Sunday snacks: On perfection, beautiful people and decisions

Hey Friends 👋

In the last few days, I was trapped caught in the monkey desire of perfection. I ​redesigned my website​. The design which I made just a week ago, started seeming ugly. So without sparing a second, I dumped it, and started from scratch again. Although the new design aligns well to my style, but it cost 2 days of mental work. For what? The pervious design was absolutely fine, and had zero problems.

Perfection is an enemy to productivity. And perfection is a myth. Yeah, sometimes it is good to want our work to be perfect. But we must realise that, the picture of “this is perfect” always keeps changing in our minds. And it is not humanly possible to keep up with that. It is always above our capabilities. So stop chasing perfection. Make things good, but don’t make them perfect. Because perfection doesn't exist.

I read this quote last morning and this entirely describes my words about a friend of mine. Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler Ross on how beautiful people are made:

“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.”

And this is so true. The people who have an appreciation for life, a sensitivity towards other human beings are the ones who have suffered the most. And we often fail to realise that.

We always struggle making decisions. Decision making always terrifies. When we have two 2 roads in front of us, should we choose the hard one or the easy one. Here's the rule of thumb I use to simplify decision. I heard it first from Naval and since then It changed a lot for good.

• If you have 2 choices to make and it’s 50/50, take the path that’s more painful in the short term.
• If a task is worth less than your time/ambitious hourly rate - outsource it, automate it or delete it.

This is a Piece I read last week by ​Mark Manson​. It talks about when to say yes, and when to say no in life. It says that,

When you are early in your career, you need to jump into every opportunity you can get. So you need to say yes to everything. Even the things that make you feel uncomfortable, because there’s where the true learning happens. You never know what doors it will open to you, so say yes to almost everything.

But when you start building your skills and reputation, you begin to find yourself in situations where you have more opportunities than you need. This is when you begin to strategically start saying “no.” By saying “no,” you’re able to focus on the opportunities that present the biggest upside and you get even further, faster.

We often things more will make us happy, but In an abundant world, happiness is much more about simplifying, rather than upgrading, our lives.

Here’s an amazing visual from ​Aletheia Delivre on twitter​. She represents the journey of a creator/entrepreneur.

The only asset that goes up and to the right forever is your experience. Such a clear illustration by ​@VisualizeValue.​

Don’t half-ass everything. Commit. Illustration by ​Janis Ozolins​ ⚡️

That's it, hope you liked reading this! Until next week,

Yash xx