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“Too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run.”
Aldo Leopold
For years I believed that the bigger my habits were, the bigger my anti-habits needed to be.
A habit is something I choose to do. An anti-habit is something I choose to avoid. One of my anti-habits was eating only inside a 6-hour window. Another was finishing work by 4pm.
Eating only in that 6-hour window, it felt like my brain started to conserve energy. The quality of my thinking dropped.
The fast was costing me the quality of thought my goals needed.
The 4pm finish worked until my ambitions grew. On the days I wanted to push harder, the work had to stop anyway.
The bigger my goals got, the tighter the rule squeezed my days.
For about a century, the US put out each fire it could reach in Yellowstone.
Small fires used to clear away dead wood and brush. Without them, the dead wood stayed on the forest floor and piled up year after year.
In the dry summer of 1988, fires reached all that fuel and burned about a third of the park.
The rule meant to protect the forest built the fuel that burned it.
Marc Randolph kept a narrower rule. Each Tuesday at 5pm, he left work to spend the evening with his wife.
He kept his Tuesday nights for more than 30 years, through the founding of Netflix. He tells the story in his book That Will Never Work.
His rule was small enough to survive building Netflix.
Each anti-habit guards a goal. Push one far enough and it starts working against that goal.
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What rule could you loosen so it stops blocking your goal?
