


Guide to Living a Highly Ineffective Life, Part I

success_failureAttempting to measure one's own accomplishments is generally a monstrously bad idea.  Even the most successful of men may find themselves coming up short when they compare themselves to a yardstick of their own making.  Those who succeed generally do so by finding themselves perpetually shy of achieving some newly important and consuming goal.  That having been said, taking stock of yourself is a sobering necessity, something which me must do if we are to re-align our compass with an objective, societal true North.  It is in this brutally reflective frame of mind that I make the following observations about myself, most easily expressed as a Guide to Leading a Highly Ineffective Life.  The objective reality is that I have achieved quite a lot, more than many, less than many, and a reasonable amount given my particular make up and life challenges.  Nonetheless, I have observed in myself the  following limiting, (at times) crippling characteristics that have kept me from being far more than I am.

20 Things You Can Do To Be Highly Ineffective

  1. Work on many projects simultaneously.
  2. Associate with no professional colleagues.
  3. Cultivate few friends.
  4. Spend almost all of your time by yourself or with a girlfriend only.
  5. Work in secret.  Share almost none of your ideas or work.
  6. Do everything from scratch.  Build your own rather than modifying existing software/code.
  7. Believe your mind and/or abilities are failing you over time.
  8. Be deathly afraid of judgment.  Ensure you never finish any task properly.
  9. Ignore important details.
  10. Explore periods of intense lassitude.
  11. Be mildly obsessively interested in many, many generally unrelated things.
  12. [Removed by request.]
  13. Secretly believe that those who succeed are magically different from you, possess something you entirely lack (as exemplified by the tone of this list).
  14. Put off until tomorrow that really hard thing that intimidates you, never try to do it today, never right now.
  15. If you find yourself not particularly challenged in a situation (job, life, etc.), then maintain the status quo, choose comfortable over challenge.
  16. Develop as little self-discipline as possible.  Go to bed when you want, eat what you want, exercise as little as you feel like.
  17. Constantly wrestle with existential and philosophical doubts rather than engage in the business of actually living.  Wonder about what the point of living is if you die rather than actually focus on getting the most from every minute of life.
  18. Avoid seeking professional, psychological help for things like depression and anxiety, assume that you alone can surely defeat obstacles which have bedeviled humans for millennia.
  19. Have tremendous difficulty switching tasks/projects, avoid doing so because it's mentally painful.
  20. Watch TV.

^ Q

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  1. Seems tough, but I bet you could resolve everything in 3 easy steps if you really wanted to.

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