My maladaptive perfectionism predisposes me to associate results with self-worth. Couple that with the automatic negative thoughts and cognitive distortions that come together with anxiety and depression, the result is my strong belief in my worthlessness. A solution I’m experimenting with to cope with that belief is to ignore results entirely and put my full focus on taking actions. It might be a bit extreme but it’s just an experiment so it shouldn’t be too harmful.

The basic idea is to orient my life towards actions. One major shift is to stop putting too much emphasis on goals and instead devote close to 100% of my attention on systems. I’m a centrist on the whole goals vs systems debate; I actually hate the one-sided justifications peddled by both the pro-goals and pro-systems evangelists as if goals and systems are mutually exclusive. But in this experiment, I’ll go exclusively systems-based just to see if my life feels a little better that way. Note the word “feel” here: what I want to see it’s possible to experience a stronger sense of self-worth through actions alone. And to go all meta, I’ll try to not think about the results of the experiment and just focus on carrying it out without any hypothesis or expectations.