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I told myself I wont check emails until I check off my one thing to do for the day. I couldnt do it. I always reach for the phone in the morning. Willpower wasnt enough. The brain is wired to take the path of least resistance. Fighting it every day with willpower wont work. These days I use systems. I work with rituals. I get my most important tasks (MIT) done between 9 a.m. and 12 p.m. I schedule my MITs the night before. And get straight to work at the scheduled time. Ninety percent of the time at the same place. Ive done it for so long, I do it on autopilot now. My three-hour block means no motivation required. Im not relying on willpower to stay productive. Im depending on a system that nudges me in the right direction. Goals are about the results you want; systems are the processes you actually follow. Your goal might be to write a book. The system is open the laptop at 7 a.m. and write 200 words before you start your other tasks. Systems make good habits stick. They take away unnecessary mental decisions. So you can focus on your meaningful tasks. If your schedule or environment is designed to support your habits, you are likely to follow through. For example, you dont wake up and give yourself a motivational speech before you brush your teeth. You dont look for hacks to make it stick. You just do it. Same bathroom. Same sink. Same routine. The system runs you. No willpower or motivation required. Your brain hates decisions Now apply that to the things you struggle with. Writing. Exercising. Saving money. Eating well. Notice the pattern? Those areas usually have no clear or intentional default. They rely on you feeling like it. Thats where things fall apart. Your brain loves defaults. It hates decisions. Every decision costs energy. By noon, youve already burned through most of it deciding what to wear, what to reply, what to ignore, what to worry about. So when you say, Ill think about it later, youre just waiting to borrow energy you wont have. Designing systems or rituals can be applied to almost anything. From batching similar tasks, blocking distractions on purpose to arranging your workspace in a specific way. Systems dont just help productivity. Want to sleep better? Define your ideal bedtime. Dim the lights, hide the blue light devices. The same principle applied to investing. Automate the transfer the minute it gets to your savings. Want quality connection with the people you love? Pre-schedule time with them. Dont hope youll feel like it. Systems are the invisible things we put in place to take back control of the direction of our lives. Willpower can only nudge you so far. If you want lasting change, real work, better life experiences, you need systems. Set them up, tweak or upgrade them, and let them do what they do best: make your life efficient and meaningful. Your future self will thank you. The minute you notice systems at work, you will wonder why you havent been applying them all those years. Its like realizing most of your day isnt driven by motivation at all. Its driven by defaults. Starting is everything Systems dont make you better. They make starting easier. And starting is everything. The people who seem disciplined usually have just engineered fewer points of failure. They dont rely so much on motivation. They depend on structure. Even creativity works with systems. The myth is that structure kills freedom. In reality, structure creates it. When you remove distractions and decisions, your mind has space to play. Thats why so many artists swear by boring routines. Same walk. Same workspace design. Same start time. They are protecting their creative space. If you keep failing at something, the problem probably isnt you. Its the setup. Dont blame yourself for not thriving in environments designed to distract, stress, and fragment you. Design better systems to support the habits you want to start. Put the phone away from sight to do deep work. If your phone sits next to your laptop while you work, you will check it. You cant willpower your way out of a notification. Put it in a drawer. Or disable the notifications. Put the book on the pillow to start a reading habit before bed. Your future self will find it there, a clear next action. Automate the bill. Get the running gear ready the night before. Every time you have to ask yourself, Should I work out now? you give yourself an out. When you have a system, the answer is already Yes. And your environment is designed to support the new habit. If my system fails, I dont get mad at myself. I get curious. What needs adjusting? Are there too many steps? I tweak my structure and try again. We all respond to cues daily. Systems put them to work for you. You are more likely to be disciplined if you design better structures for your week, both at work and at home. Design beats willpower. Every time. You dont need more motivation. You need fewer decisions. Want a challenge? Pick one area in your life. Now, design a new system for it so your brain does the hard work automatically. Start tiny. Start ridiculously small. But start.
