Two hits. OP rejected one offer

Lower your sights to things you can probably succeed at.

For example, if you’re afraid to go into law because you think you might fail as a lawyer, maybe set a smaller goal to start with, like doing 20 pushups a day.

I started doing 5 minutes a day of meditation (my rule was no reddit until I’d done my 5 minutes). Now I’ve got a streak of 148 days, and I’m up to 9 minutes a day.

And that may not seem like much, but my life has improved radically since 148 days ago.

20 pushups a day could change your life. It could make you the kind of person who might be less likely to fail as a lawyer.

It’s stairs. If you think you can’t step up to the next step, well, make the steps smaller. That’s literally what stairs are: a way to get up over a wall that’s too big to step over, by breaking it down into smaller walls that you can step over.

Your goals should be something you know you can do, but only if you grow a little.

And they should be nearer-term than you’re probably thinking. Becoming a lawyer is, absolute minimum, a three-year process. Most likely it’s more than that, because you need to get other things accomplished first, like getting a stable job, or fixing your health, or going through undergrad, or saving up some money to have a buffer while you study.

So instead of trying to commit and act on a five-year plan, maybe make yourself a one-month plan.

1% improvement per day. Just strive to do something 1% better than yesterday. A little bit of pushing, just for today.

Afraid to commit to cleaning your apartment? Clean one windowsill.

What are your goals, everybody?

Mine is to become a therapist

But if they somehow manage to get up on their hind legs, watch out!

There you go.

Maybe they only vaporize us if they see that we’re letting the naive, sheltered people make the negotiating decisions.

What if a ranch full of cattle was armed?

“In accordance with Dark Forest Protocol, this year’s super bowl will be shortened to five innings”

“Sincerely”,
— Congress

I think that psychologists, diplomats, and paranoid schizophrenics should be working on that protocol.

Unfortunately, it’s probably radio astronomers, who are about as qualified to negotiate with aliens as a hostage negotiator is to calculate the relative velocity of a star via redshift.

Yeah let’s just focus on simulating living systems as accurately as possible. That’ll reduce unnecessary suffering for sure.

Did it also taste like a pretzel stick?

Some assembly required

An even shorter answer is that it was based on non-consensual relationships which are inherently more unstable than consensual relationships.

Of course all nations are that way; the definition of a law is a rule you adopt by being born. But the Soviet Union applied this kind of nonconsensual ordering to entire nations.

It’s light now but the joke is that back in the day it was hard to run in some cases.

I had to do various weird things on my computer to get Doom working. My mom was so mad that I’d “screwed up” my computer when one of her friends reconfigured a bunch of stuff so Doom would run.

It was a Packard Bell 486-SX 33 with 4 MB of RAM.

Trying to un-fuck my computer was the beginning of my tech career.

Join a league soccer team. Instant friends.

Competition is good for everyone involved. I do hope we don’t get too many global networks of satellites.

It’s more like 100x isn’t it?

Well everything we do causes pollution so the more valuable something is the less reasonable it is to target it with pollution complaints.

The only way to stop pollution entirely is to self destruct our civilization. So barring that it’s all about which endeavors are worth the pollution.

Is dropping your goals to take the shortcut to feeling worthy actually "motivation"?

Jeff Bezos is a goldmine of dismayed-looking pictures.

I’ve gone the opposite direction. Somehow I got a lot less attached to outcomes in pvp games and it’s so much more fun.

I play Halo with a friend and he’s not having fun unless we’re winning. I just enjoy the challenge and the flow of the game. He gets so frustrated, and we usually have to switch to some PvE game just to keep him from having a heart attack.

Another bad habit: taking a hit any time there’s a pause in the action.

Actually when I decided to only take a hit of weed between matches (not each time I died), it led to a decline in my smoking that eventually became zero smoking, ie I quit.

I never stick with a game when the going gets tough.

A friend of mine, while we were growing up, had this rule from his mom: she wouldn’t buy him a new game or allow him to buy a new game until he proved to her that he had beaten the previous one.

Mofo has a wife and kids now, runs his own business, while I’m living in a bedroom with no bed.

Which is?

In college my GF and I did this once at the movies. Just watched a movie neither of us had heard of. It was About Schmidt and it was pleasantly surprising.