How to do hard things
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That said, I've been living these principles since I was 18 (long story, lots of tears, bring a hanky).
I can tell you that anyone can benefit from this.
But most simply, if there were one single trait that I think has been key for me; it's been self-discipline. It has paid off all over the place.
Finishing stuff takes a great deal of what people like to call "grit." There's a ton of unpleasant, boring, hard-to-digest stuff, in delivering a finished product. In many cases, it can be more than half the project.
In my experience, not giving up, and powering through the "boring bits,", when, what I wanted to do, was go into a fetal position under my desk, and sob into Mr. Floppy Ear Bunny, has done the trick.
It also does wonders for self-image, and self-confidence (which, unfortunately, is often interpreted as "arrogance" -nothing is perfect).
I've found that starting the day at 5AM, and with a 5Km walk (which I hate), is useful. Everything after that, is gravy. Real gym rats beat that handily. Many of my friends work out for a couple of hours before getting into work.
Habits are more powerful than self-control and discipline.
Imagine every time you make a conscious decision to do something you expend willpower points. You have a only a set number of willpower points a day.
Some things you like, some things you don't, and that depends how much they will cost. Choosing not to do something can also costs points, because it's a habit.
Habits are a way to reduce or discount this choice associated cost.
Now, I recently thought a lot about discipline, motivation, dreaming (for the future) and hope. And I think the problem with discipline is that, everyone has a different definition on it, and it also changes between context. Military discipline is not the same as daily discipline. Soldiers are plenty undisciplined in their daily lives.
When people talk about discipline they think "doing things that one doesn't want doing" but it's really not that simple. It all ties to hopefulness and dreaming for the future.
And s someone who's experienced this first hand due to a traumatic childhood: People who don't value themselves won't be disciplined for their own sakes, but they can be incredibly disciplined for the sake of others. So, there's a component of seeing value in what you do, or believe that there is value even if you don't see it.
So, like everything in life, discipline is multi faceted.
As an example, people talk about dopamine and motivation, but I've realised that it's probably closely tied to discipline too. You need to be motivated to be disciplined.
I've recently started becoming more "disciplined" by being incredibly intentional about trying to regulate my dopamine baseline throughout the day. I started doing it to feel less miserable throughout the day, but ended up being more disciplined as a side effect. And I've also realised that this has increased my daily "willpower" budget from earlier.
I think the main component is that after I wake up, I have a normal warm shower, and after I rinse myself. However, then I turn to cold water. There's some research[^1] that shows that this creates an effect of slow dopamine release.
Next thing to do is be mindful about what gives you dopamine spikes, and how to not have them too often, since if you do it too much your body becomes "used" too too much dopamine. Basically, biology likes homeostasis, so it will find a way to achieve it.
This includes not drinking coffee too early too, but around midday/noon, and trying to couple coffee with activities you _want_ to enjoy, but not necessarily do, because coffee increases dopamine levels[^2], so it's "hacking" your brain to consider this reward-seeking behaviour by pairing the artificical dopamine increase with something you would like to enjoy (like say exercise, or learning a new skill, or work). There's other obvious benefits of caffeine like improved focus and concentration.
Now, all this might sound like "too much dopamine," since it's very "do this that gives you dopamine, do that that give you dopamine", but it's not that you're getting spikes in dopamine like you get from sex (or masturbation, or cocaine, etc), it's small releases that you strategically pair with activities that are good for you. Over time as they become habits you won't have to consume willpower for them, and you won't have to constantly be so intentional about what you do.
There's also the other side of the coin, like "reducing" dopamine. Doing stuff that you don't enjoy can suck, but sometimes that stuff is good for you. This is where the psychological component comes in. Thank yourself (think of yourself as your future self thanking your past/current self) for engaging in these activities after you do them. Gratitude releases dopamine, too[^3]. So the brain then associates this as reward seeking behaviour, and it becomes less hard in the future. It's not surprise that drug addicts will go to incredible lengths (I was a drug addict myself, so talking first-hand here) to get their substance of choice even if it's a giant chore and not enjoyable. Why? Reward-seeking behaviour; the reward is the dopamine, the behaviour is getting and consuming the drug. One could say they're incredibly disciplined to get that high (it's a weird way of putting it, but alas).
