[HN Gopher] Spiraling into Control (2013)
___________________________________________________________________
Spiraling into Control (2013)
Author : quickthrower2
Score : 53 points
Date : 2023-10-11 10:57 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.beeminder.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.beeminder.com)
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| > The confidence damage from failing is still huge compared to
| the confidence boost from succeeding
|
| Not if you practice at failing, and get good at it. I can fail to
| get out of bed in the morning and feel fine about that. In fact,
| feeling OK about it was the key to getting over my depression.
|
| I had a really nasty inner critic, that used to beat me up over
| every little failing I had. Hard to sleep at night when my inner
| critic was going over every aspect of the day and making sure I
| knew exactly how badly I'd done.
|
| Accepting that I'm not a perfect human being was the key to
| getting over it. I will fail at things. A lot. It's OK. I'm not a
| perfect human being. Allowing myself to fail also allows me to
| experiment with things, to see what works, because it doesn't
| matter if I fail.
|
| So yeah. I'd be snug in bed, reminded that I hadn't exercised,
| and stay there without a qualm. Life's too short to get that hung
| up on succeeding at every little thing.
| valyagolev wrote:
| there should be an alternative cult of patiently and kindly
| listening to one's needs and wants rather than overriding them
| with force (or little monetary incentives). i mean, there's
| already a bunch of those cults, but if you mention them around
| here you'll quickly learn that those methods are not
| "effective" (at forcing any kind of premeditated results)
| K0balt wrote:
| I there is a strange little book called "the care and feeding
| of homo sentiens" that approaches this subject through a
| stoic paradigm.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| thanks for the tip, I'll search it out :)
| gexla wrote:
| I was going to post something like this. I would even argue
| that you didn't fail. You did exactly what you actually
| desired
|
| This is an opportunity to introspect on why your actions
| didn't align with whatever goals you set. Maybe you don't
| actually want to reach the goal at all.
|
| As with anything else. The value of the journey isn't an
| illusionary destination, but rather what you learn along the
| way. You'll likely find that you don't follow the path you
| imagined, likely because you found something more exciting
| along the way.
|
| It's as if the goal is some sort of sacred object for change
| rather than something to be obtained.
| kqr wrote:
| This is an unhelpfully reductive view of needs and wants.
| Many of the systems humans have in place for regulating
| behaviour towards needs and goals are intensely focused on
| the short term.
|
| The point of these incentives is not to override your actual
| long-term needs and wants, but rather to artificially bring
| their consequences up to the near term so that you work with
| your inherited systems rather than against them.
|
| You shouldn't set a goal to exercise daily if doing so makes
| you feel bad. You should set that goal specifically when you
| have recognized it makes you overall feel better, even if it
| costs a discomfort in the moment.
|
| Some people can easily align their behaviour with their long
| term needs and wants. If you are such a person, these
| incentive structures will not help you and you will be
| confused about the need for it.
| valyagolev wrote:
| > You shouldn't set a goal to exercise daily if doing so
| makes you feel bad.
|
| Daily is probably excessive, but regular exercise will very
| likely be a bit unpleasant for most people, and that's not
| really a reason to avoid it.
|
| My comment was not about avoiding unpleasure. My comment
| was about learning to listen to yourself, instead of
| tricking and forcing yourself as the default mode of
| behavior. Unpleasure is a very interesting and helpful
| thing when you're learning to understand yourself, by the
| way. But only if you pay attention, rather than "Use every
| motivation strategy you know, every trick in the book".
|
| What scares me is that such a method might end up just
| overriding any kind of long-term-goal adjustment from the
| inside. If you force yourself to write daily (and god
| forbid, publish what you wrote!), do you know how to make
| this forced writing actually attentive to yourself? Or do
| you just do it because you promised yourself, and ignore
| any inner protest? Could it end up a daily article about,
| say... forcing oneself to write?
| kqr wrote:
| > regular exercise will very likely be a bit unpleasant
| for most people, and that's not really a reason to avoid
| it.
|
| My point is that there is a group of people for whom that
| _is_ practically reason to avoid it. The unpleasure is
| large enough that it doesn 't happen.
|
| Some people can force themselves by just "listening to
| themselves" whereas others get more mileage out of first
| listening to themselves, and then setting up a commitment
| scheme.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| completely agree - being ok with your own failings is a step
| forward not backwards
| gnz11 wrote:
| Not to mention that so much of life is simply out of our
| control.
| theyinwhy wrote:
| Alternative subtitle: Someone is great in throwing medicine balls
| on a regular basis and really wants to let you know about it.
| skrebbel wrote:
| Am I reading the graph right that this guy poured $70.000 into
| some habit building app?
| joisig wrote:
| It's the total amount of money he'd be paying to Beeminder if
| he failed all his goals (money at risk).
| joisig wrote:
| I'm a very long-time Beeminder user and would recommend it to
| anybody looking for another motivational mechanism. It's not
| always the best approach to motivation, but for certain types of
| goals like "work out frequently enough", the one-week "akrasia
| horizon" which kind of means you're mentally committing to work
| by your future self rather than your present self (and as your
| present self you can only un-commit with a week's notice), along
| with staying on a good-enough-on-average "yellow brick road" as
| they call it, is a game-changer.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| Me too. Beeminder was part of how I quit drinking.
