The Education of Axel Heyst

Where are you and where are you going?
classical_Liberal
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by classical_Liberal »

@7WB5
Not commuting suicide is very different than being motivated. But assuming a correlation, that stat simply goes to prove my point. Most women with 7 kids are more likely to have less time and money than one with 0 or 2. Causing them to significantly value any excess of both, and remain motivated to using them effectively. Also, hungry offspring are probably good long term motivation to continue the 30+ year commitment of raising 7 kids, even when flow or stoke is hard to come by. Or even boredom, if the last would be possible.

PS good to interact with you again. :D

7Wannabe5
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Right, but within the context of ERE, you could “adopt” 3 soon to be extinct species, 2 acres of abandoned strip mall asphalt, one 9 year old boy in juvenile detention in Chiraq, and 1 yet to be born likely to drown Bengali baby. Obviously, doing that would make the Save Up Enough Money to Support Future Me game as boring as Tic Tac Toe.

I swear it’s like you guys sometimes don’t even know how life works. First you grow up, then you accumulate resources, then you have babies. Duh.

Western Red Cedar
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Western Red Cedar »

AxelHeyst wrote:
Wed Aug 11, 2021 4:45 pm
I think there is a relationship between motivation and personality type. It is important to know yourself well enough to set up a system of accountability to follow through. That could be internal, or external.

One thing I've noticed about myself after taking either months or years off of work is that I don't seem to have the motivation to follow through persistently after months working on a goal. I'll often take pretty significant steps, but may bail when things get pretty tough. If I have a boss or professor looking over my shoulder, I typically grind through things. One positive facet of work or school is that it creates external accountability for me to keep plugging away when things I want to do are no longer fun, pleasurable, or interesting. Often times, in hindsight, I'm glad I persevered.

It's something that lingers in the back of my mind as I consider my lifestyle after a traditional career. I need to develop environments that will help hold me accountable and spark some motivation.

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

Motivation != Willpower
I think it's important to make the distinction between motivation and willpower, as Jacob does in his post. Motivation has more to do with one's Why. Why do I keep my kitchen clean? Because otherwise my partner will be disgusted with me (extrinsic) or Because I like living in a tidy living space (intrinsic).

Willpower is one's power to stick with something and see it through. I know I've used the term motivation sloppily, because colloquially we say things like "ugh I've lost motivation for this", which isn't necessarily true, it might more accurate to say "I've lost willpower to do this". Your why remains the same, either intrinsic or extrinsic, you just haven't got the oomph to see it through for whatever reason.

If "not following through" is a problem, the analysis will be more fruitful if motivation and willpower are properly regarded.

An example of a legit motivation problem is last winter's shipping container build. Things were going fine, and then my roommate and I changed our deal so it was *his* shipping container and I was building it for him, and he'd pay me for it. He started micromanaging, and I stopped giving a shit, within a week, and progress ground to a halt. It's because my motivation had switched from intrinsic (I want to do a dope container build) to extrinsic (I'm doing this because roommate is paying me), and that wasn't a strong enough Why because I had a job at the time and a stash, so the reward was too small compared to the effort required. We quickly reverted to the previous deal where my motivation was mostly intrinsic and I magically got excited about the build again.

But why was intrinsic stronger here? I think it's because I have a strong belief in my growing identity as a dirtbag-builder. I have this strong internal vision that in a number of years I could actually be a pretty decent builder of dirtbag stuff and natural buildings. Getting paid for this work is fine, but that vision requires that I have a fair amount of autonomy/agency on the build, and my roommate's micromanaging just killed that aspect of it for me, just sucked all of the intrinsic motivation out of the project. (However, if he was going to pay me a million dollars for it, I assume that would have been a strong enough extrinsic reward for me to stick with it).

An example of a willpower issue would be those days when, despite having healthy intrinsic motivation, I just felt like a meatball and didn't want to do anything. I think willpower issues tend to be more tactical: it was cold, I was tired of having DGF huff at me for making loud noises with tools while she was trying to do art, I was injured, my toes hurt, work was stressful, etc. The environment just made it difficult to approach the work fresh and full of energy.

It seems to me, then, that a process for analyzing "gettin' stuff done" issues must first look at motivation-related issues and then look at willpower related issues.

