When I was a little kid I had a bad habit of throwing a tantrum when one little thing didn’t go my way. Like I’d be building a sand castle and trying to carve out a parapet on one of the towers and the parapet would crumble and so I’d give up and stomp all over the whole castle.
I still do the same thing with my lifestyle sometimes. Things aren’t going well at work or a relationship turns south and I jump to drastic conclusions like I should move to Spain and write a novel or I should go work for my buddy’s startup in Chicago.
Part of growing up for me has been about seeing where something starts to go wrong and rather than throwing a tantrum and running away from the whole thing I try to take a deep breath and look at it and say, “Okay, what’ve we got? And what do we need? And how do we get it? Okay, let’s get it done.”
These small changes allow me to keep some of the progress I’ve made while also avoiding being too unhappy if something starts to irk me (e.g., working 45+ hours per week for a large company). The trade-off for long-term progress, of course, is a certain level of commitment to doing the same thing for an extended period of time.