I've also—somewhat unsuccessfully due to the childhood trauma mentioned earlier—tried to pick up mediation. It's helped me initially with focus and mindfulness, but caused some emotional problems. They are always there, but for a lack of better word, my chaotic mind was probably somewhat of a "defence" mechanism to mitigate CPTSD[^4]. This is a home-brewed theory me and my therapist came to. Going through the stages of grief for my "lost childhood" and my therapist's open-mindedness to psilocybin-aided therapy helped resolve this. I've done Psilocybin later on my own as well, and I've managed to make a lot of progress even on my own (but I have to thank my therapist and myself for developing the mental tools to explore those in a productive way). I wouldn't blanket recommend psychedelics since I've had bad trips too, but they've helped me immensely.
Anyway, I've went a bit on a tangent here. Back to dopamine control. I can luckily now safely meditate without "relapsing", and that's helped a lot with focus, energy and overall willpower. It helps because I can choose what to focus on, and my mind is less ADHD-y. So this means you have to spend less "willpower points" on returning your mind to what matters to your "conscious self" (or ego). I don't know if I have ADHD or not, maybe; but it's likely related to the stuff I talked about earlier.
Meditation isn't very enjoyable for me, but as I started pairing it with gratitude and started seeing incredible benefits in my daily focus after only just about a week or so of daily 10-minute meditations, it's started to become enjoyable... Interesting even.[^5]
Listening to music releases dopamine too, but be careful you don't do too much of "dopamine layering" since the activity might be less enjoyable in the future without all these "helpers", or it can offset your baseline too much. So, if you're at the gym for example, listen to music some days, but do a few days where you are doing it without the music. Try (it isn't always easy) to enjoy the atmosphere of the environment too.
Always remember to be grateful to yourself after these activities, too. Progress is sometimes too slow to see, and for progress-minded people, it can be a bit discouraging. But the progress is there, even though you might not realise it immediately. Trust yourself you're doing the right thing if you know it to be right.
Also, another big component in this whole thing is energy. So make sure your body is treated well in a holistic matter, not just your brain. The body and the brain are a unit, and we often forget that in our day-to-day-lives, I think. So, make sure you get enough sleep, eat healthy. It helps to take probiotics, especially with modern diets; I take mine daily, but you don't have to be as rigid with it as I am (but I also have digestive issues and my GP suggested probiotics and multivitamins; it helps a lot for me). Drink water, but depending on where you live don't drink tap water; buy a Brita water jug (or whatever the equivalent is in your region). It's easier to make tough decisions when you're not exhausted, and that means you expend much less willpower points when you do make them.
It's late and I might've forgotten some stuff. I won't write much more so I don't risk you or someone else tl-dr-ing this (as I genuinely believe it's all good advice) but feel free to ask any follow-up questions if you're interested.
[^1]: Nicely summarised by Dr Huberman here https://hubermanlab.com/the-science-and-use-of-cold-exposure...
[^2]: This is well researched I think; just google "coffee dopamine" and take your pick
[^3]: This is more nuanced. You really need to do this with your full intent behind it. Murmuring a throwaway "thanks buddy" won't have the same effect. I combined this with journaling. I like to think __why_ was this good for me. Why do I think it helped me, how could it improve my life. Another big component with me is how I can improve the lives of people around me, since I'm a bit of a people pleaser. So, I like to muse on that too. If my life is good, I'm in a position to help others improve their lives, etc.
[^4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_post-traumatic_stress_...
[^5]: I recommend reading The Mind Illuminated book. Here's an Amazon UK link: https://amzn.eu/d/6wZtqQb
What the parent was trying to say is that you can form healthy habits even if you're not disciplined.
