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April 2 - April 20, 2025
The repeated trials of your pact provide you with more reliable information to make decisions. Furthermore, each iteration is likely to be more successful, fueling growth in its own right regardless of whether you opt to extend your pact beyond its initial period.
Put simply, it pays off to iterate.
In the words of John Maxwell: “The
more you do, the more you fail. The more you fail, the more you learn. The more you learn, the better you get.”
A pact is not a habit. A habit has an unbounded time commitment (e.g., exercise every day) driven by the desire to achieve a specific result (e.g., a positive health outcome). Failure is not the end of the world, but it’s a holdback and we try to get back on track.
A pact is not a New Year’s resolution. If you’ve been struggling to maintain your New Year’s resolutions, it’s not just you. There is overwhelming evidence that New Year’s resolutions don’t work.
A pact is not a performance metric.
A pact is not a resource-intensive project. As we will see in chapter 5, there are indeed resources you need to manage to complete your experiments, but these are not time and money.
You also don’t need to quit your job to conduct your experiment full time.
Beyond choosing a pact in genuine accord with your curiosity, you don’t need to have anything else figured out. Each cycle of experimentation will be a chance to discover more about yourself and the world, to expand your skills and your knowledge, and to iterate on your approach based on what you learn.
I will [action] for [duration].
Neurodiversity may also be a factor in the obsession with productivity. Some neurodivergent people tend to focus their attention on a narrow range of interests at any time, a behavior known as monotropism in autism and hyperfocus in ADHD. When the topic is productivity, a legitimate interest in how to stay focused and motivated can spiral into a fixation: buying courses, installing applications, and downloading templates—which often paradoxically prove to be distractions from actual work.
Let’s be honest: Nobody really wants to live a productive life. We want to express ourselves, connect with others, and explore the world. Productivity is just a means to those ends; it should certainly not come at the expense of actually living life.
Deep down, we know this—that time is elastic, that some moments last for what seems like an eternity while others come and go in the blink of an eye.
The Greeks valued this qualitative view deeply, so much so that they had a second word for time: Kairos. Kairos expresses the quality, not the quantity, of time. It recognizes that each moment is unique, with a unique purpose, rather than a fixed unit to be mechanically allocated. Sometimes the Greeks used the word Kairos even more specifically, as an opportune time for action, an opening, the perfect moment.
However, the wise forager knows that not all moments yield the same bounty.
Whether due to sleep habits, hormonal fluctuations, or seasonal changes, everyone has unique cycles of productivity highs and lows throughout the day, the week, and the year. Researchers found that there may be longer biological rhythms at play, which they call circannual cycles, suggesting that seasons have a complex effect on how the brain works.
That first arrow you could survive; it’s the second arrow that’s the real killer. That arrow is not the procrastination itself; it’s your emotional reaction to it. Studies have found that adverse psychological reactions such as anxiety and shame often accompany procrastination. No surprise, given that we have been taught to equate procrastination with being worthless. “There is nothing like the downward spiral of procrastination to make you feel like an abject failure,”
Rather than being an indication of laziness or lack of discipline, procrastination points to nuanced psychological roadblocks that need addressing.
procrastination wasn’t a sign of personal inefficiency but rather a vital act of self-preservation.
Sometimes procrastination can help reveal our innate curiosities. In addition to diagnosing why you are procrastinating—head, heart, or hand—you can take a moment to consider what you often find yourself doing when putting things off.
“The answer is this: I don’t. Whenever you see me somewhere succeeding in one area of my life, that almost certainly means that I am failing in another area of my life.”
“If I am excelling at one thing, something else is falling off. And that is completely okay,”
Rhimes has achieved remarkable success not by striving for unattainable perfection but by embracing the perpetual juggle of life, where we must stay in movement—never quite achieving balance but constantly directing our attention to what is most important in the here and now.
Much like some investors who risk it all for short-term success, we often risk our mental health in the relentless pursuit of perfection.
It may seem surprisingly simple, but the essence of intentional imperfection is accepting your limitations: you cannot expect to simultaneously excel at every target you set for yourself. To put this in the language of Sesame Street, it’s the equivalent of the line, “You’ve got to put down the ducky if you want to play the saxophone.”
Many other people have found success in embracing intentional imperfection.
Collaborate with Uncertainty
Creating Growth Loops
Kipchoge intuitively understands that making progress requires two essential components: trial and error. The trial part of the loop involves taking action with limited information; it requires a willingness to step into the unknown and explore possibilities. The error part involves observing the results and making adjustments based on that data. If you don’t do both, you don’t grow.