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How can you keep your brain agile and young throughout your life, even as you get older? By spending time on creative pursuits as often as you can. Thats the fascinating finding of a study by researchers from Universidad Adolfo Ibáez in Chile and Trinity College in Ireland, among others. As the studys authors note, earlier studies have shown a connection between creative activities such as playing a musical instrument and improved brain health. They wanted to know just how creativity affects brain health. So they first recruited more than 1,200 healthy people as controls, and then compared them with 1,467 research participants who spent at least some of their time in creative pursuits. This included dancers, musicians, visual artists, and strategy-based gamers. (Real-time strategy-based games are complex and involve creativity.) Using EEG readings, they determined each participants brain age gap, the difference between their chronological age and the apparent age of the participants brain. What they found was that creative people across all disciplines had younger brains than their noncreative peers. Dancers had some of the youngest brains compared with their actual ages. This isnt surprising since previous research has consistently shown that strenuous physical activity also slows brain aging. This means that dancing, which is physically strenuous as well as creative, packs a double dose of brain health. Strategic gamers had the smallest brain age gap, though they still saw benefits. The researchers also discovered that those who were most expert in their respective creative areas saw the greatest brain benefit. And they found that connections within the brain that typically deteriorate with aging were stronger in these creative types. We tend to treat creativity as a luxury What does all this mean to you? If your current work involves a lot of creativity, thats good news. Chances are its benefiting your brain and helping you stay mentally young. But whether your work is creative in itself or not, it also means that you should make time in your week for your own creative activities. We tend to treat creativity as a luxury after the real work is done, writes Karen E. Todd, a registered dietitian who writes the Feed Your Brain blog for Psychology Today. Instead, she writes, we should prioritize our creative practices the same way we prioritize sleep, because both are essential for keeping our brains young. Even 10 minutes of creative activity can make a difference if you do it every day, she writes. And, as the study shows, the more time you spend on it, and the more expert you become, the greater that benefit will be. So pick up a paintbrush, guitar, camera, or notebook. Dive into a complex creativity-boosting game either online or in real life. Or put on your dancing shoes and sign up for tango lessons. Whatever you choose, make sure its something you enjoy, so that you are happy to make time for it and stick with it. Your brain will be happy you did. Theres a growing audience of Inc.com readers who receive a daily text from me with a self-care or motivational micro-challenge or tip. Often, they text me back and we wind up in a conversation. (Want to know more? Heres some information about the texts and a special invitation to a two-month free trial.) Many of my subscribers are entrepreneurs or business leaders. They know how important it is for all of us to keep our brains as young as possible throughout our lives. Getting creative can be a fun way to do that. Should you give it a try?
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For a long time, I told myself I was choosing stability. I was working at a prestigious university, doing work that mattered, surrounded by smart people. The role had legitimacy and the paycheck came on the same day, in the same amount, every month. The path forward was clear and the structure well-defined. At that point in my liferaising very young kidsthat predictability felt not just comforting, but necessary. My work mattered, and it held up easily when I described it to others. I could justify why staying made sense. And yet, I was unhappy. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/11\/cupofambition.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/11\/cupofambition-mobile.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to A Cup of Ambition\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"A biweekly newsletter for high-achieving moms who value having a meaningful career \u003Cem\u003Eand\u003C\/em\u003E being an involved parent, by Jessica Wilen. To learn more visit \u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/acupofambition.substack.com\/\u0022\u003Eacupofambition.substack.com\u003C\/a\u003E.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"SIGN UP","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/acupofambition.substack.com\/","theme":{"bg":"#f5f5f5","text":"#000000","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#000000","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91454061,"imageMobileId":91454062,"shareable":false,"slug":""}} Not in a dramatic, crisis-driven way. There was no single bad boss or catastrophic moment that forced my hand. It was quieter than that. A low-grade, persistent sense that I was out of alignment with myself. A feeling that I was expending more energy maintaining the arrangement than the work itself required. The tricky part was that I already knew what I wanted. I wanted to leave and build my own business full-time. I had started it on the side. I had a growing number of clients and the work energized me. I felt more like myself doing that work than I had in years. Still, I stayed in my academic role far longer than I needed to. The explanation I gaveover and over againwas the same: I like stability. I didnt want to lose a consistent monthly paycheck. I was being cautious, responsible, and