|
| I just logged one dot manually every day, at the end of the
| day, when I had managed to shrug it off. It was very difficult
| at first but I knew I had to keep going. About four months in I
| bought a pizza to celebrate 100 days, and the habit has stuck
| ever since. Recently I got myself kebab for 365 days without a
| drop.
|
| https://www.beeminder.com/resonant_pyre/days-since-drinking
| kqr wrote:
| I just signed up. I think the way they explain in blog posts
| how they navigate a very tricky business model ("pay us when
| you fail" is the mother of perverse incentives) is highly
| admirable.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > Turn "study Chinese for half an hour a day" into "study Chinese
| for at least one second, five days a week."
|
| This approach is immensely valuable for tasks where the real
| problem is _initiating_ rather than persisting... And at least
| for me, there 's a lot of that.
|
| Once I've done the context-switch, the task is often not nearly
| as painful/stressing/etc. as my subconscious mind likes to keep
| believing. Sometimes it even switches from "it's not worth it to
| do this now" to "it's not worth it to _not_ finish this since I
| 'm already here."
| spiffytech wrote:
| This is the premise behind a lot of those habit books. I think
| it was popularized by BJ Fogg's _Tiny Habits_.
|
| A common example is "commit to flossing just one tooth, so
| you're not overwhelmed with the commitment of flossing your
| whole mouth. If you feel like doing more once you've started,
| that's fine.".
|
| What those books often don't point out is that this approach
| doesn't work if you're actively avoidant of the habit you want
| to build. The approach solves forgetfulness or intimidation,
| not distaste.
|
| I bring this up because I read several of these books without
| getting results and kept wondering what I was doing wrong.
| valenceelectron wrote:
| Did you find a solution for tasks you actively avoid? Asking
| for a friend that needs to finish a thesis...
| spiffytech wrote:
| For myself, it's very "it depends".
|
| Beeminder was helpful for smaller habits, but I'm too
| scared to pledge a truly painful amount of money, so the
| cost of failure was often too low to motivate me.
|
| When possible, I've found that simply moving to a new
| setting is helpful. I can crank through tedious tasks if I
| go somewhere other people are being productive. I like the
| university library (I graduated long ago, but it's free and
| open to the public).
|
| I work well when I have externally-exposed structure. I
| reliably make it to the gym when I have a standing
| appointment with a personal trainer. Working a job with a
| fixed schedule is easier for me than working a flexible
| schedule. Back in college, I struggled to keep up with
| homework but I almost never missed a class.
|
| Sometimes I'm surprised at why I'm avoiding something. I
| thought I just hated doing the dishes, but when I added a
| clean/dirty marker to the dishwasher I magically started
| staying on top of it. Turns out the blocker wasn't the
| chore, it was needing to figure out whether the dishwasher
| was ready for dirty dishes each and every time I finished
| eating. Once I no longer had to assess & decide, I could
| simply _act_
|
| Similarly, if there's a technical task on having trouble
| getting started with, it goes a lot easier if I just break
| it down into the most itty-bitty steps I can think of.
| Sometimes I'm not avoiding the task, but figuring out what
| the task is.
| valenceelectron wrote:
| Thanks for your insights. At the end it's a very personal
| thing that varies a lot among people. Your statement
| about the setting is also very much true for me. I do
| work better in public settings and enjoy the atmosphere
| of people working around me. Interestingly, this effect
| seems to wear off. A certain location does not help
| indefinitely. Switching it up alleviates this problem.
| But maybe that's just me.
|
| Unfortunately, the university library is inconveniently
| far from my new apartment and the local library has
| opening hours that are incompatible with my full-time
| job. Well, I'll find a way.
| vonnik wrote:
| Was going to recommend Tiny Habits.
|
| The Beeminder thing is such a pressure cooker of motivation,
| when you can achieve so much by finding the right context and
| trigger for a small action.
| dkarl wrote:
| > There are many tricks to becoming a fail-proof superhuman, many
| of which I detail in my book
|
| Good lord is this cringey.
|
| > The confidence damage from failing is still huge compared to
| the confidence boost from succeeding, so to do success spirals
| right, you don't ever want to fail a goal. But how can you
| completely stop failing when you're starting off as a normal
| human who wins some and loses some? Just trying harder isn't
| going to work.
|
| Okay, so this vulnerable phase in changing your behavior is real,
| though I would frame the problem and the solution differently.
|
| The problem: deep down, your brain thinks you're paying a cost
| for no benefit, so it's trying to stop you.
|
| The goal: through repeated success, you educate your brain about
| the benefits of the new behavior, inculcating a deep conviction
| that you're benefiting from it, so your subconscious mind and
| your conscious mind will both be on your side.
|
| The problem is that when you fail, you're teaching your brain to
| associate the effort with failure instead of success, and not
| just failure, but a deeper failure than you feel when you don't
| try.
|
| So you need to make it through this vulnerable time, repeatedly
| exposing your brain to the learning experience via sheer effort
| and a lot of tricks such as making your environment supportive,
| etc., copiously documented elsewhere.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-10-12 21:02 UTC)