Centipede’s dilemma
The Centipede’s Dilemma: ask a centipede which of its hundred legs is quickest and the creature stalls, tangled in thought. Motion that was automatic now demands conscious coordination, and the once-smooth gait collapses. When instinctive action is dragged under the spotlight of analysis, performance often worsens.
A shelf crowded with non-fiction can do the same to the mind. Each new framework poses another “fastest-leg” question: Which habit? Which metric? Which purpose? Ideas accumulate faster than they integrate, and momentum gives way to hesitancy.
An antidote is deliberate scarcity: one well-chosen book carried for six months. The goal is not completion but conversion; sentences turned into routines, concepts tested against reality. Depth replaces novelty; practice supplants theorizing.
Ignore the urge to chase fresh titles. Let repetition roughen the insights until they fit the hand like tools, not trophies. By the end, pages may remain unread, yet the book will feel lived rather than finished.
What shifts when a single idea is allowed to run uninterrupted to January? Movement may regain its rhythm, and the legs, their speed.