When life’s rich torrent is foaming and bubbling around you, you can bail as hard as you like but you’re only ever going to get some of the water out of the bottom of the boat.
It’s simply not possible to stay on top of everything in life. So the key is to make sure that you focus on the areas that really matter and deliberately neglect the less important ones.
It’s easy to make the mistake of judging yourself by how many bad things you’re able to stave off. But this indiscriminate approach makes absolutely no sense.
The worst bad thing is 1000 times as bad as your “average” bad thing. While the most amazing “good thing” is worth many 1000s of minor bad things that you could have stopped.
One of the most powerful things you can do is to look clearly at your life and ask “What would make this 100 times better?”. You’ll probably find there are some seriously worthwhile changes to aim for — and that you can steer your way towards them with concerted effort.
So to live an enjoyable and satisfying life you need to make some tradeoffs. Deliberately let lots of small bad things slip through the net so that you’re on top form when the one really devastating thing comes your way.
Or let all those minor bad things go by so that you can plunge your net into the water and land that huge fish that totally transforms your happiness in life.
But this is hard for us humans. We’re biologically hardwired to notice threats of all sorts and sizes. And we’re programmed to feel uncomfortable if we don’t respond to them.
So… how to deal with this?
You lean into it. Make it a game and rewrite the rules to define that potential threat as the new grand prize. Actively set out to chase the bad things that don’t really matter and celebrate each time you make precisely zero effort to stop them.
That’s going to light up your internal reward system. Get you looking out for ways to make the bad things happen.
So here’s how you do it.
Look through your life for all the areas that you typically respond to in a hyperactive way but that don’t really matter.
One example for me is feeling I’ve got to read, digest, and reply to every single email I get.
Then assign a target for the number of them you WANT to happen. So maybe I’m now overriding my instincts and giving myself new orders: I want to fail to reply to 10 emails a day.
This turns my minor worry on its head. Now I’m declaring victory from deliberately failing to do tasks I could easily accomplish. I’m celebrating each individual one — and especially when I hit my quota of 10.
What do you get out of all this?
Before you adopt this attitude you’re constantly having to weigh up tradeoffs. “Am I ok letting something small go because I think I’m going to get a bigger payoff as a direct result?”
But there’s almost never a way to know for sure what positives you’ll get. And it’s easy to rationalise why ‘this one is different’.
So your brain is left whirring away around the answer of “maybe. Maybe not”. And each potential decision becomes an agony of trying to weigh up huge amounts of calculation and subtle judgement.
Whereas under the new approach you’ve already made the tradeoff once and for all. You’re no longer trying to match each small act against direct consequences. You’re seeing the clear benefit from removing a whole swathe of small, unnecessary tasks.
Now you’re free to stop thinking and analysing. You can simply relax and act.
So you’ve gained time, space, and energy as a result of making one big decision that removes 1000 little decisions.
You’re also demonstrating to yourself that nothing terrible happens when you do let the small bad things go. And that direct experience that the consequences aren’t as bad as I expect forces me to acknowledge what’s really important and what doesn’t matter.
Catastrophic failure is when you successfully protect yourself from loads of tiny and unimportant bad things happening. It seems positive, but it’s crowding out the chance for you to embrace the amazing, life-changing, big opportunities. You’re so focused on the small things that you lose sight of what’s really important.
So fight that danger head on. Encourage and enable as many small bad things to happen as you possibly can. Then try and beat that record.