I have the discipline but I think the key is discipline + actually loving it, loving the thing that you are doing on average. Loving the process of discipline + loving the vision that you are working towards. I think that the passion and inspiration alone are not sufficient because there are always things you don't want to work on and you may really not feel like it sometimes, on the other hand, discipline for the sake of discipline without appreciation - having to push yourself... no. There must be both push and pull. If you don't feel any pull or if it's much weaker than the push then it most likely means that the sacrifice is not worth it or maybe you are doing way too much and not scheduling any time to appreciate the present moment.
Oh, yeah.
I do luvs my programming. I couldn't imagine doing this for something I hate.
I should add that having a completely finished product, actively being used by end-users is also a very good feeling.
I think that's the general theme of this. So long as a significant chunk of the work (i.e. 1/3) is genuinely enjoyable just for what it is, the other, more boring work is also more pleasant because: 1) - it feels like a part of the bigger picture that you like (i.e. whether you are doing something really boring or maybe earning money to buy yourself more time) and 2 - just conditioning, getting good emotions from one part of the work is partially transferred to the boring stuff and it needs to happen on an ongoing basis.
The fact that there are boring parts to it (which one can still learn to appreciate) provides the contrast and makes the highs much higher. However, there's also something I did not mention initially. I'm spending considerable time on appreciating the now, I would set aside 40 min every day to do Zen meditation and it really does help with the discipline / will power but perhaps most importantly - appreciating work that's boring - if I can get myself to enjoy sitting still or walking circles around the room, I can treat boring work not unlike extra Zen practice that sharpens me further. It does not have to be Zen practice but just ensuring that you are spending some time enjoying the now basically every day is critical when you you are often trying to make predictions about the future which is stress and anxiety inducing.
That sounds like an excellent practice (and it also requires discipline).
This thread has really made me realize what a disability ADHD is. I struggle to watch a movie from start to finish, even one I have been really looking forward to. I dream of being able to concentrate and work on what I want to do for an entire day. My ratio at the moment is about 1-2 hours of work in every 8 hour day.
Hitting the time on a regular day (not every day is like that) requires ongoing effort to sustain it. I spend 20 min / day doing time tracking and performance analysis (I think it makes more time than it costs). So for example if I want to hit 10h on a day which is purely dedicated to work, I wake up at 6, I end work at 8 and go to sleep at 9:30. That gives me 14h between 6 and 8, so it means that the combined time for the morning and midday routines must be under 4h. I don't stress about doing too little work on any given day, but I will always look at it the next day and consider what I could do better with the execution of the previous day . Then it mostly becomes a habit, I would just do it like a robot. Not every day is like that, but most are.
I'm sorry to hear about your disability. I don't know much about ADHD but perhaps you would find the following tips useful. You could look into Zen meditation - a good book with the how is 3 Pillars of Zen, feel free to discard the supernatural stuff and just focus on regular practice. One of the main benefits of Zen practice is increasing your attention span. It's extremely challenging to sustain focus on nothing and I still struggle with this despite doing it regularly for 5 years. It could be as simple as counting exhales and resetting the count every 10 breaths, expect to lose track fast but you get better at it with regular practice and this directly translates to your attention span when doing other things. Maybe you could also benefit from journaling - try to successively increase work blocks by a small amount every week or so and keep track of it. Other tips: avoid scrolling social media, get good sleep - you may need up to 8.5h of bed time / 8h of sleep, it's easy to be chronically sleep depleted without being aware about it and everything is much harder without good sleep, do quick breaks while working, i.e. 1 minute pause every 15 min just looking at the timer (not email!).
quick gist is when people say motivation to train or do anything there's really a specific process we go through that determines to what extent we stick with anything
1 inspiration
2 motivation
3 intention
4 discipline
5 habit
6 passion
sibling comment is correct here, discipline is necessary but only 1/6 of the framework. for long term sustainability we need habits plus higher order reasons to want to do it. passion ideally, or boosts of positive energy from inspiration and motivation.
