Tie Your Comfort to Real, Tangible Value
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The whole point of skills, technology, superpowers, whatever, is to accomplish greater things. Not to stick to the status quo with less work.
Lots of people begin their upskilling journey with this mentality but lose it along the way. They get lazy and use their skills to minimize the amount of work needed for a baseline comfortable life. You follow that path for a while, you end up stuck in a micro-optimization arena where more work has diminishing returns anyway. Itβs hard to escape from that quicksand.
The way to avoid the trap is to develop strong emotional ties to a lofty problem where incrementally solving it incrementally transforms the lives of some people you care about while incrementally making your life more comfortable. You need to tie your comfort to real tangible value that you can begin tasting relatively early.
The hardest part is the beginning, when there are other options that provide a more comfortable short term at the expense of 1) an asymptotic long term, or 2) de-coupling your comfort from real tangible value that you provide to the world. The emotional connection helps you stick with it until your current situation is even more comfortable than any alternative, which is the thing that really locks you in for the rest of the long term.
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