Do things with love. Invest warmth, care, and focus in whatever you do. Whenever I am confused, overwhelmed, or feel like I made a mistake, I try to revert to this simple heuristic: start where I am, focus on this one thing I am doing, and do it with love. In practice it means

• When I am walking, I will focus on placing my feet with attention and care
• In a meeting, I will give my complete attention to the person in front of me
• When I am doing dishes I will treat it as a meditative task and invest attention and care in every movement.

Effects

• On a broader level, doing things with love is an antidote to
  • feeling unfulfilled, always wanting more, and
  • our evolutionary tendency for Negativity bias.
• To do things with love may mean doing fewer things, but doing them better.
• It helps in self-expression, addressing Hierarchy bias 🎨, fears of judgment, like, "Can I say this, publish this, appear like this? Is this good enough? Am I enough?"
• It can also be a remedy in the face of complex and significant decisions. When overwhelmed or in doubt and I remember approaching things with love, a sense of harmony emerges, and things start falling into place.

Further examples

• Feeling grateful is very similar feeling, maybe it’s the same?
• A friend told me – the strongest people he knows are the ones who love lifting weights. The most flexible people are those who love stretching. The most stretched people I know love stretching and fall asleep in a weird
• Naval Ravikant mentions the same approach when it comes to reading. If you love learning, don't force yourself to read ambitious books; instead, select works that you would enjoy reading. This would help you expand your knowledge organically.
• Ai Weiwei's father, Ai Qing, was both an artist and one of China's most revered contemporary poets, who as a young man studied Baudelaire and Mayakovski in Paris … he ran afoul of the Communist Party for subtly criticizing its suppression of free speech. The party exiled him, first to Manchuria, then to remotest northwest China; Siberia, essentially… Mr. Ai and his family lived in a hut dug into the ground. His job for the next 16 years was to clean out the village's public toilets.,,"He was 60 years old. He had never done physical work in his life and he had to start doing it," his son said. "Every night, he comes home very, very dirty. But he says, 'For 60 years, I don't know who cleans my toilets. So now I do something for them.',,"That's something I learned from him. He became very powerful in terms of his thinking. He made the toilet so clean, he would see it as a work of art --- like a museum, like MoMA." via New York Times

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