As Nassim Taleb has put it, in complex systems—“ones in which we have little visibility of the chains of cause-consequences”—trial and error beats a linear approach designed for a specific target. This iterative model is inspired by nature itself. Nature adapts in response to environmental feedback and evolves through cycles of experimentation.
“You could burn out if you consistently do the exact same thing,” she told me. “Every year, I sit down and I review the feedback, both qualitative and quantitative. I reflect and I notice: that’s interesting, this is what people like, this is what they said last year, this is how I feel about it…It’s important to bake in moments of reflection.”
When we use trial and error, we set in motion a series of growth loops where progress emerges in conversation with our environment. Each cycle adds a layer of learning to how we understand ourselves and the world around us. Instead of an external destination, our aspirations become fuel for transformation. We don’t go in circles; we grow in circles.
When you start looking, you will notice many of our greatest achievements can be traced back to such iterative cycles of trial and error. The scientific method relies on formulating hypotheses, testing them, and incorporating the results into the design of future experiments. Sports teams commit to a strategy, apply it during a game, and keep on adapting their approach through each cycle of training and competition.
Metacognition is for good reason often referred to as the forgotten secret to success. It is the skill that allows a student to recognize they’re unprepared for an exam and take corrective action, or an athlete like Eliud Kipchoge to understand the importance of not just how fast he’s running but also how his shoes feel during a run. Metacognition is also helpful for gaining clarity in everyday work situations. As marketer Leo Sadeq told me, “We deal with ten thousand things at a time in the office. Metacognition gives me clarity of thought and creative space to think. It’s a way to assess
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The secret to designing growth loops is not better knowledge or skills, but your ability to think about your own thinking, question your automatic responses, and know your mind. That’s the metacognitive edge: it equips you with the skills to be both the actor and the director in the unfolding story of your life.
The tool is called Plus Minus Next, and it does what it says on the tin with just three columns; positive observations go in the first column (Plus), negative observations in the second column (Minus), and plans for what’s next in the last column (Next).[*]
“Being able to make small adjustments every week is something that you can’t stop doing once you see the compound effect,”
Write the date at the top of a page and draw three columns. At the top of each column, write a plus sign for what worked, a minus sign for what didn’t go so well, and an arrow for what you plan to do next. Then fill it with experiences from the past week.
Any experience constitutes valid information to include in your Plus Minus Next review. The idea is to capture a snapshot of your mind. That includes celebrations, questions,
Plus. Write down any accomplishment that made you proud. These could be largely work-based, but don’t neglect other areas of your life such as relationships, hobbies, and homelife. Your achievements can be big or small, such as completing a project at work or learning a new skill, or small daily victories such as maintaining a consistent exercise routine. Reflect on moments that brought joy, such as special occasions, positive feedback
Minus. Identify any challenges or obstacles you faced, whether it was a difficult task at work, an unexpected setback, or an opportunity you missed.
Next. Use the insights from both the Plus and Minus columns to shape your actions for the upcoming period. Consider strategies to foster more of the positive observations listed in the Plus column.
The ancient Greeks talked of praxis, or “thinking in action.” Present-day researchers call it reflection in action. You may call it thinking on your feet.
What people may not know is how messy and iterative Leonardo’s creative process was. Scholars have described how he would start sketching ideas without a full understanding of how they worked, using the mistakes he discovered to propel his thinking forward. His drawings were in fact so often covered in smears and stains that his inky fingerprints have been used to identify some of his work centuries after his death. Still, he kept them all.
To err is human. We fall prey to miscalculations and mishaps.
Any attempt to avoid mistakes altogether would be fruitless, but we can choose how we respond when they occur. Daniel Dennett—one of my favorite philosophers—wrote that we should strive to make good mistakes. Good mistakes prompt us to reflect and refine our approach, which increases our momentum. They are the ones we learn from and that make us grow.
Now you get to decide what your next growth loop will look like. If everything has been going well, you may be dreaming about all the ways you will build on your accomplishment. If your pact was to write a five-hundred-word journal entry every day, you’re already envisioning a book project.
In medieval guilds, where mastering a skill and producing high-quality goods were highly valued, the focus was on maintaining a standard of excellence rather than constant growth. And of course, from Taoism to Buddhism, many Asian philosophies emphasize the importance of balance rather than the endless pursuit of more.
When you’re not playing a game of leveling up and chasing linear goals, persistence—showing up consistently over a long period of time, long enough that you can start seeing the compound
