Death By Over-Indexing
Hey friends,
Here’s a life lesson that I’ve learnt through experience that may benefit you. It is the idea of over-indexing:
To index is to assign value, meaning, or measure to a single thing. To over-index is to allocate too much thought and energy into a single thing.
I bring this up today because ultimately when we index things in just the right amount it can genuinely help move the needle forwards. But, when we begin over-indexing on one thing, this can have the very opposite effect. It can make us stagnate and at worse propel us towards burnout and failure.
Let’s put this into a personal example. Once upon a time, humans online told me to post consistently to succeed and therefore I focused on being consistent at absolutely all costs. In other words, at times, even at the detriment of my physical health and mental health. Does this sound healthy to you? Hopefully, it shouldn’t. What I found was although, yes, I was consistent and yes, I was growing online, I wasn’t really that proud of some of the work I published. My work got bland, less creative, and more regurgitated. And of course, the other things I mentioned didn’t help. I was getting physically out of shape as I kept missing one too many runs and binged on unhealthy snacks to power late-night edits or content sessions.
All of this because I over-indexed on the fact that the internet collectively was telling me the only way to find success is to be consistent. But of course, this is just an example of me over-indexing on the whole consistency thing. Over time I’ve found that actually to be successful online you need many other things. You need an element of originality, creativity, and personality to name a few. All things I knew prior to over-indexing on consistency, but all things that quickly began to slip my mind as I just focussed on being consistent. Now I’m not saying consistency is unimportant. But, I’m also not going to over-index on being consistent in the future as I value my creativity and health, in body and mind, above online growth.
So, the lesson here is to index things in just the right amount. There’s literally no “one thing” that will make you successful. But, the combined result of multiple factors may find you some success — whatever that means to you personally.
Above all, nothing is worth over-indexing, ever!
Let’s keep growing! 🚀
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This Week’s Quote 🎯
“When you hear something, you will forget it. When you see something, you will remember it. But not until you do something, will you understand it.” ― Michael E. Gerber (The E-Myth Revisited)
This Week’s Recommendation 🚀
Book 📚 — Indistractable by Nir Eyal
At first, I was apprehensive about this book. I shared my new read on my socials and a few friends dropped by to tell me this book is sh*t. So, I put it off for some time. But, I just finished it and it’s actually pretty great! There’s a lot of simple lessons to take away from this book about removing distractions backed by mental-models thinking.
8/10 read. Would recommend it to chronic procrastinators and internet addicts.
This Week on YouTube 🎥
I’m currently studying for my last medical school exams, so here’s a vlog:
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