Remember...don't practice golf at night!

When we light a candle in a dark room, the effect is very dramatic, from complete darkness to a little light, a big progress, and it can be spotted right away!

Lighting the second candle will also have a great effect, but it doesn't seem to have as much effect compared to the first. The third candle also brightens the room a bit, but the effect is less pronounced than the second...

As each new candle is lit, the effect of each candle is getting lower and lower, and by the time we reach the 15th candle, it will hardly affect the brightness of the room.

This feeling of "as the number increases, the effect becomes less and less obvious", the author calls it: the candle effect.

The candles that are lit one by one are like milestones on the way to our goal.

The author takes running as an example in the book. Suppose you practice running very hard and want to speed up your running. When you are promoted from 5 kilometers per hour to 6 kilometers per hour, it is equivalent to your promotion from running 1 km in 12 minutes to Running 1km in 10 minutes is a huge improvement! 2 minutes faster per kilometer.

However, when you go from 8 kilometers per hour to 9 kilometers per hour, you can run 1 kilometer per hour more, but the completion time per kilometer is only less than 1 minute faster. Just looking at the rate of progress is not as good as cutting in half.

Perfectionism comes in at this time! He uses these "feeling-reduced success margins" to justify things not going well enough to convince us that we should give up!

That's why the author wants us to have data, because when perfectionism is yelling on our way to our goal, it's better to have a fact sheet that can be used to slap him in the face!

Jason wants to lose 18 kilograms, and his job as a pharmacist is sedentary, so he accidentally gained a few pounds of fat on his body.

While 18kg might seem like a lot -- the weight of a kindergarten kid after all -- it's not impossible, because he's done it before.

Unfortunately, 44-year-old Jason found the excess pounds increasingly stubborn, refusing to leave him despite eight weeks of trying. He hired a personal trainer, ran more often, and ate more carefully, but every morning, the needle of the scale was still unwilling to move...

When things don't go as expected, perfectionism jumps out, points it out loud, and suggests that now is a great time to give up!

However, when things don't go well, it's not the time to give up,
Rather, it's time to identify where you are and make adjustments.

The author uses the image of a runner as an example. If he stands on the edge of the track and looks at all the runners, he might yell at you, "How is the race going?" If you answer, "I don't know! I don't know myself How fast you run, don't know how many kilometers left, or even where you're going. But as long as I run faster, I can solve these problems." If you do, he'll think you're stupid.

Perfectionism won't want you to check progress, and may tell you you don't need to. Or, perfectionism might tell you that you're afraid of what you're about to discover.

The author hasn't seen his book's sales for a whole year because he's terrified of knowing the results.

So, now you know why "don't practice golf at night"?

How is it possible to improve because you have no idea where the ball fell?

This concept seems intuitive, but most of the time we've been chasing our goals in the same way. Once our actions are out of hand, they disappear somewhere in the middle of a busy day.

There is a classic saying that goes like this:

If you can't measure him, you can't manage him.
If you can't measure it, you can't manage it.

There is no record of data, Jason simply forgot how much effort he put in to lose weight last time. It is very likely that his first successful weight loss process was very hard. He was out of breath when he stepped on the flywheel, and that The numbers on the scale don't progress every day either, but our memory is constantly editing itself and therefore unreliable.

If Jason had a record of every time he lost weight, the next time perfectionism came out in his ear, he could shut him up!

If data has so many benefits, why don't we use it more?

The next content will reveal the secrets of the war for you!

Reference source:

Done - by Jon Acuff

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