I love traveling and temporarily immersing myself in different cultures and geographies. My habits usually suffer when I do so, but I’m realizing that they shouldn’t. This last trip I went on, in particular, made me acutely aware of my tendency to make excuses.

Life is a constant battle, riddled with choices. Day by day, moment by moment, we are forced to choose between what is easy and what is beneficial. If there were a Venn diagram of easy and beneficial, the overlap would be quite small. This means that these two are usually pitted against one another — we are forced to choose. And, unfortunately, in that battle, beneficial doesn’t stand a damn chance.

I put the following excerpt as the fact in the 9/6/2021 edition of my newsletter:

If there were a lily pad that doubled in size every day and, after 50 days, covered the entire surface of a lake, it would cover less than 1% of the lake after day 42.

Some might question whether a simple math concept should qualify as a “fun fact.” I chose to include it because it’s obvious, yet surprising.

I don’t doubt anyone’s ability to come to the same mathematical conclusion when given a pencil, a sheet of paper, and 4 minutes. Even with the calculations in front of us, this example makes us do a cognitive double-take. It highlights our profound inability to intuitively understand exponential growth — the very fuel that propels the most powerful force in the universe — the compound effect.

Most people, myself included, have a peculiar tendency to consistently do things that are bad for us and consistently neglect to do things that are good for us.

I would argue we do so because we don’t fully understand the implications of our actions. We don’t understand the (compound) effect our daily actions exert on our long-term outcomes.

The problem isn’t that we don’t understand what is good for us versus what is bad for us. The problem lies in our inability to make the connection between how our actions today contribute to our outcomes in the future.

Time is the greatest force multiplier there is. It makes good habits our friend and bad habits our enemy.

The problem is that we have a hard time prioritizing things that don’t offer us immediate results. We understand that good habits will lead to positive outcomes in the future and that bad habits will lead to negative ones, but it’s not intuitive.

The future is so abstract, so far away. Now is so concrete, so immediate. We confuse the lack of immediacy with a lack of importance.

In life, if something is important to us, we tend to make time. If it’s not, we tend to make excuses.

Long-term time scales tend to skew our perception of what is important and what isn’t. Our goals are clear, but the steps required to get there somehow are not. Life then becomes an unending stream of extenuating circumstances.

If you’re looking for an excuse you’ll always find one.

I have a checklist of things I try to do every day. “Jarred’s housekeeping items” if you will. Whenever I travel, I find my hit rate for completing these goes down significantly. I use being on vacation as an excuse. It is my extenuating circumstance.

Sitting here writing this, I realize that’s pretty silly. I’m tired of making excuses.

Brian Chesky once asked Jeff Bezos what the best advice Warren Buffet ever gave him was.

Bezos said, “I asked Warren, your investment thesis is so simple, you’re the second richest guy in the world, and it’s so simple, why doesn’t everyone copy you?” to which Buffet responded, “because no one wants to get rich slowly”