Schopenhauer’s Advice on How to Achieve Great Things
Three takeaways:
The 19th-century philosopher’s writings leave us with three rules for achieving great things that remain resonant and practical to this day.
Schopenhauer stressed that it was important to view your daily work as the building block of a greater design. “It is only when we come to view our life as a connected whole that our character and capacities show themselves in their true light.”
As a modern example, Brooks cites a 2020 experiment involving undergraduate students had one group set specific academic goals while another group did not. The goal-setting students demonstrated significantly better class performance across the semester, while those who had not set goals tended to flounder.
Brooks boils Schopenhauer’s three rules for achieving life’s great goals to:
- Keep the grand plan in mind – Treat every day as a significant building block of a greater effort. This helps you to avoid being bogged down by the feeling of progress being slow, or daily tasks being too small. Build slowly and envision the eventual goal.
- Live in day-tight compartments – While focusing on the bigger picture, be careful not to “live at the finish line” mentally. After envisioning your completed project, back up to focus on today and only on what you need to do here and now to make progress. Dale Carnegie called this living in a “day-tight compartment.”
- Block out the noise– Build your day around the tasks that will get you closer to your goal, and protect that time. Allocate specific times for activites that might divert your focus, such as checking the news or scrolling through social media.
From Arthur C. Brooks at The Atlantic:
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