Comment by kaolinite | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kaolinite | Hacker News Reader

I've read more in the past 12 months than in the past few years, purely because I discovered a company in the UK called the Folio Society[1]. They sell beautifully bound and illustrated editions of fantastic books, although at rather high prices (£30-40 on average).

Previously the majority of the books I read came in the form of cheap ebooks from the Kindle store. As a result, I often abandoned them (or even just forgot about them), only reading a few chapters. Now though, when I spend £30 on a single book, damn right am I going to finish it.

Plus, as a result of the curation, there isn't a single book on their site that isn't at least worth a glance. The same can't be said for many physical bookstores, let alone Amazon, etc.

And, the best part is, I don't really need these expensive books anymore. I've gotten into such a habit of reading because of them that I'm buying regular books again and I'm reading for at least an hour or two a night.

[1] http://foliosociety.com

> when I spend £30 on a single book, damn right am I going to finish it.

That's an interesting exploitation of the sunk cost fallacy. [1][2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost#Loss_aversion_and_th...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalation_of_commitment

That's only works if

a) cost is high enough compared to your income

b) you are a reasonable person, and value your money enough to care

I tried to use this tactic many times, mostly to hone my programming skills - didn't work. Damn, I recently entered a postgraduate program at the university, for 2500$ cost - didn't help much, still can't force myself to spend more time learning things.

A similar phenomenon are the various ways people try to trick their procrastination habit, not with money (fake price) but with time (fake priorities).

However, as you correctly noticed, these techniques don't work well. That's normal, don't worry if these simple solutions don't work. Maybe you think they should work, because you often hear from people for whom "that one weird trick" worked. Or that one complicated technique. But usually these are the same people who try to sell you their book on that topic.

Instead, you need to the root of this issues, which may involve finding your true priorities, and may involve actively changing your habits. All this may be really hard, and you'll fail and retry many times - especially when trying to do this alone. Heck, there's a whole profession around helping people to fix these types of issues - some of them are highly qualified, others are charlatans. (The latter often call themselves "coaches" as that term doesn't require much qualification, so that they can't be sued if they do a bad job.)

How do you find the highly qualified? How are they called? How do you find the fitting one, without having tons of money to through out like a big manager would have (but probably enough, specially if the result is promising)

Thanks!

Since this is about treating human beings, of course the best qualified people are physicians. More precisely, medical psychotherapist and related professions. Among various treatments, behavior therapy is quite common, but there are others.

There is certainly some stigma around this, because most people think that going to a therapy means you have some serious mental illness. But that's nonsense. There's a huge variety of issues, small and lager, and all physicians are fully aware of this broad spectrum.

The defining criteria is always: Does the person suffer from that issue? (Sometimes also: Do the people around that person suffer from it?) And, of course: What's the best way to help them?

Moreover: If they can help people to get away and stay away from alcohol and other drugs, and are able to talk a violent to cooperation, which are both much harder tasks than anything discussed here, then they can help with "smaller" psychological issues as well.

And compared to people with some 3-months crash course, they know exactly what they do, and have all forms of therapy applied to themselves as well, that's a vital part of the training.

For reference, I'm talking about the situation here in Germany. But I think this should be very similar in other countries, too.

I've had a similar problem. My studies included a lot of econ and I'm very familiar with sunk costs. I was trained to not care about them, and now I don't.

Buy a month's worth of gym visits as a commitment mechanism, quit after the first one without regrets. Sunk costs are sunk.

Tens of thousands of people join gyms for the same reason and stop after a few weeks.

Nice physical books could be indeed a pleasure to read; here is an interesting approach of printing books on bible type paper (haven't tried it yet; but does look appealing): http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2008089/Time-reading...

Thank you for this! What a fantastic resource. This is going to hurt my wallet.

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