Motivation Check:
....Why are you doing this? (note if it's intrinsic or extrinsic)
......No, but really, WHY are you doing this? (repeat as many times as necessary)
....If extrinsic: do you really care if you achieve that reward or avoid that pain? Like, who cares? If the reward is money, do you even need it? Have you YMOYL'd the life-energy? If it's a punishment you're trying to avoid, do you actually care? Can you just take the hit, get it over with, and move on? Is it a difficult conversation, maybe a loss of face (admitting defeat/that you were wrong to start the project), or a shame/cultural norm issue?
....If intrinsic: is this *really* who you want to be? Is your vision super strong? Can you do anything to strengthen that vision, really make that belief about yourself tangible and enticing? Is it *really* your idea about who you are, or is it a culturally constructed narrative you've just gone along with? Is it something you do genuinely enjoy, just not so much that you're stoked to do a 6-month major project, and you'd have more fun scaling it back?
....Cross-check: is it something that is normally intrinsically motivating for you, but somehow an extrinsic reward/punishment got thrown into the mix? (Science shows when you add extrinsic motivation sources to an activity that people used to find intrinsically motivating, their intrinsic motivation dies down).

If the motivation check is all g2g, then do a
Willpower and/Or Discipline Check:
Am I stressed and overwhelmed? How's my constitution, am I worn down? Have I taken any breaks recently? Have I been eating junk, or not sleeping well? Have I been isolated too long and am lonely, or am I too distracted by the presence of other people that it's difficult to focus? Is it cold, or hot, out there? I think there's more here but I haven't dug into willpower issues in a while. (Relevant here is probably Angela Duckworth's "Grit", but it's been a few years since I read it.)

I think a good Why is almost always enough to get something off the ground, but is often insufficient to get the thing across the finish line. A nice "I want to have the physique of a gymnast" Why will get me to study up, build an initial routine, and do a week's worth of exercises, but it will require willpower and discipline to actually put in the years of work required to get me that physique. (Or rather, it will take willpower and discipline to put in enough votes for "I'm the sort of fellow who works out gymnast style N days a week" to settle into a self-identity belief, at which point intrinsic motivation will mostly take it from there.)

I also find it helpful to realize that my willpower is going to wax and wane, that it's unrealistic for me to maintain a high level of excitement for something constantly. Knowing that, it's easier to recognize when I'm just feeling low, and "force" myself to go through the motions to cruise through and maintain, and know that the excitement is going to come back if I just plod along a little bit further.

--

Time
It is interesting. I actually feel a greater sense of urgency to execute my projects, now that I have abundant free time (and 40-50 productive years ahead of me). I feel that I used w*rk as an easy excuse to beg off on all the stuff I wanted to do with my life - ah, can't, busy, stressed, don't even have time to think about planning a trip. Now that I have no good reason not to be doing X and Y and Z.... my urge to do them is much greater. This might, for me, be related to the next section:

Ultimate Motivation
Suicide is extremely relevant to motivation, at least for me. A big reason I do anything is because the spectre of death is always over my shoulder - both just a simple knowledge of my own inevitable mortality, and the sneaking suspicion I've had for decades that life isn't actually, like, worth living, technically speaking. If you wanna get to the heart of it, for me, all my projects and structures and spreadsheets and hustle are simply my Sisyphean rock, in the sense of Camus. I have to imagine myself happy pushing the rock up the hill, otherwise the only obvious choice is to let go and settle into annihilation.

Anytime I get too lazy for too long, let my projects slip, there's death breathing down my neck. It's an interesting process. I do actually hold out hope that there is some kind of peace I can make with meaninglessness -- I believe that I could be wrong about life being not worth living, but I haven't figured out how to truly, deeply convince myself of that fact. Until I do, I have to maintain this tricky balance of lies and hustle to keep myself distracted from the horror of existence on the one hand, but read and research and probe into ways of accepting death on the other. It's like how some faint stars you have to look away from in order to be able to see, but in this case, if I stare too hard at where I know the star is, I'll die by my own hand. Fun game.

Super ultimate motivation?
A big Why that's been a common theme for all my projects since before I graduated college was my desire to Do Something about climate change, resource depletion, etc. I mostly farted around, banging between various forms of denialism and nihilism, for the past decade and a half, but that Why has been present in one form or another the whole time. And, now that I've grown up a bit and gotten some breathing room (thanks ERE!!), I feel for the first time able to actually conform my lifestyle to that theme.

