It doesn't matter if the previous play was the…

It doesn't matter if the previous play was the best or worst of your career. Rituals force the mind to focus on the next play, not the last one.

— from Expanding Your Range (Growth/Change/Education/Learning/Habit) · Clear Thinking: The Art and Science of Making Better Decisions by Shane Parrish

In the book

Remember that what you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while, and that mastering the basics, ruthlessly, beats forever chasing some secret or shortcut. Where a habit merely automates, a ritual animates — the same action, done with meaning and attention, becomes a generator of feeling and not just efficiency, and like an athlete's pre-shot routine it pulls your focus onto the next play rather than the last one. This is how mastery is actually built: nobody develops an extraordinary ability without enormous practice, the high performers all keep a handful of nonnegotiable trademark behaviors and simply refuse to break them, and the way the masters sustain that practice is by making it a habit, set into the same hour of every day. — Expanding Your Range (Growth/Change/Education/Learning/Habit)

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