What I do when I feel like giving up (2015)
jamesclear.com
jamesclear.com
I don't feel like leveraging grit works in all situations, though? Do others feel differently?
For me, there are times I want to program, show up to program, and then fail to dictate the movement of pixels of light appropriately with my critical thoughts. It's not for a lack of grit. I could sit for hours making attempts to gain headway, but only build in frustration as I become increasingly aware of my failure to drop into flow state.
The brain is a muscle, decision fatigue is real, and your body imposes safeguards on how much you're allowed to crunch it. There are some tasks which do not progress without a sufficiently critical mindset and require rest. You can do other, less mentally demanding tasks, and this will satiate some of your hunger to create, but, just as cleaning the house isn't a suitable replacement for that actually important chore you're procrastinating on, I don't feel that writing a blog post that just says, "I showed up." is sufficient to say you're continuing to progress in your own, personal character development?
Happy to be told I'm being overly cynical here. I think I am and just need more coffee, but curious to hear other's thoughts.
Give it a shot :)
Breaks are wondrous in problem-solving.
When stuck (and when not), take breaks and do other stuff.
In ~95% of the cases, solutions come to you. In the rest 5%, you reach out to someone who can help.
Breaks are miracles in problem-solving.
And I mean not only in case of programming/math, but also social situations.
In my goal tracker, I set high levels goals to be productive, but then about 30 different possible tasks count as productive. I track them at a low level so I can keep a good track of my time, but they all count towards the high level daily/weekly goal of being productive. That way I make sure I'm just doing _something_ productive, if not the thing I planned to do, rather than screw around surfing Reddit or something.
Of course, this strategy works much better if you're a bootstrapped founder with 40 important tasks in front of you. It works less well if you have a daily standup with a project manager stressing the importance of only doing the JIRA ticket at the top of the backlog. So YMMV.
Usually accomplishing a small task builds enough motivation to accomplish another small task or a larger task. Getting started always seems to be the hardest part.
I think that you and the author both have valid points of view that don't necessarily contradict each other.
I have a lot of mental health challenges and completely lack the reserve capacity most people have. The advice to "suck it up and do it" fails spectacularly with me. At best, I burn out mid-day. At worst, I burn out for several weeks.
This doesn't preclude having grit.
I work to know myself and my limits. Other people do not get to define my limitations. I know me, they don't. I will never "live up to my potential" in their eyes.
To them, I lack grit in all its forms.
But grit isn't about each day, it's about the long term. If I have to give up today, it's only so I can be ready for tomorrow. Every day is a chance to start again.
That is the very definition of perseverance. It's a choice to keep going after being defeated.
Are you able to speak more about your daily processes?
How do you work to know yourself and your limits? How do you know if you're being lazy or recuperating? If grit isn't about each day then what psychological stat is?
For me, the main things I use to determine my limits are:
- "Does doing this increase my odds of a relapse?": There are correlations between stress and risk of relapse, so I manage my stress very closely.
- "Is doing this/pushing through sustainable, or will I need to borrow energy/sleep more/create issues going forward?": This one is hard because it involves knowing oneself and one's triggers and body very well. Like I'll down a shit ton of aspirin and Benedryl to work through migraines because I know they're brought on by either quick changes in barometric pressure or my menstrual cycle, which resolve quickly and can't spiral into worse problems. MS heat intolerance, on the other hand, means I need to stop and rest if I end up too warm because my nerves will be fried until I rest even if the weather does cool down.
My life is defined by the absence of process and discipline. It's basically managed chaos. I do what I can, when I can.
The one process I have nailed down is medication. I use a pill planner and make it a habit to check it any time I can't remember if I took my medication. I use alarms because they are difficult to ignore and I can hit the snooze button if I'm busy. Reminders and calendar events don't work.
> How do you work to know yourself and your limits?
I've learned how my body and mind feels when I'm running low. I started with a mood tracking application, but once I learned to operate by feel, it became automatic. Once that problem was offloaded, I stopped using the app.
My therapist gave me some great advice: "go with what works". If an app becomes work that I start to avoid, then it's time to switch strategies.
> How do you know if you're being lazy or recuperating?
I generally give myself 15~30 minutes to get started on something. If I can't manage any useful focus, I move to something I can accomplish.