Speaking of ERE, this "I want to be part of the solution" motivation is probably 90% of my Why for ERE. I want free time for myself... so that I can spend time thinking how to pioneer and communicate post-industrial ways of living. I want greater agency... so that I have the psychological freedom to take certain kinds of direct action risks that I'd be uncomfortable with if my livelihood relied on being "employable". I want a pile of money... so that I can't be tempted to corrupt my integrity by lucrative contracts. I want a mess of skills... so that I can run dharma workshops to teach others how to increase their own self-sufficiency so they too can collapse now and avoid the rush. I want to read a pile of books... because this problem is tricky, and requires a lot of study to even begin to wrap your head around the nature of the problem (give Timothy Merton's 'Being Eco' a skim for kicks, and explain how it's actionable, or why "is it actionable?" is the wrong question, but then also okay fine but what do I do next Tuesday?).

Rightly or wrongly, I *feel* situated to act as a sort of pioneer species in the process of human cultural succession, and a big part of my identity and self-belief is wrapped up in that. And the more aligned my actions get with that vision, the easier it gets. Activities that I used to be super stoked on, like downhill mountain biking or world traveling, I now just genuinely am not that interested in doing anymore, because they don't fit the Grand Narrative. This internal vision makes it easy to analyze my web for overall telicity. I can run a spot-check in an instant. I'm 100% at peace with selling my dh mountain bike (currently rebuilding the rear shock at the moment in preparation for craigslist). And I'm at the point where I can admit to myself that the RTW trip next year doesn't really fit, and my "well we can visit ecovillages and do workaway on organic farms" is probably a flimsy excuse. If my goal is to get a homestead up and running somewhere in the US, I should go find that land and start getting after it now, not waste a year wandering around the globe in different climates and cultures and burning huge amounts of jet fuel to do it.

The idea of not having access to a Why this strong actually fills me with existential dread. I have no idea how I'd get out of bed in the morning if it weren't for this.

oldbeyond
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by oldbeyond »

I think I am in a similar position to you with regards to motivation. If you lack it, developing your Why is a major undertaking, and really a pivot from your previous path. I feel that this might be yet another sticking point around WL5 for a lot of us. To move beyond “super efficient consumerism” into cultivating a suitable ecology for yourself, you need to really understand yourself and have a sense of self strong enough to articulate positive goals. Up to around WL5 you can get a lot of mileage out of negative ones (avoid debt, avoid consumerism, avoid junk food). And it’ll do you good. But if you stop there, your life will revolve around avoidance and likely not fulfill you. As one individuates, I think it gets easier to identify homeotelic behaviours and prune in themselves “good” activities that counteract your larger goals. Without a Why, how can you tell what is Good and what is Bad? I’m still in the early stages of this process, but it has removed a lot of cognitive dissonance and guilt.

I also find that it decreases existential angst. In trying to create a game for myself and striving to play it well, I am in a sense creating meaning. I have also found it easier to distance myself from the Egos plotting and connect with simply Being, not constantly but then and again. That might not be directly related to individuation, though. In some sense, all the schemes and plans you and I make are simply one little part of us. And your gut or your feet are not standing on the precipice, held back only by your noble quest for ecological living.

daylen
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by daylen »

Sounds to me like you are running up against the limitations of the mind. Definitions can be surrendered and scope can be expanded perpetually. Once the intrinsic and extrinsic align, the will of the universe flows through and around you. Quiet the mind as the gut and body take hold of the pervading and permeating energy. Question all, and in particular that which you deem axiomatic (a.k.a. automagical).

Well, that's enough mystic stage acting for me in one day. :)

Western Red Cedar
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Western Red Cedar »

That was a very thought-provoking post @AH. Thanks for spelling it out. After reading Jacob's original blog post again I see I was conflating the concepts of motivation and willpower.
AxelHeyst wrote:
Mon Aug 16, 2021 5:04 pm
Motivation != Willpower

It seems to me, then, that a process for analyzing "gettin' stuff done" issues must first look at motivation-related issues and then look at willpower related issues.
There was loads of great stuff in the post, but I'll focus on motivation and willpower for now. I realize now I actually have pretty strong intrinsic motivation for everything I do. In some instances, there may be a layer of extrinsic motivation here or there, but I've fundamentally designed my life around things I strongly believe in or value.

