to publish something without caring too much what others think about it, though I’m not entirely sure it’s something to brag about here.

Goal number two is kind of a gimme, since I believe every person on the planet, even the slug playing Skyrim for 14 hours a day, learns something new every day. Whether that knowledge is worth clarifying in writing has more to do with the slug in question than the little bits of knowledge the slug accumulates, so it almost becomes an extension of the primary goal: to improve as a writer. So, did it work?

No. Well, maybe. But mostly, no. Some of the things I wrote here were worth reading. Most of them, especially lately, were rushed, pointless, and completed out of obligation. If I base my judgment of this goal on the quality of my writing here, I earn an eff minus. Maybe an eff plus. But it did affect my ability to write at work more quickly and effectively–I take less time to write things when I really care to write–so maybe writing crap frequently has its benefits.

In any case, goals and all that notwithstanding, I’m glad I decided to write every day, and glad I decided one year is long enough. I’m trying on some new ideas–a weekly post that’s actually worth reading, or some self-imposed assignments, maybe–but the daily adventure, if you’ll excuse the misnomer, has reached its end.

Thank goodness.