Why Trying New Things Is So Hard to Do
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I thought this article would be about learning new skills like art or programming, which I actually do find hard to get into.
For those, I know why it's so hard: I'm so good at the things I do daily that new things are quite painful to see how much I fail at them. I end up just going back to the stuff I'm good at instead.
The author (as an economist, I suspect) equates new experience with consumption, but there is a huge range of new experience available if you do away with the frustration of trying to find something better than you currently do. Say, experimenting a range of sports (rock climbing, hiking, weight lifting, skateboarding) as act of knowledge rather than attaching to the results it gives.
It seems rational that there is more benefit in new experience, good or bad than repeating pleasant experience. Going to a new travel destination will give you more memories and anecdotes than going to your favorite vacation spot. And yet we're all a little bit coward and tend to stay in our comfort zone.
For example, my wife and her sister went to one of those wine-and-painting things and produced what I think are actually pretty good paintings with no real practice beforehand.
It horrifies me because I know I'll want it to be better than it is. (And my wife felt that way about hers, despite how I felt about hers.) So I haven't done it.
I did, however, buy a book and art supplies and do 3 of the 50 projects before wandering off to something else. I really do intend to go back to it, but haven't.
Point is, of the things I’m good at, none of them was something I was just born doing well at. Some things come easier than others, but none come naturally. I’ve worked hard at everything I’m good at (even if it was so much fun it didn’t seem like work) , and I just assume the next thing I try will take just as much work. So don’t get frustrated, just assume if it’s worth learning then it will take effort. Otherwise everyone would do it. :-)
If you want to get good at the music business, as you imply, well that’s another discussion entirely.
but if I stick with it for a few years I'll probably sound pretty decent.
Thats the frustrating thing with music, both as a beginner and one helping the beginner get started. I’ve been playing mandolin for about two years, almost every day, and i’m just now starting to get to be what I’d call “kinda good”. Meaning I can sit in just about jam, and if they stay in major keys I can keep up even on songs I don’t know, might even improv a decent solo. So on the one hand, I’d say to the beginner, “if you sit down six days a week for thirty minutes of deliberate practice, you can’t help but get decent after a year or two. I’d argue that it’s almost unavoidable.”
But what the beginner hears is, “I’ve gotta do scales for two years before I have any fun.” Which isn’t true, but if your standard is Hendrix I guess that’s what you hear.
If you consider soda to be a special treat and are looking forward to the Coke to fulfill that special treat, I can completely understand why it would be difficult to reach for the off-brand version instead. Granted, if you're crusing a six-pack of soda every night, where you can throw an off-brand sample in the middle and can quickly fall back to old faithful if it falls short, I understand it less.
...
"Habits are powerful. We persist with many of them because we tend to give undue emphasis to the present. Trying something new can be painful: I might not like what I get and must forgo something I already enjoy."
I'm drawn to a quote written by Sir Terry Pratchett every time I read this sort of article. So tl;dr,
>"They think they want good government and justice for all, Vimes, yet what is it they really crave, deep in their hearts? Only that things go on as normal and tomorrow is pretty much like today."
These two statements are not contradictory, of course; the primary reason we have government is to avoid unpleasant surprises, whether they be crime, fraud, war, unemployment, sickness or natural disaster. If things go on as normal with tomorrow like today, government is working well enough - unless today is unendurable, in which case it's broken.
People might balk at negative changes at first, even very sharp and sudden ones, but they probably won't continue to fight them over the scale of years or decades as the 'new normal' sets in.
Let's say, for example, some brand name food item costs $1.00. The generic costs 0.75. Sure, I could save 0.25 if the generic is good enough, but let's say it's unacceptable, in the sense that after trying the generic I would rather forgo it than pay for it even if the brand name weren't available.
Then, in a sense, I've lost 0.75 in an attempt to save 0.25.
Soda might not be the best example, but what about other things, like laundry detergent?
Generic drugs also upset me as an example because there have been recurring problems with generics being diluted in dose due to lack of regulation in the producing countries (for example, https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2014/04/are-generic..., https://www.fiercepharma.com/manufacturing/wockhardt-u-s-pla...). In many cases, I can't even find a label for what country my over-the-counter generic drug was produced in, let alone any other details. So is it irrational for me to be willing to pay extra money for a drug sold by a company willing to put its reputation on the line, and furnish me with information about the drug's production history, etc.?
Yes, people can be stuck in their ways, but I think some of these examples aren't as irrational as the authors make them out to be.
You have lost more than that, because it is not a one-off decision about a single drink - you are buying information for all your future choices. Suppose you drink 1 coke a day. The difference is $0.25/day or $91 a year. The gain from switching does not stop after a year, it goes on indefinitely, so at a fairly psychologically normal discount rate of 5%, the NPV of the gain is $1871. In order for your experiment to not cover $0.75 and not be profitable, you would have to assign a prior probability of ~0.013% to the generic being as good (or better!) and you switching and reaping a gain of $1871. Which would be crazy because you know that often the generic is fine and frequently is literally the same manufacturer as the brand name, either because they use the same contractors or because it's just price discrimination.