The real challenge for me comes down to willpower. That is where external accountability comes into play personally. I often need to develop a system with external checks to keep me on track to achieve certain personal or professional goals. At work, it is easy to put off reviewing court cases or policy papers on a sunny Friday afternoon rather than grinding though them. It is also easy to fill up my calendar with a bunch of endless meetings or focus on email - essentially neglecting the deep work for the more mundane.

I notice a similar dynamic at play for personal projects or hobbies. For example, I love to play guitar but probably only play a few times a week, for 2-3 hours. Most of that is probably playing one of the 50+ songs that I know and enjoy. I realize to get better I need to focus more on learning new songs, fingerpicking styles, scales, theory etc... That stuff represents the deep work in this example.

To riff on that example and the notion of external accountability a little more, you could look at the 10,000 hour rule. Malcolm Gladwell mentioned the Beatles relentless touring schedule in Germany (often fueled by booze and amphetamines) as one of the major ingredients for success in Outliers. They obviously had intrinsic motivation to become musicians, but it was the grueling schedule in their early years that taught them to play well together and become much better musicians.

I'm not sure where I'm really going with all of this, other than to say that I've noticed intrinsic motivation isn't nearly enough to help me achieve my personal goals. I need the external accountability to keep me on track. One potential drawback of the Renaissance or generalist focus is that one has so many interests it is easy to transition to something new when things get a little tough. That may limit the level of proficiency or expertise for certain skills. Of course, I've also noticed that spending a few hours on a task and then switching to something else feels quite natural and healthy. I think you mentioned a while back how good it felt to do some hard physical labor for an afternoon. It isn't something you would want to do for 40 hours per week, but feels good to do once or twice a week for a few hours here or there. I've noticed the same.

I suppose having a really clear sense of "why" as you mention is one way of fueling the willpower to persevere when projects aren't fun or get too tough. Not sure if any of this resonates @AH. Just curious what strategies or systems you have to help develop high proficiency or mastery - or is that even a goal?

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

That all resonates quite a bit @WRC, thanks for writing it up.

High proficiency and even mastery is a goal for me, in certain domains. I've started seeing my life as a network of S-curves, (and then also some s-curves cluster together to form a larger Composite S-curve) and on each S-curve there's a glowing dot that represents my level of proficiency at that activity. For a small handful of S-curves, I want that dot to be near the top. There's currently only one or two curves where I'm highly proficient. For other curves, I'm probably okay with the dot being at about the midpoint/steepest part of the curve.

Also, I'm going through a process of evaluating each S-curve and deciding if I actually care about it at all. If I decide I don't, I'm intentionally dropping it. That frees up more resources for the S-curves I actually care about.

I think I have to jump on your wagon: I mostly do stuff for intrinsic reasons, and struggle primarily with willpower. Monday and Tuesday this week I returned to my timeblock planning practice and felt great about the structure and what I was accomplishing. Then, yesterday, I had a bad day. It was all the things: my ankle hurt, my surgery hurt and I'm worried about it, my energy was low, existential dread was extra high, it was too hot in the shop to work on my bike, and the catastrophes of climate change seemed to be closing in and choking off any possibility of having a good rest of my life. As a result, I went off my timeblock plan, didn't accomplish barely anything, and watched Iron Man in the middle of the afternoon. If there had been alcohol or sugar in the house, I would have had too much of it.

Today I woke up and I've just been killing it. What's the difference? I wish I knew. I think part of it is recognizing that some days are just gonna suck, and the best thing to do is to go to sleep on that day as soon as possible without doing anything too stupid so you can try again the next day.
James Clear wrote:Never expect to fail, but always plan for it. The fastest way to get back on track is to have a plan for when you're off it.
I've gotten thrown off so many times because I didn't have a plan for when I failed. I took any slight failure as a catastrophe, as a reason to justify throwing my hands up. Cal Newport talks about how when things get crazy, the best move is to "face the productivity dragon", not to abandon your systems in despair, because that'll just make things worse. There's a certain courage, I think, that it takes to be able to both plan for failure, clearly realize it for what it is when it's happening, and brushing yourself and getting on with it. Whenever I daydream about futureAxel, he's never fucking up, he's just confidently executing and being a badass. So when I get to my future, and fuck something up, I suffer, because suffering = reality - expectations. Maybe I should incorporate handling fuckups and bad days well in my daydreams of myself.

