Perfectionism, Parkinson’s and AutoGPT

Welcome back to the Another Excuse Newsletter

Another Excuse Newsletter

Welcome back to the Another Excuse Newsletter, the newsletter that isn’t just another excuse, but a reason to start that thing you’ve been putting off.

What to expect this week:
👓Perspective — Perfectionism
🔨 Tool — AutoGPT
🍿Consume — Brain Health with Dr. Daniel Amen
📖Concept — Parkinson’s Law

Perspective

Perfection is a myth

We identify as a perfectionist when we’re afraid to fail. Nothing is perfect and so it’s impossible to attain. This leads to procrastination and not failing, which is important for growth.

Is there a way to break this procrastination “cycle?”👆

We’ve got to reframe the way we think.

It’s a lot better to finish something and learn from it than never finishing at all. We’ve got to see these failures as opportunities for growth, and the focus should be on the journey, not necessarily the result.

By celebrating the small wins and reflecting on your progress, the process becomes the goal and failure becomes your friend. I struggle with framing failure this way. I’m still in fear of it and I have to remind myself that it would be more beneficial to fail than not try at all.

You get the point, but here’s Adam Grant to drive it home.

Tool

Image created by Stable Diffusion (prompt to image AI generator) — Prompt: “AutoGPT”

AutoGPT

AutoGPT is ChatGPT on steroids.

I’m sure you’ve all heard of ChatGPT and what it’s capable of. And hopefully, some of you have played around with it. This is the next step in this fast-paced freight train that is AI advancements.

AutoGPT is an AI that completes tasks and connects to the internet on your behalf.

For example, you can get it to start a business in any niche you like.

It will search the internet to do market research and then report back on its findings. It will then recommend the next steps, and with your permission, complete those steps. It will continue to repeat this process until it completes the task you have given it.

The possibilities are endless. You’re limited by your own imagination.

It runs in Python and so it may be a bit daunting and confusing for some to install. But trust me, the effort to install it all is worth it in the end.

Here is the GitHub link with all the installation instructions and necessary code.

And here is a YouTube video explaining the process, too. I got a bit stuck just reading the instructions, and the video helped me understand it all.

Consume (Read / Watch / Listen)

Brain Health

Steven Bartlett interviews Dr Daniel Amen about brain health.

They discuss how we don’t treat the brain the same as our other organs and that most psychiatric illnesses are not mental illnesses, but brain health issues.

Amen believes that we’ll look back on this period of psychiatry and be ashamed that we used to throw harmful medication at almost every problem.

He recommends making good lifestyle choices that we all know we should be making, like:

• Consuming fatty oils like Omega3
• Engaging in new learning
• Avoiding restricting blood flow
• Understanding the impact of loneliness
• Good oral hygiene
• Removing highly processed foods from our diet
• Not blaming everything on genetics.

He suggests using this app to scan the labels of everything (including your toothpaste) to check how quickly it’s killing you. Here’s a site that does something similar.

It’s an interesting episode.

Concept

Parkinson’s Law

Parkinson’s Law occurs when our work expands to fill the time we’ve allocated to complete it.

This means we usually finish tasks closer to their due date, irrelevant of how long it would actually take us to complete them.

This brings two thoughts to mind. Procrastination and a false sense of productivity.

We procrastinate because the due date is far enough away that we don’t feel the urgency to work on it. Or, even worse, we don’t set ourselves a date at all and so we never get around to doing it. This applies to me when it comes to personal projects. I start the project with a lot of passion and motivation and it dies out with no plan or date. It’s something I’d like to complete but never get around to it because I never set a completion date and the effort is gone.

We have deadlines and schedules for work, so why not incorporate them into our personal life?

A false sense of productivity can occur when we’re meeting all our deadlines, but not reflecting on how hard we’re working to meet them. When we learn a new skill or take on a new project, Parkinson’s Law can be applied too. The beginning is hard and takes a lot of time to complete simple tasks, but as we improve and learn, the same tasks take as less time.

So, having the same deadlines and amount of tasks as you did when you first started doesn’t make sense, because the time to complete them has exponentially improved.

Here’s a really old book that goes into more detail and if you just google it, there are many blogs on the topic, but you get the gist.