Comment by jrvarela56 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrvarela56 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> How do I make my feelings inconsequential and do the things I consciously want to do without being a little bitch about it?”.

> The point is to cut the link between feelings and actions, and do it anyway.

We all wish our feelings had no impact on what actions we take. If we could just get stuff done without caring for what the monkey in us 'feels', we'd be wealthier, happier and our problems would go away.

I just don't work that way. Of course having a bad day is going to impact my ability to get shit done. I fear taking a stance like the one in the article would get me in the habit of ignoring the way I feel - and lead to a permanent sense of guilt/shame/uneasiness and lack of confidence in my hunches. This would have a negative impact in my creativity and joy.

In my case, cultivating motivation has made me productive. When I feel like procrastinating, I question: what believe about this task makes it feel like I want to run away from it?

Writing about my longer term plans helps me spot where I lack conviction. Identifying these items where conviction is low, makes me explore my motivations, look up data to validate my claims and breakdown my plans further.

As I 'debug' my plans, it makes it easier for me to link day-to-day stuff to my long-term plans. I do this writing probably every ~3 weeks and it has done wonders to keep me on task as I have a clear 'why'.

I think there's utility in differentiating between "long term" and "short term" motivation. You should follow your long term motivation, and completely unlink from short term motivation.

Say you have to study for an exam. And you hate it. Ask yourself: Do I want that degree? If the answer is: "well yes in general", then disregard what you're feeling rn and just do. Sometimes you'll be motivated to study, it'll grip you, sometimes you'll hate it - it shouldn't matter. You're working towards a long term goal that you DO want, so disregard short term feelings.

That being said, I think it's hard to get these sorts of insights just by reading a text. It all feels meaningless until you actually feel it. Personally I had the realization once where sort of got annoyed at my feeling of dismotivation, and sort of said, whatever, I'm gonna do it anyway. Then it clicked: I don't need to feel like doing it in order to do it. But this story is probably useless to obvious to anyone who hasn't experienced the same thing.

It's good that you managed to convince yourself and have it 'click'.

The problem is when we tell others to 'just do it' bc we figured out a way to 'just do it' ourselves. It's like telling me to just 'stop eating too much' to lose weight - well duh if I could I would.

Each person needs to come up with their own narrative that makes them believe that if they do X or push through a bit then it'll be alright.

This is what gets me. Of course, if I could do the thing regardless of my feelings I wouldn't read about self-discipline, it would already be handled.

My biggest frustration with the self-help industry is that nothing addresses the fundamental action that needs to be taken. It's little tricks and hacks. They might work temporarily but then that goes away...because guess what you need discipline for sticking with the little tricks and hacks as well.

On the flip side, if you hate what you do, why do it?

>My biggest frustration with the self-help industry is that nothing addresses the fundamental action that needs to be taken. It's little tricks and hacks. They might work temporarily but then that goes away...because guess what you need discipline for sticking with the little tricks and hacks as well.

This is worse when the book is just... anecdotes? Stories about hypothetical clients (or ones they swear exist, but don't), which you can't really port over to yourself.

The thing is, you're never going to get that "manual" from a self-help book. Maybe from a therapist or a coach, but the majority of the work and exploration has to be done by yourself; to the people that feel hopeless, discouraged, depressed and alone (the people who may be buying these books) this is a hard thing to sell, so the authors don't.

The best coaching/therapy is the one that teaches you to do these explorations by yourself. Problem is that it's bad for business to teach people to manage issues themselves vs subscribing them to therapy.

It kind of sucks that I'm stuck in the looking for the best solution instead of coming for a solution. I don't do this when I code and I probably should, and for my personal life I do it too much and probably shouldn't.

I would assume you trust your gut wrt to code: when you come up with a good enough answer you know what the tradeoffs are or at least have confidence that you can fix whatever comes up.

Wrt personal life/feelings, it has helped me talk to therapists and friends who've had similar issues and hear what they did to develop my own intuition.

It's tough! The computer throws errors but feelings are less deterministic and reflective (they change our ability to look into them).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com