I also think you're dead on with environmental design. This is "use your smart, weak brain to outthink your dumb, strong brain". There's two sides to environmental design for willpower: removing stuff that will cause you to do things you don't want to do, and adding stuff that will aid you in doing what you do want to do.

Smartweak Axel made sure not to buy any alcohol at the store, because he knew Strongdumb Axel would drink it even though we said "zero alcohol this week". But I'm in my parent's house at the moment, which has a dvd player and a stack of mostly crappy movies, which explains why I wasted 2 hours yesterday watching a movie I'd already seen with basically no redeeming value. Our paleolithic brains can't handle being in a candy store and not eating candy, so we gotta make sure we just don't go into candy stores. And most of our environments are insane candy stores (our phones are enough to turn us into slavering imbeciles if we aren't careful).

On the "add stuff to encourage what you want to do" side of things, if I want to read more, but I don't have a comfortable place to read books, that's a problem. I can pull an @Ego and find a nice fixer-upper antique chair at a swap and also maybe get a nice lamp, and a side table where I put my tea, and now I have an inviting reading chair. I'll inevitably read more, all things being equal. If you want to play your guitar more, it's probably better if it's out somewhere visible and inviting, all set up and ready to play, than if it's stuffed in a closet and you have to move the dining room table over and no one else can be in the house, etc. (I'm not saying that's all there is to it, just that this is one angle to evaluate.)

Accountability is also huge like you say. A technique is to commit to something that forces you to get better, practice, perform. For a while I committed to posting one piece of digital art every day, even if it sucked. I got way better and faster during that period. My first pieces were horrible, but after a few weeks, they were mostly kinda okay and every once in a while I made one that I thought was cool. But the main thing is I just got better, sharper, because of the practice.

I've gotten better at public speaking because I volunteered / said yes to speaking engagements that I wasn't ready for.

And of course, probably the main tactic is to eliminate the non-essential. It's difficult to devote yourself to something if you're also sorta devoting yourself to six other things. In the past year I've let go of serious mtb, serious climbing, vehicle-based dirtbagging, figure drawing, and a few other things. I probably have more stuff to let go of.
--
I was actually thinking about this this morning.... There's a *ton* of good thinking and writing being done about willpower and effectiveness and mastery and all that in the space of "workplace productivity". A lot of FIRE types are allergic to this sort of thing, because w*rk sux bro and Down with the Man and all that, and I get it, but also
Bruce Lee wrote:Absorb what is useful. Discard what is not. Add what is uniquely your own.
Cal Newport, Scott Young, James Clear, David Allen, Tim Ferriss, Robert Greene, and a host of others have *gold* for anyone willing to put in the effort. The stuff on the surface is fine, some is take it and some is leave it, but once you get a couple layers deep and actually pay attention to what they're saying, there's some really profound stuff in there.

I also find that consuming material from these types is generally inspiring for me, even if I'm not getting something specific. I can throw on a Cal Newport podcast and listen to it while making breakfast, and my willpower gets a noticeable boost even if he was just rambling about fixed-schedule productivity systems for undergrads. On Monday I was reading Ambrose's book Band of Brothers, the early parts where he talks about their training in the States, and then I went out and ran up a hill, even though before reading it I was on the verge of skipping training that day.

--

An anecdote about a pitfall with accountability: I've had the experience a couple times now where accountability backfired on me. I partnered up with someone, but they almost immediately fell off, and so our check-ins fell into a pattern of them saying "damn, I didn't do it, super busy", and me saying "uh, well I did it, but yeah super hard huh?". I almost felt bad for doing what I said I was going to do, because our check-ins felt like a thing where we noted that I was Doing Better than the other guy, and that doesn't feel good to me. So I actually had pressure to slack off to not make the other person feel so bad about themselves. Tall poppy syndrome. I was better off doing my own thing in those instances.

--

That was a lot of rambling. Let me try to break it down into a process.