It always remains circular. Doing X to compel you to do Y just shifts the problem from Y to X. There is no “bottom” that is guaranteed to work.
Sometimes you just need to get things out of your system. I feel much better after a good sob. The brain is not a perfectly designed machine, but a bug-ridden contraption that can do some amazing things. Of course, it would be much better to not feel the need to sob. But sobbing can be used to regain focus if you give yourself the freedom to let loose.
So, it should be okay for humans to let it out, too.
Break big problem into sequence of small and achievable goals. Getting small gratifications by completing small steps helps to maintain mental balance and avoid burn-out and dead-lock.
Sorry it took so long to respond. I browse HN on my breaks, and it's catch-as-catch-can.
I keep my eyes on the prize at the end. For me, it's all about having a finished product after all the agita.
There's also a lot of (in my case) interest in the Mission of the project. One project that I did, took ten years to really start coming into its own. During that time, I was pretty much left on my own, and even outright abused (by the end users, and also "gatekeepers," who wanted to control the project).
It all came out great, in the end. The project was taken over by a new team, and very little of my original code remains in the current version.
I'm happy about that. Most of what I wanted to do, was push the idea of the project (an infrastructure-level resource locator).
I agree. I like to ship everything I write; even if I don't actually ship it.
But actually, surprisingly, things you don't initially want to do can become positive habits in a very short time period. Like, 3-5 times. Of course, the flip side is also true; I've often fallen OUT of workout habits just as easily. But at the end of the day, perfection is not the goal. You shouldn't avoid starting a new positive habit just because you know you'll probably lose the habit again. You can always pick it up once more!
Someone who is a regular gym-goer for a few years, then becomes sedentary, then picks up running for a half decade, then moves on to cycling, then falls out of the habit, is probably better off than someone who never bothers to try.
That's what the entire internet tells me, but it just doesn't happen to me.
Whatever it is that I wish to keep up, I have to decide to do it every time, roughly the same as I did the first couple of times.
Yes, that includes brushing the teeth.
Of course there are habitual things in my life, but I can see no common characteristics. Total time spend certainly isn't it.
Amusingly, this has made it almost trivial for me to quit smoking despite being a smoker for many years. I just never developed a habit for it, so dropping it was as simple as just not smoking.
The key thing is to do/start with the same thing everyday, with slight variations in the end. Make it an autopilot routine during which you can be mentally elsewhere. Only then you may think “I have to…” and [click] it’s done before you even notice.
I like to establish the habit of consistently succeeding. I feel that we often need to start with "small" successes, then gradually increase the complexity/ambition.
Before you know it, you're routinely completing pretty damn ambitious stuff.
When I was an accountant, my teacher once said "How do you eat an elephant?" (dramatic pause) "One bite at a time."
Frequently, the line between amazing achievement and wistful thinking is shutting up, turning off the "what if" part of the brain, and plowing into it.
I'm not saying people shouldn't think ahead, but smart people usually have the opposite problem of mental over-investment toward non-result-generating thoughts.
And yet the only way to win is not to play. So I work as hard as I possibly can force myself to in hopes that I’ll be able to retire as early as possible.
Any advice on how to make eating frogs easier, I’d love to hear it. I get up early, I take cold showers every day, I do HIIT workouts every other day, and I have a complex productivity system for tracking what I need to do, I ruthlessly prioritize, and I do a pretty good job and closing the laptop and not working in the evening and weekends. I hate it all and can’t wait for when I can stop all of it.
Remember to spend at least some of your time doing something for joy. Do something new. Something you're bad at. Drop it the second it's not fun anymore. Or take a trip. Ensure you're spending time on friends and family. Just waste time sometimes and don't feel bad about it. Focus on a task thats not actually the top priority but is more fun now and again.
It doesn't get easier. You pick up more tasks and harder tasks. You can make things that were once harder things easier things, but you're always going to be working hard if you're improving. Make sure you do it sustainably -- it's a marathon and not a sprint. If you rush to retire but don't build a life you want to retire to it will just make it worse.
