Some part of me is convinced that the main bottleneck for achieving my goals is being smart, coming up with the best plan, and getting all of the necessary information. And this is true! It doesn’t matter how good you are at doing things if what you’re doing is crap. But it also doesn’t matter how good my plan is if I never act upon it.

And it’s really easy to miss this point. It’s easy to always think “I can do this tomorrow” “This is not a priority” or “This would never work”. And it’s hard because sometimes those thoughts are correct. But I find that, unless I put in active effort, I’m the kind of person who’ll always have those thoughts. I’ll never actually act upon my goals, or change things about my life.

There isn’t a connection in my mind from “This is a problem” to “What am I going to do about it?”. It’s not that I think through the problem, and conclude that I can’t do anything, it’s that it never feels like there’s a question to be asked in the first place! And I think this is a problem that extends far beyond me - I notice some amount of this in most of my friends, and I think it’s incredibly widespread. There seems to be a mental block between “things are not as I want them to be” and “I can do something about this”.

I think this is a solvable problem. Being the kind of person who does things, an agent, is a skill, and I think it is a trainable skill. And this is hard, and won’t work perfectly, but there’s a lot of room for progress. And this is one of the most valuable skills I’ve ever tried developing.

The main symptom is that, at the moment, acting upon your desires never feels urgent. It never feels important and can be put off. Or it never feels possible, the problem just feels like a fact of life. And so a solution must center on solving the problem in the moment. And the solution that worked for me, is to make it part of your identity to be an agent. Make it a point of principle to do things, not because the thing is necessarily the perfect action, but because I choose the life where I do things, over the life where I always wait for the perfect opportunity.

The point of this is that I avoid the paralyzing perfectionism and uncertainty by changing the question I am answering. It doesn’t matter if I’m not doing the right thing, because what I’m doing isn’t that important. I can close off the paralyzing thoughts, not by answering them on their terms, but by realizing that the choices I make today affect the kind of person I’ll be for the rest of my life.

Notice the next time you agonize over a choice, or pass up an opportunity. Ask yourself not “What is the right decision?” but rather “Which decision will get me closer to the kind of person I want to be?”