Why You Keep Too Many Doors Open

22 people had breakthroughs this week. Will the next one be you?

Two things for you to think about

The most underrated trait for a happy life: decisiveness.

Our intuition is that it’s best to keep our options open. But as long as you try to keep every door open, you’ll never be able to walk through the one that matters.

Optimizing your life for optionality creates a false sense of growth.

You feel like you’re adding more potential to your life, but all you’re doing is guaranteeing your inability to commit to anything.

Two things for you to ask yourself

What doors are you keeping open that you’ll never walk through? What’s stopping you from closing them?

One thing for you to try this week

Choose a door to walk through this week. Let me know what happens.

Last week’s breakthroughs

In last week’s newsletter, I reframed happiness as the upgrading of problems, and asked you to find one worth having.

Jason found a problem to prioritize:

A bigger problem I would like to focus on this week is rigorous high-intensity action on a project. The project is around my home and fixing it up, making the spaces cleaner, nicer, and more organized. Having my home be a space my family and I love. This has required some work finding contractors, making decisions with my wife, and spending money which is not always easy for me to do as I tend to be frugal.

My target date is my birthday which is Thursday, June 25th. I intend to focus on being in action from now until then, and even after throughout the week. My work colleague from Germany will be here through Tuesday but I still plan to be in rigorous action. Will keep you posted.

Our next reader verbalized a problem they’d like to have:

I would like to have the problem of needing to purge my closet of all the clothes that no longer fit, and having to figure out where to donate them.

Then I would have the problem of all those extra hangers, because there is now only one size of clothes in my closet instead of three (current plus the next two sizes down). And I would also have the problem of needing to shop and find clothes that fit and only settle for things that I feel good in.

These may seem like small problems; however it would be the result of two goals: continually improving my health and purging my home of unneeded stuff.

Finally, here’s where Karen finds happiness:

I like this. It got me thinking that at almost 60, I probably see it a little differently than someone in their 40s.

The problems change. At 20 it’s school, jobs and figuring out who you are. At 40 it’s careers, kids, mortgages and aging parents. At almost 60 it’s retirement, health, purpose, relationships and what you want the next chapter to look like.

So yes, hopefully we trade our problems for better problems.

But I also think happiness lives in the spaces between them. The walk, the coffee, the sunset, the dogs, the laugh with a friend. If we’re waiting for a life with no problems before we’re happy, we’re probably going to be waiting forever.

Like any other goal. Its completion simply becomes a brand new starting line.

As always, send your breakthroughs by simply replying to this email. Let me know if you’d prefer to remain anonymous.

Until next week,

Mark Manson

#1 New York Times Bestselling Author
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