Act less, think more. Reflect on what really matters to you. Stop doing anything that isn’t valuable, that doesn’t make you happy. Savor life.

This advice goes against the grain as self-help authors usually suggest to behave the other way around: think less, and act more. The danger in acting more than thinking is that eventually you’ll find yourself working on goals you don’t really care that much about or doing things in a less than optimal way.

For example, when I was working on my fitness goals, I acted a lot. I religiously followed my workout schedule and did everything I could to build a strong body, including eating foods recommended for bodybuilders, recording videos of my lifts to improve my technique, and even hiring a fitness coach.

I acted a lot, but thought too little.

It was only when I stopped and reflected on what mattered to me that I realized that I had never wanted to be a bodybuilder. I was following the wrong ideal, chasing something that didn’t make me happy or produce any visible results. Upon this realization, I redesigned my entire approach to fitness and started doing something that finally felt natural instead of forced.

Periodically pause and reflect on your own choices. Are you pursuing goals that matter to you? Are you working on your goals in a way that fits your lifestyle, or is there imbalance and disharmony?

If you are pained by any external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs you, but your own judgment about it. And it is in your power to wipe out this judgment now.

When people who are on a diet slip up, it’s not that one-off slip-up that causes them to fail; it’s their judgment about it, namely persuading themselves that since they made a mistake, all of their prior efforts are now for naught. What follows is self-guilt, which leads to self-doubt, which awakens the need to self-comfort, usually by eating forbidden foods (after all, in their minds they’ve already lost) and subsequently ruining their entire diet.

A similar phenomenon happens with other goals, too. A person saving money who was forced to spend their entire savings on an emergency expense might consider it a reason to stop saving money. What’s the point of saving if one unplanned cost can wipe out the entire fund? Their incorrect judgment of the situation subsequently destroys the positive habit they’ve built, instead of seeing the situation as a powerful demonstration of how important saving money is.

Whenever you find yourself doubting that you can achieve your goal because you made a mistake or failed to hold out against a temptation, remind yourself that it’s in your power to give this event either a negative or a positive meaning; you can consider it as a reason to give up or as a valuable lesson that will help you in your future endeavors.