Expectation vs Reality
Jeff Bezos once said, “Do you want it fast, or do you want it good?”. He was talking about preparing milkshakes when he said that1, but I’m sure this applies to diary entries too.
Is what you get out proportional to what you put in? There’s always some loss, waste, spillage. No process is 100% efficient. Carnot’s engine is only a theoretical concept.
Learning to be okay with not meeting imaginary fantastic goals you set for yourself every day takes more clarity of thought than it takes to create those plans. It’s a recipe for dejection. Some optimistic enthu-cutlet2 can learn to feed on this constant failure of imaginary goals and still keep work towards the same goal, failing over and again. It’s a way of life and everyone at some point in time was/is/will be that person.
But could there be any other way of handling the internal mental dialogue, such that it is not the constant barrage of mental stimuli - positive or negative - that motivates you but it is something less shallow that drives you? My expedition to look for the latter has made me temporarily halt at stoicism. Ryan Holiday, in this podcast3, peels some layers off the pop cultural idea of stoicism by highlighting that it does not mean the absence of reaction to pain or pleasure. A stoic is as much involved in the game4 as an enthu-cultlet, and - No! - one is not better than the other.