But even if you read a thousand different ways to explain/justify/dress up "do hard things", you only need one to really click with you.
Of course, there's plenty of expensive fitness equipment gathering dust, but don't let someone else tell you "you don't need all that stuff" if it works for you. If it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid!
I’ve found the same for myself, if I want to feel solid about my day, I need to get up early and exercise and figure everything else out from there.
I absolutely hate it, but I can’t deny how much better I feel. I’m hoping that one day my brain will flip and I’ll genuinely enjoy it, but it is still very much a need and not a want.
Everything after is still gravy!
It is a negotiation and fight every single morning, and I don’t see myself enjoying it at any point.
I started opening GitHub issues I never expect anyone else to read to help myself explore and verbalize a problem without having to nag anyone else about it; it’s been helpful and also yields a lot of what is effectively documentation of the “why” behind our design choices. Not sure if it would work as well on public repos or if you work with anyone that tries to max their GitHub stats (eg average issue close time) though.
etc.
Real killjoy.
Popularized by Brian Tracy with the book "Eat that Frog - Stop procrastinating and get more done in less time",
the idea is attributed to Mark Twain there, but was actually recorded by Nicolas Chamfort: "One should eat a frog every morning, to find the rest of the day less disgusting, if you have to spend it in the world". The translation from the French tradition of the "nausea" to pragmatist Union America, where it came to mean "do the hardest first as a strategy", fits.
When do you get to sleep to allow for that early start?
I'm a morning person. My wife is not...
Couldn’t imagine doing this, purely considering the implications of going to bed with the sun up and offsetting my schedule to accommodate a commute that early.
People do, in fact, do this. Absolutely fucking baffling to me, but they do.
Whether you can or should do it depends heavily on your particular circumstances, of course. But when I started doing it, I wondered why more people weren’t talking about it. Personally, I find it fantastic.
Reminds me of some friends that work third shift, and they’re working through nights and sleeping during the day and I don’t get how they pull it off.
Let's just say, that, at 18, my life was a dumpster fire, and it took a lot of work to get things back on beam.
I've spent my entire adult life as a member of a Fellowship that is all about keeping on beam.
Going down this particular path has been life changing as someone who grew up in an environment that essentially conditioned me to default to aversion/avoidance, a default that culminated in a pretty big burnout.
Realizing that aversion/avoidance was almost always much worse than the thing I was avoiding was a major aha moment, and realizing that this could be corrected is when my life started changing.
Whether it’s ACT or some form of mindfulness+related philosophy, I can’t recommend this kind of internal exploration enough. The associated mental shifts are like freeing up numerous processor cores that were previously consumed by unhelpful thoughts and feelings.
Mindfulness meditation was the tool that made this go from something that I knew intellectually, to something I could observe directly within myself. Once you can see these things clearly, changing them becomes far easier.
Which is not, to be clear, criticism or belittlement - indeed, when different groups with different motivations or backgrounds independently hit on similar approaches, that's probably a sign that there's something to it...
Yes, I'm somewhat defending my own particular branch (which I doubt is innately superior to many others, fwiw). But it was the LARPing enlightenment comment that caught my eye: it is absolutely a thing, and it shows up plenty in both traditional and "science-based" methods.
But my personal experience is that once you get far enough into something to start to understand what enlightenment would actually require, it becomes a lot less appealing of a target. I'm sure it would be great, but boy howdy it requires a lot of uncomfortable work. I just want to live better and feel better, dammit.
You can often sort out the posers from the real life cultivators by enthusiastically bringing up enlightenment. The real people will be the ones who (figuratively) roll their eyes. If they're further along, it will be done in a very polite, understanding, and non-judgemental sort of way.
"I was once like you, grasshopper. And I still am."
> A mentor of mine likes to talk about experiential avoidance as a sort of "reverse compass." When we notice the desire to avoid something, it may actually be telling us what we need to move toward.
