Marshall's rule: stop chasing perfection; raise your adherence rate. Nobody goes a lifetime without missing a workout, a meditation, a review — "perfection is a fool's errand," and statistics apply to you. So establish a baseline of how often a practice breaks down, then stack advantages to do it more often. Adherence rate is simply "doing what you want to be doing." If you eat junk most of the time and cut that in half without bingeing on the other half, you've done better — full stop. His favorite example: a nutritionist's advice to fill half your plate with vegetables every meal. Why it works isn't nutrition science — it's that you physically can't eat much junk once half the plate is vegetables. It raises the *adherence rate* of eating well. This folds in his closing rule, "mastery is a process": the goal is never to be perfect but to do better than last week, last month, last year. Every fall-off is information to get a little stronger, not a verdict. Cross-domain: diet, exercise, study habits, writing streaks, any recurring practice. --- *Source: [[Book Inventory/Progression|Progression]] (Sebastian Marshall, 2016) — Upstream Effects #9 — Adherence and Mastery*