One of my weaknesses is that I am addicted to dopamine. Every morning, I make a task list for the day and every time I can tick a box, I get a little dopamine boost that makes me feel good for a while. Do that every hour or two and you get through the day feeling pretty good about yourself and about life. The problem is that even though I am ticking boxes, these actions do not necessarily get me closer to my long term and life goals. Some of it is just busywork that makes me feel good, but doesn’t really get me any closer to what I hope to accomplish in my life. The solution is, of course, obvious: spend enough time thinking about my goals and about how to operationalize these. But while I am doing that open-ended thinking, I won’t be collecting any dopamine kicks. And my experience is that I really need to go deep for several hours before I start to get real, relevant results. It’s of course much easier to instead pick up an urgent, but unimportant, task, complete it and bask in the dopamine for a bit. So, as I keep challenging you this week: are you a dopamine junkie? Or are all your actions directly supporting your long term and life goals?