I rarely get life-changing advice from a podcast, but something I heard one time really stuck with me. This super-successful guy was talking about all the businesses he owned or something and the host asked him what his morning routine looked like. Paraphrasing, his answer was:
"After I've gone through my normal morning activities, I sit down and make a list of the things I need to do that day. I always look through the list and find the thing I want to do least, and I do that one first. Because I have found the things I don't want to do are almost always the most important."
And thats why binary advice is pretty much useless.
Everything is a balance, but you can't embrace the suck for 10 years, rarely anyone can.
Sometimes we also avoid the reality that we just need to quit, get healthy.
IMO the secret is not to always be struggling but to always maintain the balance of both. That is also why for many people "Eat the frog first" doesn't work.
So I'll end this with menial - it highly depends...
Balance, 'pick the fight', nobody normal has infinite amount of stamina and burnout can happen to any human being if pushed enough. I know plenty of non-normal for the lack of better word, somehow broken inside. Great career, once you truly know them inside out, its a sad pile of crap. Over-competitive till last breath, always comparing with more successful, never happy with what they have. Often quite bad parents who pour their mental state into their kids too (but I think that would be impossible to avoid). And cycle repeats, kids with great grades, excelling in various sports but happiness and smiles are not their trademark.
Many hit the wall eventually and its not a nice sight. Some will never get back on their feet afterwards
“What’s going to suck less, later?
Handling it now… or later?”
For me, procrastination has some similarities to addiction. If I'm on a streak, I can maintain it. If I fail once, it's really hard to get back to it. I may be productive for a week, but sooner or later, something is going to happen that will allow me to procrastinate. When this happens, I'm like an addict, I'm not satisfied with a small dosage, and all limits are off. I know I should be working instead of watching Youtube. I don't want to do it, and I know I will regret it. All this happens while I'm typing "youtube.com" into my browser's address bar.
Various methods work on various people. Experiment and try different methods. Don't confuse it with trying multiple implementations of one method - if you tried two to-do list apps and it didn't work for you, skip the to-do lists and move to something else. My method is body doubling, but YMMV. Once you find a method that works for you, revisit previous productivity methods - they may supplement your productivity
The short answer is, if you accept that it's going to be hard, you can focus on the problem rather than how stuck and frustrated you are, and that helps you to not make it harder than it needs to be.
Of course, a person who needs help needs more than the short answer; in particular, we often need a lot of unlearning of bad mental habits, and we need to hear exactly what ACT is saying and, sometimes more importantly, what it is not saying... because we tend to hear what we expect to hear, not what is actually being said.
Here's the self-study book I used: https://www.amazon.com/Get-Your-Mind-Into-Life/dp/1572244259
Highly recommend.
Self-discipline is also more costly. You can brute-force your way through tasks with ADHD, but it is more taxing on your overall energy. Those with ADHD typically experience impulses often and it's harder for them to ignore. Forcing yourself to ignore them requires extra energy. It's not sustainable to do all the time. It's hard for those without ADHD to truly understand what that's like.
In addition to impulsivity, executive dysfunction affecting starting tasks or work is also a big challenge.
My hunch is that for a lot of people, ADD is a result of growing up in a home that felt unstable so they never gained a basic internal sense of stability that you need for things like task switching or staying focused.
I think people lean into the personality traits, 'neurotype', cognitive styles, talents, and inherent tendencies they have as kids when it comes to coping with trauma. You use the tools you have. If you have ADHD and a situation is unbearable, hyperfocus is a tool you have— or at least a pattern you can fall into— that can prevent you from being overwhelmed by the feelings that weigh on you when that situation is on your mind. It would be shocking to me if ADHDers didn't often end up relying on features of ADHD to adapt to traumatic situations.
These things are interrelated in people who have both, and I don't think it's generally easy (or necessary) to pick apart 'which is which' when it comes to a specific behavior or experience.
What parts were the most useful?
Any recommended resources or books?