Personally, I make a point of, whenever trying something new like food, to buy 1 of everything and compare them. I am no longer surprised when I find that the generic is as good or better at 1/3rd or less the cost, or that I prefer something I didn't expect to prefer. (Particularly in tea this has paid off in learning that I liked things I didn't remotely expect to like, like 'twig tea'.) It doesn't even take blinded experiments to show this, just trying stuff side by side will often reveal this. I think it's crazy how people will buy the same thing forever and overspend on brand names and buy small quantities. (And then they complain their monthly grocery bill is $400 and they wonder where all the money goes...)
See “Predictably Irrational” by Dan Ariely for several examples of this effect.
Despite agreeing with you, I never get why people do this. I'm a big diet coke addict. But my local store has a generic clone which tastes exactly the same. I always buy the clone.
You are immune to the lie :-) you gotta have a different lie to feel good.
BTW: I didn’t come up with the stuff. A splendid book about that topic is “All marketers are liars” by Seth Godin
1. The Power of Habit 2. Hit makers
I'd also argue that humans don't want to tax their decision making skills as it's often time consuming & exhausting. When you purchase a Coca-Cola, the assumption is that you're purchasing dependability (taste, mouth feel, ingredients, packaging, etc). You have _no_ dependability trying a new product.
Will the product taste similar to Coca-Cola? Is the product more affordable than Coca-Cola? Is the generic soda's ingredient list worse than Coca-Cola's? Is this product available at multiple retailers or am I now forced to purchase the generic soda from a specific retailer? How do I choose which retailer's generic soda to try?
Now, move to the bread isle and start the process over! Clearly, this level of evaluation is taxing for a small purchase: bread, soda, chips, etc. However, most do take the time to evaluate large purchases: TVs, computers, homes, automobiles, etc.
TLDR: There are times where analyzing costs more time than it does dollars.
It's harder when the new thing is less enjoyable but will eventually pay off.
I think this is related to learning. Once you've learned a particular task (say, writing a unit test) you don't "relearn" it every time you want to execute the task again. Instead you "reenact" it - it's more automatic and can be done more quickly and with less focus and concentration. Each unit test is unique - but the tooling and concepts that surround it are already there.
Reenacting vs. learning may be one reason behind brand loyalty and habit. It simply takes more mental effort to re-evaluate and re-learn than to coast off a previous decision. It's more work, even if it's something minor like trying a different brand of soda. We can only "spend" so much attention and care during our waking hours.
The value of a habit is that you make a decision once and project it into the future as an automatic response. The notion that these automatic responses are somehow flawed or need to be optimized away, or optimized to produce some economic advantage, is suspect.
What _is_ valuable is understanding that these automatic responses are as much a part of human cognition as our deliberative attention. We should be re-evaluate them periodically and try to understand the effect they have on the trajectory of our lives.
MAKE IT SAFE TO FAIL
That's right. Spend time and energy thinking about opportunities to practice and fail over and over while minimizing the fallout.
For example, are you afraid to launch that app on the store until you've done all your beta testing and your metrics show high engagement?
Don't be afraid. Launch it and simply DON'T PUBLICIZE IT. Who knows, Apple might approve it and you may get 5-10 organic new beta testers a day. You lose nothing for trying.
That's the mindset that will get you far :)
"This is a pity because experimentation can produce outsize rewards. For example, I wouldn’t be risking much by trying a generic soda, and if I liked it enough to switch, the payout could be big: All my future sodas would be cheaper."
You don't get much safer to fail than trying one soda.
The article was about trying new behaviors different from habits, rather than trying big new things, and was disappointing overall.
For instance, if you want to train job interviews you could apply for a lot of jobs that don't really interest you. But there is no real motivation for writing compelling cover letters or making every effort in the interview.
The article explores the consequences of our reluctance to break from habit, rather than explaining why we find this hard to do.
More accurately, it explores why we so rarely do it. If we were discussing it being truly 'hard to do', we'd need to first establish that we consciously want to break from habit, but then fail to follow through with action. The article doesn't take this route.
The closest it gets to delivering on the title is Yet the fact that many people needed a strike to force them to experiment reveals the deep roots of a common reluctance to experiment. This is not then expanded upon.
My thoughts exactly. I hate this practice with a passion. Looks like the author's answer is basically "because we are human and humans are creatures of habit". Well yeah, but that's not exactly news worthy of a NYT article.
The probability that the author got to choose the title is very slim
This journalistic blight may indeed have been happening for a long time, but it still discredits the source and should disqualify it from HN.
Some titles are actually honest. Who would've thunk?
I agree, though, that _why_ we don't want to would be a more interesting article to read.
"I make bad life choices, now listen to be for advice on...."