Do things with love, that is with “warmth”, care, focus, and a positive attitude.

Notes

• This is one of the most powerful and clarifying heuristics I know. It works on micro and macro scale. Whenever I am confused, overwhelmed, I feel I did a mistake I revert to it.
• Micro scale example. If I am confused one of the few reliable solution is „to start where I am” and focus on this one thing you I doing and do it with love. If I am walking, I am just gonna focus on placing my feet with love, attention and care. If I am doing yoga. I will just try to do the movement I am doing with focus, precision, and invest a sense of “warmth” into it.
• Macro scale example. Doing things with love acts as an antidote to our default state of being unfulfilled and constantly desiring more. It helps in revealing ourselves to the world and in handling concerns about how others judge us, like when the following thoughts arise "Can I say this, publish this, appear like this? Is this good enough? Am I enough?". Or it’s a remedy in the face of complex and significant decisions, when I'm overwhelmed and can't figure everything out. When overwhelmed by such thoughts, I find it effective to say that’s okay, concentrate on the task in front of me with care and attention. If I decide to do that, to just start doing things with love, care, and attention, often the sense of harmony emerges, and everything else gradually starts falling into place.
• I believe there is something universal about this approach. It counters our hierarchical minds, our negativity bias, and our evolutionary inclination to focus on the negative.
• To do things with love may mean doing fewer things, but doing them better

Examples

A friend told me – the strongest people he knows are ones who love lifting weights. The most stretched people are the ones who love stretching. Eg. he has friends who do splits and fall asleep stretching at the parties.

Naval Ravikant mentions the same approach when it comes to reading. If you love learning, don't force yourself to read books; instead, cultivate a habit of enjoying reading.

Peter Fischli, one of my fav artist, said something similar to my friend. As an artist, you can do almost anything. But this anything can be done either sloppily or approached with care, attention and executed with the highest quality.

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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