## Highlights ‘Should’ is a canary in the coal mine for the deficit mindset because it captures the two core tendencies involved: 1. measuring ourselves against a receding horizon of idealised expectations, and 2. seeing ourselves as failing to meet those expectations in a way that could, would, should have been avoided, if only we were better. The first rule of the deficit mindset is that there is no excuse for being in deficit. --- No surprise, then, that people who recognise themselves in a description like this often just wind up adding Get rid of deficit thinking to the list of things they should have already done, right after flossing twice a day and getting back to being fluent in French. --- ‘Should’ tells us there’s a rule, which we naturally won’t want to follow — otherwise there wouldn’t need to be a rule about it. So when we don’t follow it, the reason is clear: we’re bad at controlling our natural inclinations. The only relevant responses are apply rule harder and become less bad. --- We never need to look any further because our badness is always ready to hand as the answer — no investigation required. Nothing to see here, folks, we won’t be needing the ol’ pre-frontal cortex for this one! --- The whole stupefying system of ‘should’ rests on our conviction that we’re inherently terrible at self-discipline, which means there’s no analysis required to understand why we can’t do the things we know we want to do. ---