1) Decide there's something I want to attain a higher level in.
2) Make sure it's not heterotelic to anything else.
3) Run an "identity motivation" visualization practice on it. Visualize the kind of person it is I'm trying to become, and what my life will be like, and how it'll feel. Start talking to myself in the present tense about being good at that thing.
4) Design a program to achieve that next level, leaning heavily on Scott Young and Cal Newport for the construction of that program, while taking into mind a lot of James Clear stuff. Here's the template I use for learning project design:
0:Project Name
1.0: What are you trying to learn?
1.1: What is the desired outcome?
1.2: Why do you want to know the thing? How will it improve your life?
1.3: How will you know when you are done?
2.0: What Materials are you going to use to learn? What's the curriculum?
3.0: How are you going to practice?
...Increase intensity, not volume.
...Distribute practice (1hr/day for 5 days > 5hrs in one day)
...Active recall should be >75% after initial information intake.
...Prioritize the hard/important stuff. Struggling? Home in on that material.
..Fix weak spots first, instead of repeatedly doing stuff you're bad okay at.
...Aim for level-of-use, as close to the actual activity as possible. When that's not possible, use drills to get specific skills and then go up a level.
The best practice activity:
The second best practice activity:
Don't use more than 2 learning techniques to start with.
3.1: Deadlines and milestones, including end date
3.2: Week-by-week Plan
4.0: At the halfway point, do a broad-insight Feynman Technique. ID weaknesses.
5.0: Final Feynman, recorded on video.
5) Recently, I've been playing with having 0-2 "main focus activities", and putting everything else on a "cruise" list. And explicitly writing it out. For me, it's a way to acknowledge that I can only make rapid progress on one, maybe two things at a time, and everything else has to be in somewhat of a maintenance mode. Things can be in the focus category for as short as a day at a time, but typically I think it's better for it to be there for at least several weeks at a time, until some milestone has been reached, and then it can drop back to cruise to gestate and something else can be focused on (or a break from focus can be taken).


[Pro tip: sometimes the forum makes you re-log in when you hit "submit". Before you do, get in the habit of selecting everything you wrote and CTRL-C'ing it. Then if the forum forces you to log in and loses your text, just paste it back in and bam. You're welcome.]

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mountainFrugal
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by mountainFrugal »

I really like your template. I would suggest a small addition that might go under 3.0... What is the 2 minute version of the activity that you could try to do no matter what? (James Clear)

white belt
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by white belt »

How much of motivation is nature vs nurture? How much of willpower/discipline is nature vs nurture?

Edit: I don’t want to come off as overly mystical. These questions stem from the fact that in my life I’ve seen a wide range of willpower among individuals*. Similarly, some people are able to “trick” (maybe not the right word) themselves by creating motivation to accomplish things in the most counter-intuitive of circumstances.

* = In the military, there is a lot of debate about whether physical fitness should be a component of job performance (especially for military jobs that are just 9-5 office gigs like in the corporate world). I used to think it was overrated, but I’ve definitely noticed a correlation between those who are physically fit and those who have a lot of willpower. And since much of military work is doing things that are unpleasant/you don’t want to do, that serves as a good predictor of job performance.

Western Red Cedar
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by Western Red Cedar »

Great stuff - thanks @AH.

This is all really helpful as I think I'm probably falling in the trap of using full-time work as an excuse to neglect other goals. I've always been impressed with your GTD/time-block approach. In the past when I had lots of free time between jobs I've probably followed my own whims too much. I'll really need to get serious about this so that I'm not only relying on intrinsic motivation to keep developing as an individual.

I was thinking about this all a lot while I was working out last night. It reminded me of some of the discussions about productivity, time, and system design in a permaculture system.

Right now I have a wide range of interests/goals. Some of those are more strongly connected than others. I think I need to spend a whole lot more time figuring out a coherent system for those interests/goals. But that shit is hard and doesn't just fall into place.

This video kept popping through my head while I was :

viewtopic.php?f=9&t=11126&start=820

"We think we spend about four hours a week on average to grow that amount of food, which is a lot less than I expected it to be, to be honest. What does take a lot of time is setting up these systems, implementing the design, and also learning the skills to grow food..."

(I really hope you didn't lose that last post. I learned the copy/paste trick the hard way early on the forums)

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

@white belt, I think it's a really important question, I just am not sure I have a useful answer to it. To my mind it's similar to the questions "do we have free will?" and "are we living inside a simulation?" A number of philosophers think the true answers are "No" and "Probably", but in both cases they think we have to live as if the answers are "yes" and "no". In other words, I assume the answer to your question is "it's both nature and nurture", but from my perspective as an individual* it's best to assume it's mostly nature, and I therefore have some agency over it.

