What’s the default approach? You get enthusiastic about some rule or set of rules, then try to impose them on your life – using them, in a telling phrase I keep encountering in the world of personal development these days, as a “forcing function”.
In other words, you take a bunch of concepts, give them pride of place in your mind, then demand that your thinking and behaviour start conforming to the concepts.
It causes you to evaluate your real life – the messy and imperfect one you’re actually living – against a perfect conceptual structure, in comparison with which it can only ever be found wanting.
