“Default settings—both in software and in our lives—are most helpful when we wouldn’t know where to begin otherwise. But that ignorance is temporary. We’ll always have default settings—shortcuts for making decisions, patterns of behaviors, and habits—but we don’t need to hold on to our original settings over time. When we have limited time, we don’t want to waste it on things that don’t move our goals forward. “Greatness,” as American historian James Harvey Robinson said, is “courage in escaping from old ideas and old standards.”