AxelHeyst wrote: ↑Thu Aug 19, 2021 2:12 pm
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.
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.
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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
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.
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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.
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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:
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).