There seems to be three reasons we don't do things in our lives. One is we don't have the ability, this is obvious to anyone who ever dreamed of being a professional athlete until they realized that this requires a very sport-specific body type as a baseline requirement. Two is we don't think of it until it's too late. Starting an online bookstore as a way towards dominating retail is something many of us could have done, but only one did.

The third reason is we have the ability, and we have the idea, but we just don't do the work. In some cases this is due to just not having the time available, but I think for most of us lucky enough to only need to work eight hours a day or less, it's usually due to just not doing the thing that needs doing.

Why this is puzzled me for a long time. Then last year I started playing chess, and I happened to read Nabeel S. Qureshi's Notes On Puzzles, which ended up being the best thing I read in 2023. It opened my eyes to something fundamental about myself and the world that I'd spent four decades unaware of: complacency.

Complacency, I can see now, acts as a gravity-like force against all our endeavors. Overcoming it requires skill and effort. And amongst subsets of people who meet the baseline ability and the right ideas, it's usually the primary difference maker - moreso than the marginal difference in ability or quality of idea, as I would have supposed.

To refer back to sports ability: I now believe that there have been probably ~100 or so people, maybe more, who could have been Michael Jordan. That doesn't mean you or I could have. The set is limited to the 100 with the right physique and whatever you call the ability to perform fine motor skills while running up and down a court, and then of that set those who have decided to focus on basketball and develop their body and mind towards being a basketball player.

The 100 is a wild-assed, order of magnitude guess. I wouldn't bet a dime on it being exactly 100 but I'd bet a decent sum on it being between about 60 and 400ish.

It's taken me a while to write about complacency partly through complacency(!), but mostly because while epiphanies seem in hindsight to have happened in specific moments, there's an underrated and necessary time period where we have had the thought, but must digest it first to realize it as revelatory and insightful.

One interesting framework I stole from trading is the ability to think of qualities on different timeframes. Applying this to complacency, we can see it on many timeframes:

At the lifetime scale, most of us over 30 probably know a few people we grew up with who seemed to have so much potential but haven't done anything meaningful with it.

At a slightly shorter term scale, projects can incubate, spin up and be put away with the years slipping by so easily. Again, over the age of 30, most of us probably know someone who was going to start a business, a restaurant, a non-profit, but they just never have.

Day to day complacency can be seen at school or work. The kid scrambling to finish his homework on the bus, or in the class before the class when it's due. The coworker who never seems to come in on time with anything they commit to.

And then in the moment to moment is where it's the most fun. You see complacency loops mid-conversation, as someone throws out a quick opinion and then scrambles to justify it. Sometimes you see them do more work to justify the opinion than they would have if they'd just stopped and worked the possibilities before deciding - observing this actually gave me some insight in how to overcome complacency in myself, which will be coming up soon.

Actually, let's get into that now: If you accept that complacency is this really powerful, universal force, and that overcoming it is is really tough but also a huge underrated differentiator, what are some ways to do so?

Ways Of Overcoming Complacency That Have Worked For Me

• Start with just awareness and acknowledgement. "You are a lazy motherfucker" I'll say to the mirror in the morning. Or I'll catch myself in a moment, realizing that I'm taking a shortcut through a task so my mind can move on to something more interesting.
• Jerry Seinfeld's system: A calendar with a checkbox. Did you do the thing. Simple. And then book the time and make sure the time has an ending.
• Impose a forcing function. Someone holding you accountable to have x done by y time can be a great motivator - at least on that timeframe. Be careful with this. Oftentimes I think it impels us to cheat on the shorter timeframes. Especially if we perceive the deadline to be unfair.
• Start doing the thing before I'm ready. This is to avoid batting a draft around, changing wording or tone without making hard decisions about what to cut or starting over. In those cases, what I need to do is early publish the Confluence/Notion/Whatever page with the word Draft in front of the title, or, if it's code, put up a draft PR. Putting a draft in a place where others might find it turns on the part of the brain that's afraid of shame, a powerful subsystem that seems capable of overcoming complacency.
• Make it official. Want to learn to write code better but keep putting it off? Get a job writing code. That sounds really simple and you might think software engineering jobs are hard to get. Yes they are. That's not what I meant, though. There are plenty of jobs, many much easier to get, many entry level, where writing some code is or can be part of the job.