It sounds like you’ve been aiming very high. That’s awesome, but it is important to continually remind ourselves that we’re doing it. One great advantage of aiming high is of course that we can win big, but another is that when we fail, it feels just sort of neutral because that was the most likely outcome all long. But for that it is important for us to continually remind ourselves that we’re aiming high.
What I also like to do is Nate’s care-o-meter frying in reverse. My System 2 is ecstatic about having a high expected impact spread thin across hundreds of thousands of people in the future (adapt the numbers for your case), but my System 1 wants to see and feel something, so I let it have that but imagining a fraction of my impact small enough and condensed enough to be feelable. And when that tiny fraction already feels so fulfilling, then, System 2 concludes, the entirely of the impact must’ve been worth every minute of my work no matter that it in turn is only a tiny fraction of a solution to the enormity of the problem.
It sounds like you’ve been aiming very high. That’s awesome, but it is important to continually remind ourselves that we’re doing it. One great advantage of aiming high is of course that we can win big, but another is that when we fail, it feels just sort of neutral because that was the most likely outcome all long. But for that it is important for us to continually remind ourselves that we’re aiming high.
What I also like to do is Nate’s care-o-meter frying in reverse. My System 2 is ecstatic about having a high expected impact spread thin across hundreds of thousands of people in the future (adapt the numbers for your case), but my System 1 wants to see and feel something, so I let it have that but imagining a fraction of my impact small enough and condensed enough to be feelable. And when that tiny fraction already feels so fulfilling, then, System 2 concludes, the entirely of the impact must’ve been worth every minute of my work no matter that it in turn is only a tiny fraction of a solution to the enormity of the problem.