I may look lazy from the outside but I've had to be told by everyone (friends, family, doctor, therapist, support group, manager, etc) to slow down and take care of myself. That's been hard to accept but my productivity and happiness has greatly increased since I started doing that.
> If grit isn't about each day then what psychological stat is?
People aren't robots. We all have good days and bad days. There is no one stat, only patterns and trendlines. In a way, it's heartening. We can always make better decisions tomorrow. :)
I heard somewhere that certain high performing folks only need five hours of sleep a night. I tried this for a week and it was a disaster. Damage to work. Damage to relatonships, etc.
But it did lead me to a years long experiment to discover my limits for sleep (while also struggling to understand how diet and caffeine intake interact).
I just finished a year where I aimed for 49 hours of sleep per week (5 nights of 6 hours, 2 nights of 8 hours, 1 or 2 naps of 1.5-3 hrs), and after 11+ months I started having the same problems I had from the initial 5hr/night experiment that last only a week.
So I've accepted I'm not a 35/hr a week guy. I might be a 45/hr a week guy, with precise diet/exercise/caffeine dosing, but in the meantime I'm comfortable accepting decent productivity at 55/hr a week.
That's what sleep is to me, the most effective nootropic "sharpening the axe" you can do for your productivity. Unfortunately, that doesn't quantify easily like "hours of sleep" so it's harder to track.
Grit and the Sunk cost fallacy are often at odds with each other.
Grit is useful when picking up a skill (programming) and sticking with it. But within that skill, you might not want to stick to something specific for too long if it's not working out, otherwise you deprive yourself of other learning opportunities.
It also depends on what kind of success you want out of it. If you want to master a skill, no-matter-what, regardless of what kinds of jobs it has, then go for grit 100% to keep you working on it.
If you want to try something new because you're seeking a deep passion, sticking with grit 100% will have an opportunity cost of not trying something else.
Also a lot of this comes down to how hard you want to be on yourself. You can have strict goals of progress where just showing up yields no progress, so you might consider it a failure because there was no meaningful progress.
These are different words for a reason.
I think of grit as just not giving up and maintaining the integrity of a schedule and the quality of the work.
It's a learned skill like anything else. Grit soon enough just becomes competence with experience, but you need to stop procrastinating first :)
https://www.raptitude.com/2009/03/how-to-keep-bad-moods-from...
The feeling of wanting to give up is an evolutionary adaptation to not engage in activities that have a low probability of success.
Unfortunately stuff like filing taxes or getting to work on time are relatively recent things, so our minds can't estimate the benefits of that intuitively.
One way to get out of this is to think about the outcome. It's easier to do something if the end result will be satisfying.
As far as it ringing true, perhaps your cognition is more derived toward consistent work than GP’s.
It is a good thing to have neurodiversity.
What is a blog post to a hunter-gatherer? Nothing that has a clear link to the next meal, the feeling of safety or finding a mate.
Any feeling of accomplishment that a person gets from that is a product of culture, not something innate.
Unfortunately that's just not enough to work every time.
Contrast to my pseudobuddhaguru friends who think that the mind is 100% ego-driven and that, if they could only silence this alien voice in their head, their "true self" will take over and they will achieve enlightenment.
Sometimes when I don’t see any progress, this thought is what really brings me down. It feels pointless and makes me want to do more enjoyable things.
One of the hardest things in life is to recognize when you really should give up, because you are holding on to something just because you want to persevere to reach some questionable goal in the future, but in the end it just makes your present more miserable. Of course, this is not to say that there are goals that are really worth the sweat and tears.
That itself is a quality to admire, keep the hustle going man!
This is a particularly powerful line and something I will certainly reflect on.
> What is life, if not the sum of a hundred thousand daily battles and tiny decisions to either gut it out or give it up?
This is such a cynical and miserable way to think about life. Relax, enjoy yourself, find some pleasure in some simple things which aren't tied to "success". You don't have to live like this.
I was interested to learn the Roger Zelazny went to his typewriter every day and refused to leave until he had written at least a page. I imagine many of those "single page" days did not result in anything I read. But still, his output was definitely worth reading.
Reframing that thought is powerful.
This reminds me of a line from Tom Lehrer: "if you can't communicate, the least you can do is shut up."