thoughtful. All of that was true. And also not the whole truth. What I can see now is that stability was doing a lot of emotional labor for me. It allowed me to avoid naming something harder and more uncomfortable: I was stuck and I was playing it small. When stability and stuckness look the same This distinctionbetween choosing stability and being stuckis one I see constantly in my coaching work. And its not an easy one to make, because culturally, we tend to reward staying put. We admire endurance and praise loyalty. And the more together your life looks from the outside, the harder it can be to question whether staying is still serving you. But psychologically, stability and stuckness can feel almost identical from the inside. Both involve staying. Both involve tolerating discomfort. Both can be justified with perfectly reasonable explanations. The difference isnt in the external facts of your life. Its in your internal relationship to them. When youre choosing stability, theres usually a sense of agency underneath it. Even if the situation isnt ideal, the decision feels settled. Youre not constantly renegotiating it in your head. You know why youre there and the trade-offs feel conscious. When youre stuck, the decision never quite lands. You keep revisiting the same questions without moving forward. You tell yourself stories about why now isnt the right time, but those stories keep changing. Theres often a low-level irritabilitytoward your work, your schedule, often even yourselfthat doesnt resolve with rest or time off. For me, the clearest signal was how much mental energy I spent justifying staying. If the choice had really been aligned, I wouldnt have needed to keep convincing myself. What stability was really protecting Instead, I was always explaining myself. I had a reason for everything. It wasnt practical. It was risky. It wasnt the right moment. Eventually, I realized how much energy I was spending justifying a decision I claimed to feel good about. Stability does something important for us. It regulates anxiety. Predictable income, clear roles, and familiar routines create a sense of containment that makes the rest of life possible. They reduce the cognitive and emotional load of uncertainty. When youre already carrying a lotchildren, relationships, aging parents, health, a world that feels increasingly fragileit makes sense to protect whats steady. Trust me, I get it. So when someone says, I value stability, I tend to believe them. I value it too. But heres the part we often skip over: fear and stability are frequently entangled. And when we dont separate them, stability can quietly become a cover story for fearfear of failing, fear of being exposed, fear of discovering that were not as capable or competent as we hope we are. In my case, the paycheck wasnt just money. It was proof. Proof that I was legitimate. Proof that I hadnt made a reckless mistake. Proof that I still belonged in a system that knew how to recognize me. Letting go of that wasnt only a financial decision. It was an identity one. Thats one reason stuckness can persist for so long. It often protects more than our income. It protects our sense of self and our story about who we are. The version of us that other people understand without explanation. A few ways to tell the difference This isnt about pressuring yourself to make a big shift. Its about getting more precise. One thing I pay attention to now is the quality of my reasoning. Does it feel calm and grounded, or repetitive and defensive? Calm reasoning has space in it; defensive reasoning loops and spirals. I also get specific about what Im actually protecting. When we say were protecting stability, it helps to finish the sentence. Stability of income? Stability of identity? Stability of other peoples expectations? Vagueness tends to keep us stuck. Time language matters too. Stuckness lives in someday. Someday when things settle down. Someday when I feel more confident. Stability usually comes with a clearer horizon: For the next year, Im choosing this because And then theres the shift from abstraction to action. You dont have to blow anything up to stop being stuck, but you do have to make something concrete. Run the numbers instead of imagining them. Set a decision deadline. Increase your commitment to the thing you say you want, rather than keeping it safely on the side. Finally, I listen for where Im outsourcing authority. Am I deferring to a version of being responsible that no longer reflects my actual values or life stage? Am I living by a script I inherited rather than one I consciously chose? Redefining stability Leaving academia didnt mean I stopped valuing stability. It meant I redefined it. Stability, for me now, includes agency and alignment. It includes trusting my ability to build something rather than relying on a single institution to hold me. That version of stability isnt as nea, but its far more honest. I didnt leap blindly. I planned, I built a runway, I tolerated discomfort. And yes, there was fear. But fear turned out not to be a signal that I was doing something wrong. It was a signal that I was doing something consequential. You dont owe anyone a dramatic reinvention. But you do owe yourself honesty about whether youre groundedor just standing still. Clarity rarely comes from thinking harder. It comes from telling yourself the truth more precisely. And in my experience, thats often the first real form of stability. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/11\/cupofambition.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/11\/cupofambition-mobile.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to A Cup of Ambition\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"A biweekly newsletter for high-achieving moms who value having a meaningful career \u003Cem\u003Eand\u003C\/em\u003E being an involved parent, by Jessica Wilen. 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