Famous fables about personal psychology

With a few snide remarks

Long-term goals are valuable even if you don’t pursue them now.
If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing well. 
The key to success is in your ability to focus. 
The key to your long-term goals is self-discipline. 
The key to success is will-power. 
Procrastination is a personal defect. 
The way to avoid stress is to learn how to relax. 
People can build self-confidence by telling themselves how good they are.
When you start a job, you should stick to it until it is done. 
Children should always be motivated by positive reinforcement and praise to build up self-esteem.
People only use ten percent of their brains.
You should focus on long-term goals and not let short-term goals get in your way. 
The key to learning is to develop a better memory.

Long-term goals are valuable even if you don’t pursue them now.  Where is the value?  If you ignore them completely, what will they do for you?  If you don’t forget them completely, you are using up some brainpower to keep them.   You probably have something more valuable to do with that brainpower.  Like putting it to work on more urgent goals.

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing well.  The best way to use this advice is to foist it off on your competition.  It is a good way to make sure they don't ever get finished.

Who runs the definition of well?  If you you are in charge of that definition for yourself, doing a thing well probably means doing it in a way that meets whatever goal led you to do it.  That may not be what somebody else means by well.   But that won’t bother you if you know what your goal was.

The key to success is in your ability to focus.  Does it matter what you choose to focus on?   Not unless you want to choose what success you get the key to.  You will probably succeed in what you focus on over the long haul.  But whether you call that success will depend on where your focus took you.

The key to your long-term goals is self-discipline.  Or is that just the way it looks to other people?  What looks like self-discipline from a distance is just a swarm of habits.  Built one habit at a time.  The only advantage in calling it self-discipline is that it sounds like a natural gift that way.  Call it a habit and you know they had to work for it.  Then you know that people who don’t have it haven’t worked for it

The key to success is will-power.  And what is the key to will power?  There are thousands of steps to any success.  And when you put those steps together right, it looks like will-power.  One of those steps is figuring out where you want to go.  Another is planning the route.  Step by step.    Key by key.

Procrastination is a personal defect.  Or is it just a habit in need of adjustment?  After all, some people consider impulsiveness as a personal defect, too.  Procrastination and impulsiveness are both timing problems.  Maybe they are just ineffective timing habits.    

Habits can be hard to change, but not as hard as personal defects. 

The way to avoid stress is to learn how to relax.  And the way to avoid hunger is to learn how to not be hungry?  No.  You eat.  The way to avoid stress is to deal with what stresses you.  Maybe you solve problems.  Maybe you give up goals as unreachable.  Maybe you figure out how to make lemonade out of that lemon you got.  Maybe you come to terms with the discovery that you don’t always control your world.  Maybe you call those things learning how to relax.

People can build self-confidence by telling themselves how good they are. Only if they have enough self-confidence to believe what they tell themselves. People can undermine self-confidence by telling themselves how ineffective the are.  But if you want to build your self-confidence, you will probably do better by noticing what you are good at.  Maybe noticing what you are getting better at.   Maybe deciding what you want to get better at.  Maybe noticing that you get better at something when you decide to get better at it.  That’s harder than talking to yourself.  But probably more convincing.

That leaves the rest of us to figure out what the advice means. So here goes.  Sometimes your goal is to figure out whether you want to do that kind of thing.  The job is done when you figure that out.  Sometimes you are just doing a trial run.  The job is done when you see whether the trial run worked.  Often you can work the job more effectively by chopping it into joblets and doing one joblet at a time.

The rest of the story is that people do need to carry a few jobs through to the finish.    It builds self-confidence.  It makes your Hunter feel good.  And if you pick the right jobs, it can make you a living. 

Most psychologists would point out that praise serves to strengthen the praised behavior.  So, if you praise mediocre performance, you should expect to get mediocre performance.  On the other hand, if you criticize serious effort to try something new, would you be surprised to see the child learn to avoid trying new things?

Or maybe this just applies to people who believe it.  Try the similarity test:

People only use ten percent of their cars.  You could make that case if you use time as the measure.  Maybe 90% of your car's time is spent parked and waiting for you.    

A long-term goal is an abstraction.  You won't stay focused on any abstraction for long. Your best trick for going after a long term goal is to break it into concrete sub-goals and focus on one sub-goal at a time.    The problem people usually have with short-term goals is choosing short-term goals that contribute to long-term goals.  That calls for planning.

The key to learning is to develop a better memory.

Vulcan fuzzy phrase warning:   These are both abstract statements at about the same level of abstraction.  They both mean about the same thing.  The technical term for this use of language is tautology.  It lets you say something pompous without any idea about what it means in concrete reality. 

The key to doing anything is to translate it into concrete action.