The Lenses series collects thoughts that shift how you see things.
Enjoy today’s lenses.
Enthusiasm
Opportunities shrink or expand in proportion to your enthusiasm.
— James Clear
The function James Clear describes is clearly working for me. For everything I’m enthusiastic about, it feels so much easier to remove obstacles. A lack of enthusiasm slowly kills the momentum I have.
One of the most important life skills is being able to find some good in dire situations. I’m guilty (or rather lucky) of shaping my own narrative more positively. It’s just easier to live as an optimist. With so little time we have on this wonderful Earth, it’s nice to cherish every moment.
The most important story is the one we are telling ourselves. If you add a bit more enthusiasm to it, it certainly won’t make the situation worse. I believe that being enthusiastic is contagious, and it increases your personal surface area of luck.
Do you drive your enthusiasm?
Bonus: You may enjoy To Scale: TIME. It’s a brilliant visualisation of time in our universe.
Pursuits
The first step of any meaningful pursuit is to severely underestimate its difficulty.
— Sara Hooker
I started dozens of software projects from scratch. In zero cases was I aware of even 30% of the final complexity of the problems and all the edge cases. Not knowing it at the beginning was often a good thing. Otherwise, discouragement might have been huge.
This quote resonates with the hiding hand principle, coined by economist Albert Hirschman. It’s about underestimating the obstacles ahead of us, but also underestimating our ability to improvise solutions to overcome problems. These two may cancel out, which means that starting, no matter what, is a good decision, especially with enthusiasm added.
We may be in a place where AI is great at teaching us the basics, which allows us to try, learn and explore new things more easily. But there is a dangerous flipside to it, as AI can list an infinite number of obstacles if we ask for it, and we won’t start anything.
Are you willing to ignore all the obstacles you think of and start a new project?
Giant Tree
Praise and blame, gain and loss, pleasure and sorrow come and go like the wind. To be happy, rest like a giant tree in the midst of them.
— Gautama Buddha
One of the most demanding sessions during silent retreats was sittings of strong determination. You sit and don’t move for 60 minutes. The relationship with pain changes during these sessions. It hurts a lot, but you only observe. I was amazed at how transient the pain and discomfort perceptions can be. Nothing is permanent, and everything changes.
In the previous Lenses, I wrote about “Not-doing” state. Unfortunately, to our despair, it’s perceived negatively by some societal norms. Being still in a world that requires us to run is a luxury.
Not reacting in the moment but pausing is a decision-making superpower.
Can you pause now for a minute?
Thanks for reading,
— Michał
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