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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   1731 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for November 4, 2026

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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And yet I cannot seem to make myself do it. I've tried the usual advice about starting small, setting achievable goals, and gradually building habits. I understand the reasoning behind it. My difficulty is that I repeatedly abandon even modest commitments, and once I miss a day, the whole structure seems to collapse. At the same time, I have an almost pathological need to excel. I don't simply want to become an average functioning adult. I want to make something exceptional of myself, partly because I feel an overwhelming need to compensate for the years I've wasted. Consequently, anything less than a complete transformation feels inadequate, which probably contributes to my paralysis.

I don't have good general advice here, but this bit made me think of the "processes, not goals" advice. You're fixated on a (somewhat nebulous) goal, and have a hard time with the daily process. Every successful person has some pattern of what concrete stuff they do every day and how they go about doing it, and outside of lottery winners and hereditary monarchs, that's probably related to how they became successful. There's two angles to thinking about this. One is just focusing on the daily system as a thing you build up, and turning your scope from "how will I attain my overarching goal over the span of an indeterminate number of years from now?" to "how will I practice my process tomorrow?", which is a lot more tractable and has a very short feedback cycle for improvement. The other is getting clarity on your goals and just what it means in terms of day-to-day activity to be the sort of person who can attain that goal.

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