I can look back in my life all the way to pre-adolescence and see what appears to be a pretty stable level of inherent motivation and willpower. I think I had a maxima of willpower at around 16yo, but that can be explained by 1) the most endogenous testosterone I'll ever have, 2) An extremely enticing intrinsic motivation (was applying to Naval Academy with dreams of flying F/A-18's off carrier decks) and 3) The fact that my entire worldview and metaphysics had yet to collapse, so I wasn't burdened by much existential angst yet.

But those factors only contributed to what appears to be a high point. A few years later, 2) had dissolved in an instant on the day I went to the optometrist and 3) my whole cognitive schema for how the world worked was in the process of burning around me. But even though shit was hard for me then, I was still one of the hardest workers I knew (as measured by manual labor, the gym, and schoolwork).

So I seem to have a baseline of motivation/willpower, that through design and the whims of fate can drift up or down a few points, but it feels somewhat constant. If that's true, then everything I'm doing with my systems is sort of like tuning a car. You can do a lot to squeeze performance out of an engine, but you can't turn it into a rocket. I might be able to take my stock civic and, with diligence and good strategy, turn it into a 10second car, but it'll never be a McClaren. And that brings up a point about self-design: you're probably going to wind up with a broken wreck if you drive as if you're a McClaren when you're really a civic. You'll actually get more done in life in you have an accurate mental model of who you actually are, and act accordingly. I'll never be Elon Musk, but I went through a phase of thinking I should be, and that was one of the *least* productive and happy times of my life.

*If I'm in a leadership position, though, I need a more balanced philosophy, because I'll likely get burned by loading lazy people up with expectations they can't bear, and it'll be my fault.

AxelHeyst
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

Western Red Cedar wrote:
Fri Aug 20, 2021 9:34 am
Right now I have a wide range of interests/goals. Some of those are more strongly connected than others. I think I need to spend a whole lot more time figuring out a coherent system for those interests/goals. But that shit is hard and doesn't just fall into place.
This made me thing of the book highlight I was served this morning:
Jacob in the book wrote:For an investor, the start of financial independence includes a strong vision of one day creating a metaphorical forest and living harmoniously with the forest. It starts by planting seeds. These seeds grow into saplings and the mind starts connecting the vision to the upcoming reality of a mature forest. When you live for the future, your present will very much be determined by the actions of your past. Hence, you'll only live in a forest if your past self at some point decided to plant the seeds.
I'm reading Peter Bane's permaculture book, and he's talking about how it takes a while for these managed ecosystems to start to mature, but as you said you invest a bunch of time in the beginning and later, when it all starts to connect up, the yields start flowing.

It also makes me thing of the quote
Eisenhower wrote:..plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.
It took a lot of effort getting my GTD system up and running, but now, 10 years in, it's almost completely invisible even to me. I just do it. I would have to expend effort to *not* do GTD.

The same for coming up with a coherent life system. I get the feeling that gardening might really be a great metaphor for what it's like, including the necessity of sometimes just leaning on your shovel and scatterthinking about your garden, or just observing it from your porch. I think it's easy to miss the amount of work and the amount of impact we're actually having on our own lives, because we think it's supposed to feel like how an 80's getting-stuff-done montage (Team America?) works.

(And - nah, didn't lose the post, but it logged out when I hit submit and I had to ctrl-v it back in, so I thought I'd drop a PSA.)

classical_Liberal
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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by classical_Liberal »

This is a very good conversation. I like that definitions are being targeted for discussion. I've come to realize this is extremely important when dealing with outlier issues. Lack of definition is a huge part of what lead me to become frustrated and disenfranchised with this forum's discussions last year.

Given the willpower and motivation definitions so eloquently described by @AH, I wonder if another term "goals", should be defined. I recoil at the idea of goals because it instantly reminds me of the corporate/life skill motivators idea of SMART goals. I believe SMART goals as a concept are far, far too limiting to an ERE early retiree. Since Camus was referenced, if he were alive today he might place them in the philosophical suicide camp. Although they can maybe serve very specific purposes in certain instances. Just as certain aspects of religion can maybe serve some specific purposes in life (ie human need for socialization and ritual) without diving in head first into philosophical suicide.

There appears to be an intrinsic relationship between motivation, goals (in general, not yet totally defined in this conversation), and willpower. It seems to me, based on @AH example, intrinsic motivation occurs when activities align with goals (maybe best defined as an over all life strategy or web of goals?). Willpower kicks in when the going gets tough, so to say. However, we (western society middle classish) are conditioned to use willpower to meet external goals. Like, the companies goal/vision, or to get a body shape that aligns with the magazine cover, ect. So, it's difficult to discern when willpower should be fully utilized.