There's a lot of videos with Richard Schwartz on Youtube explaining IFS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdZZ7sTX840
There's also a book called "Self-Therapy" by Jay Earley that gives an approach for doing IFS on your own.
Derek Scott has a great channel called IFSCA where he explains different IFS concepts - https://www.youtube.com/@IFSCA
https://www.amazon.com/No-Bad-Parts-Restoring-Wholeness/dp/1...
This is sort of non-descriptive. Every time you are happy, sad, angry, afraid, bored, tired; that's brain chemistry at play. Brains are electrochemical computers.
I am diagnosed with ADHD, and the best skill I've learned is putting myself into situations where I have no choice but to do the thing I need to do.
I refuse to be a person who offloads all responsibility to something that can be dealt with, with some effort.
It's like you are missing the drive to get that thing done to the point that your brain just tricks you into thinking that anything remotely productive seems more important and better to get started on now than the actual task. To me this is a rare occurrence, hence why I think I am not a ADHD person.
The problem to me is that this difficulty is hard to differentiate from self-discipline.
I suspect you will be less likely to feel that inability to get around to do the tasks that you know to be important to do it if you fail in a way that life itself, the universe, hurts you for the failure, as opposed to your boss saying "you're fired for showing up late".
I also suspect that some people use religion to fix this: Like picturing a higher being looking down and saying "Wherefore dost thou not now do that which thou must? Else, I shall smite thee from the heavens or cause thee great trouble in the afterlife."
This happened on a much larger scale when I was in university. I had 18 months for my dissertation. Each week that went by I planned to write a small chunk of it, just to get going. In the end I wrote the entire thing a week before the deadline with my professor literally sitting next to me making me do it.
> I suspect you will be less likely to feel that inability to get around to do the tasks that you know to be important to do it if you fail in a way that life itself, the universe, hurts you for the failure, as opposed to your boss saying "you're fired for showing up late".
This is true up to a point. What ADHD people need is consequences ASAP. Your boss checking in on you every hour and providing constant pressure is much more effective than a meeting at the end of the month where your boss blows his top and fires you because you've done very little.
To the ADHD sufferers out there ... would you say this describes one of the most predominant symptoms? Would you say someone who reads this and says, "That's me," likely has ADHD?
My thing is mostly that there is SO MUCH i want to do. I need to read this book, I need to practice this guitar, I need to respond to this email, I need to schedule an appointment.
Its not a matter of singular things that cause me issues, I just want to do so many things that I just kinda shut off.
Stoicism tends to be a difficult way to live but it does compensate in the long term.
Going to the gym? 95% of the time I get a decent workout once I gey there. Once I was in a particularly bad mood, so I arrived, warmed up and left. It felt liberating!
Going for a walk? It feels nice most of the time once I get in the rhythm. Sometimes it doesn't, so I come back after a few minutes.
Reading? I wanna do it more. So the goal is to read at least a single page - often it leads to many more, sometimes it's just that page and that's it.
The routine + acceptance of sometimes giving up really takes a lot of stress away from me!
The article mentions doing a "tombstone" exercise: What would be written on your tombstone if you lived the life you wanted? What would be written on your tombstone if you died today? What can you do about the difference?
I would guess (and it's just a guess), that you work out because you want to be healthy? So, would it be important to you that in your eulogy it mentioned that you were healthy? Or maybe you would want it mentioned that you had bigger muscles than other people? Like, what's the value you're chasing? Since it sounds like overall the experience mostly sucks.
But this was in response to a commenter describing a behavior of complaining, which may or may not coincide with a mindset of complaint. And the tone of the comment suggests that it doesn't.
A mindset of gratitude can coexist happily with regular complaining. One can be grateful to have something to complain about, or be grateful about how it feels to complain or have complaints heard, or just be both grateful about something and complain about it (marriage, anyone? Video games? Movies? Job? Family?)
No, it cannot. It is the case that one may not have a mindset of exclusively complaint, as one may have developed a capacity for more gratitude through the effort of being conscious. As long as there is any energy being exerted for complaint, that is energy that can be conserved and utilized for higher purpose.
