I love this quote by the legendary author and philosopher David Foster Wallace. If you haven’t read it, you should. It’s very simple. “Foster Wallace knows what he is talking about. He knows how to be an optimist, he knows how to be a pessimist, and he knows how to be a fool.
In his book, Infinite Jest, Foster Wallace writes about the difference between optimism and pessimism. He explains that one of the most important qualities of a human being is optimism. What Foster Wallace calls optimism, he calls hope. Hope is believing that things are going to get better, just because they have always gotten better. And Foster Wallace believes that the best way to get better is to stop doing something you dont want to do. So he is an optimist.
A lot of us are, but so are a lot of other people. Some of us are truly optimistic, but most of us don’t realize it. We get on the internet and say, “I’m a hopeless romantic,” and we’re usually right.
The truth is that hope is a good motivator, and can be a good motivator when you find yourself in a situation that gives you a strong motivation to get ahead. And that motivator is the way you think about things, and it’s the way you think about how you’re going to run things. You have to be willing to do whatever you want to do, and that motivator is the way you think about it.
The problem is when you are so addicted to the idea of being a hopeless romantic, you don’t realize how much of an addiction that is, and how much time you waste thinking about the things that you want to be better at. It’s easy to think about how you want to change things in your life, but that’s a lot different than thinking about how you want to change the things that are holding you back.
It sounds like this is the same problem when you think about how to be a better person. You think about being a better person, but you still have a lot of things that you have to accomplish to be better. When you focus on one thing, you get distracted by everything else.
The thing is, I’m not just talking about bad habits. I’m talking about bad habits that are preventing you from accomplishing your goals. In the case of bad habits, we can see them as either habits of procrastination or habits of inattention. We need to change our habits so that they become habits of attention.
I have a friend who is always late because he’s afraid to look at the clock. He does this so often that it is affecting his relationships. Instead of being a good person, he is just a terrible person. We need to change our habits so that they become habits of attention.
If we can break habits of procrastination or inattention, we can see them as habits of attention.
Procrastination is the act of not doing something that you want to do that you know you should be doing. Inattention is the act of not paying attention to something that is important. The two terms are so close that they often sound the same. Both cause problems because you don’t know if your habits are causing the problem in the first place.