Fighting Your Personal Preferences

People will go to great lengths to distort their contact with reality.

It is always the result of a compensation for insecurity.

If we take a page from the existentialists, we’ll stick as closely as we can to the concrete details of our lives, rather than go through the mental acrobatics of abstractions. The added bonus is that we strip away the should’s, ought’s and expectations.

Pay particular attention to what actually (and reliably) occurs.

If you wake up most naturally around 7:30am and train — at most — twice per week, then your resolution to wake up at 5am and workout every day is doomed from the outset.

You’ll simply rebel against it.

That’s not a bad thing, by the way. In fact, it’s a good thing. It reveals what is essentially reliable about you, and whenever possible we’ll do our best by organizing our lives in accordance with our essential nature. You can accomplish a great deal (with much less resistance) by creating some basic structure around your preferences and values, as made manifest by what occurs naturally in your behavior.

Why, oh why, would you want to force yourself to do something? Those top-down strategies are inherently short-lived.

Ecological systems (and psyche is nothing if not ecological) organize from the bottom up. Look for the organic processes of your life, and leverage that vital spontaneity in pursuit of what you desire.

Oh, and stop compulsively doing shit that is at odds with your preferences