<em data-redactor-tag="em">“Take a simple idea and take it seriously.”<br/>—Charlie Munger</em> Doing a few sets of pushups each day is a simple ide… - James Clear

Reminder: If someone is acting like an idiot, you can just move on and let them be wrong. You do not have a personal obligation to correct people who are committed to being stupid. Sure, sometimes you need to attempt to get on the same page, but usually you can simply reclaim your time and move on to more productive ventures.

The Goldilocks Rule states that humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities. Not too hard. Not too easy. Just right.

Similarly, habits often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold and unlock a new level of performance. In the early and middle stages of any quest, there is often a Valley of Disappointment. You expect to make progress in a linear fashion and it’s frustrating how ineffective changes can seem during the first days, weeks, and even months. It doesn’t feel like you are going anywhere. It’s a hallmark of any compounding process: the most powerful outcomes are delayed. This is one of the core reasons why it is so hard to build habits that last. People make a few small changes, fail to see a tangible result, and decide to stop. You think, “I’ve been running every day for a month, so why can’t I see any change in my body?” Once this kind of thinking takes over, it’s easy to let good habits fall by the wayside. But in order to make a meaningful difference, habits need to persist long enough to break through this plateau — what I call the Plateau of Latent Potential.