Most of what we call effort is just a performance.

People love to struggle, so we try to look like we’re fighting hard to keep the struggling alive. But there’s a difference between hard work that gets you somewhere and hard work that just keeps you busy for sake of it.

The latter is what most of us do.

It’s easy to tell yourself you’re making progress because you’re tired at the end of the day.

But if tiredness it’s your real benchmark against progress. You are simply just looking at the wrong direction. Tiredness isn’t the goal.

As explained in Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, the real deal is to make any kind of progress that approaches you to a set of stepping stones that will help you reach your goal.

Nobody wants to live with an optimized objective function.

Vaccum tubes were an invention of electrical engineering, not software engineering. Decades later, scientists and engineers decided to use to build a computer. 1

The compact engine appears because of the Wright brothers, not because of the car industry. 2

Stop being “noisy” and compare that to being “busy”.

Stop following a goal long time ago you started, just because stop doing it looks like failing.

We tend to be more afraid of being seen as a failure than of actually failing. So, you just keep going at something, that simlpy stopped making sense long ago, just because not doing it anymore will erase your entire identity (according to you).

Exhausting.

Now, go on and be honest with yourself.

Refresh your list of goals. Start over. Just quit.