What Habits Does Your Best Self Not Have?
“Perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Success and self-improvement are two different games. They correlate, but only to a certain degree.
When I sleep eight hours, get up early, then follow a morning routine, that’s good for my well-being. It supports my physical health and aligns my day with our natural circadian rhythm. It’s also productive. I can start work earlier and capitalize on my high alertness in the mornings.
But when I then decide to stay up late to finish some of that work, that’s just productive. Not healthy. The former was a move in self-improvement with spillover benefits. The latter was a success play at my well-being’s expense.
The number of win-win moves is limited, so after you’ve made them all, finding the line between the two is important. You can then spend your time becoming ever healthier, fitter, smarter — or you spend it working.
What most of us do, however, is split ourselves straight down the middle. We think we’re optimizing, when, actually, we’re playing different games at different times. One day we leave work early to support a…