So maybe the question should be,... Is the going tough because activity "x" is no longer meshing with my goals (motivational loss), or is it because it does and I lack the willpower to see it through?

I also think, very often, those with high will power or maybe "Conscientiousness " in the big five have a tendency to lose the forest for the trees. Placing a far-too-specific SMART type goal, ahead of the life purpose or web of goals. Like, I want to retire by 35 with a 3%WR. The real question is why? and does that SMART goal really align with "why". This "problem" of high conscientiousness/will power creates a continual problem of mistaking goal completion with life purpose. Where the real relationship between these two should be goal completion as a function/part of continuing life purpose

OTOH, I think @daylen and @7WB5 have a good point that we are over analyzing. Camus might agree, less thinking and more just doing in life.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by oldbeyond »

In a sense, relying on willpower is a form of waste. A bit like having to rely on money is. Very few people will be able to do without either (certainly not me!) and if your back is against the wall you’ll thank your stars if you have them, but reliance on them might be more a sign of insufficiently evolved systems than a virtue.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by white belt »

I’m of the opinion that to an extent willpower is like a muscle. With frequent exercise, it becomes stronger. Without stimulus, it can atrophy. Although, I’m not sure how much of this might also come down to the power of habit. If you are in the habit of focusing time and energy everyday on X, it becomes easier to focus on X everyday since it becomes a habit. At some point it transforms into a part of your identity. You become the person that is an Xer, rather than just a person that does X.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

I agree with you @wb, and it also is a hopeful growth-oriented perspective because if I'm (say) down on myself for not having much willpower, it gives me hope that if I just stick with it, one day I could become a high-willpower individual and make my dreams come true. But that doesn't mean willpower is potentially infinite, you're still constrained by the hand you got dealt by nature. My buddy just left to go weigh in for a pl meet. He's 6', has loooong legs and a lighter bone structure that wants to be 185. He's a lean and beastly 220, but he'll be the first to tell you he'll never be an elite competitor because geometry.

And @oldbeyond... that is a super interesting idea. :shock:

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by jacob »

Suggest using willpower to get through local minima (to see what you can see (vision) elsewhere) but not willing optimization as an overall life-strategy. It's best to align who you are with what you are before trying to punch through walls. Translating comes before transcending.

IOW... motivation is the primary focus. Willpower is just a "cheap" trick. Why over how.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by AxelHeyst »

  • Purpose, Vision, Identity: The Why. At the whole-life scale, this is the working answer to "what's the purpose of *my* life?". When one is evaluating a system for telicity, this is the "telos" I want all of my goals/effects to be converging towards.
  • Goals, Projects: Desired Outcomes (when the goals are predetermined and conscious) or Effects of Actions (I'm thinking here of how Jacob doesn't distinguish between intentionality when discussing goals/effects in Ch5).
  • Actions, including habits: The only thing anyone actually does.
  • Motivation and willpower feed actions.
  • Purpose feeds intrinsic motivation, completing the loop
Image

In an ideal system, you have a well articulated and/or felt Purpose/vision/identity. This purpose informs your goals/projects. You shouldn't pursue goals that aren't in alignment with your purpose/vision. A "goal" is nothing more than a desired outcome, but you can't "do" a goal. You can only perform actions. When thinking about achieving your desired outcomes/goals, you ought to be always thinking "what's the Next Action that will move me closer to this goal/desired outcome?"

Having defined what your next action should be, if you actually do it and how well you do it is largely dependent on your motivation and also willpower.

Per Jacob's comment, if your motivation is sufficiently well-defined, felt, and strong, you'll just do the thing because That's What You Do, and it won't take much effort to *do* it, even if doing the thing takes effort (does that make sense?). It's your identity, that's What's The Right Thing To Do, that's what you are on this earth to do, etc. If motivation is not quite enough, you can apply some willpower to get you through the hump (sack up and do it, self), to help wear in the grooves of desired habits, resist temptations, etc.

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Re: The Education of Axel Heyst

Post by 2Birds1Stone »

Dude....y'all make me so grateful just to be a fly on the wall for this discussion.....

Axel, that diagram is extremely helpful wrt internalizing this stuff for those of us who may not be as enlightened as you! Maybe enlightened isn't the right word.....I'll see myself out now.

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