27 Oct 2026
"To be someone not me, is not me intrinsically." - Someone, Planet Earth, ~1 CE - 2026
I don't believe in 'macro decisions', or what everyone calls goals. There's yet to be a new years eve where I've measured up to my goals, and it's why this year I've completely shifted to an approach of micro over macro which I guess you could argue is a macro decision, but I've embedded it as a principle.
Macro decisions assume you are honest. You might say - "you are" but are you really? When is the last time you made a macro decision (encapsulating a day to day, week to week effort) and stuck to it. Without self-discipline and honesty, decisions at the macro layer offer nothing but a half-minute period of optimism, before hours of crushing self-disgust. Rinse and repeat the process for years and you have a failed individual at the personal level.
It's every micro decision that actually impacts your existence. Let's take a boring example of fitness. Compare internalising a macro decision "I'm going to start exercising and getting abs for summer" with showing up day in-and-out. Every individual believes the latter is correct, but only 0.05% of humans get it right. I'll be the first to admit - I've done this every day for years in my past.
Another example - compare "I'm going to start focusing while working from home" vs "I'm going to focus for the next 15 minutes". It's incredibly hard to act on the basis of a decision you made in a split second for a day, and much more tangible to commit for 15 minutes. Performing the ceremony repeatedly gives you a chance to check-in with yourself, optimise at that point in time, adjusting for the state of your mind (and your world) throughout the day.
I've been incredibly victim to falling into the trap of committing to macro decisions when I've been at a low, and social media really enables this. The first reel you see on instagram is a 6ft4 model like body builder claiming he's natural. What they don't tell you is the millions of micro decisions performed to get there, and it's very rare to hear it. Even AI enables it. Talk to any code based engineers or architects before the era of artificial intelligence. It used to require effort to build something. Now the internet is plagued with 20Mil ARR startups that quite literally are half an sdk around chatgpt where they've computed their ARR based on revenue from a single X post that called their product the next big thing.
In reality, I see it everywhere. Everyone looking for quick wins, to not have to work for anything, and if it requires work, well let's not do it at all. After all if everyone's quick winning through Ponzi schemes and selling it off as success, why can't I?
Advice from someone not authorised to give it:
"If I can make micro decisions every day that skew the trajectory of my growth even slightly positive, that's success." - Me, somewhere on planet earth, 2026
Try the paradigm. See if you have any success.