For a complaint to reach all the way through the body and out the mouth, it must have already been processed through the brain. Complaining in all forms is a type of negative expression, and drains energy. The OP was commenting about how they complain going to the gym, at the gym, coming home from the gym, and while showering after the gym. I'm not sure what you're looking for as a definition of 'mindset of complaint', but this I'd suggest this is suitable.
You can think of complaining, an expression of negativity, as basically a polar opposite of gratitude. To begin cultivating something of a higher order, it will help to attempt to 'reconcile' the feeling of the two by feeling them both simultaneously. When you feel like complaining, or catch yourself doing so, make attempts to begin feeling gratitude. You'll soon find the gratitude will replace the complaining. After doing this enough, you will develop enough sensitivity and acumen to begin actually feeling both sensations at the same time, holding onto the 'complaining' feeling, while reaching toward the gratitude as well. Over time, you will be able to find yourself 'integrating' the two faster and faster, nearer the moment the feelings come into consciousness. Eventually (years), your 'complaining' will be supplanted and you will have a different mode of experience.
For me the secret is like the famous Article says: "Attention is all you need". I distract my attention on how much "boring", or "painful" or "humiliating" some work that I believe is important is.
I just do the work until the work is finished, but I should not feel bored, pain or humiliated while doing it.
If you feel it,It depends on the difficulty of your job, if the difficulty is not that much you can deal with it without problems but if it is hard you will eventually collapse, break down and burn out.
I use instrumental music for that and also habits. I also reward myself for the good work done.
I don't follow ... can you elaborate a bit? Are you saying that, when you feel the work is "boring", for example, you somehow distract your attention from how boring it is?
And if so, how?
More on wikipedia:
In 2012, ACT appeared to be about as effective as standard CBT, with some meta-analyses showing small differences in favor of ACT and others not. For example, a meta-analysis published by Francisco Ruiz in 2012 looked at 16 studies comparing ACT to standard CBT.
I think the more useful measure is: what results does a patient achieve if they fully apply themselves to a particular methodology. Of course we can also look at: what % of people that are introduced to a particular methodology fully apply themselves, but this measure is inherently secondary to the prior measure.
Let’s say my gas tank is empty. One way of treating this is to drive to the gas station. This will fail often (remember, I’m out of gas). We could compare this to other treatments like using a gas can.
Driving to the gas station normally is the better treatment, because normally the gas tank isn’t really empty. But if we’re at the point of getting professional help, it’s actually the other way. We probably have a real problem. If I call up a tow truck company and their suggestion is to drive to the nearest gas station, I wouldn’t say that’s very helpful.
So your conditioning makes sense if the goal is to turn stars into superstars. It is not a good measure for treatment of people in need.
The first half of your first sentence alone should set off alarms “I question efficacy as a valid measure…”
No single thing applies to everyone and this criticism of being "holy grail" is valid for all types of therapies.
I'm no expert but I don't think it has be dramatically better to be very useful, does it? CBT is effective and if some people gel with ACT more than CBT, then great. It might even be useful at lesser efficacy if it's effective for people CBT wasn't effective for.
It feels like my programming job clutters my mind with concerns about work. Then, when I try to program for myself, on my side-projects, I find everything is already cluttered with worries about work, and I end up making little progress.
Or, it may simply be that work makes me tired, and when I'm tired I don't want to work on side-projects?
Has anyone moved away from programming as a job and found it helps them focus on their side-projects better?
I can (1) find a different type of day job (non-programming), and/or (2) work fewer hours at my day job, and/or (3) find a day job that I personally find meaningful. Of these, which is most important and realistic?
With math like this, it's not that hard to motivate oneself. Which makes me think, if people are having a hard time motivating themselves do to things they ostensibly want to do, maybe doing them is not in their best interest (e.g. too risky, reward to far away, reward to small compared to equired effort, reward only monetary while other areas of live are badly neglected etc.). The friction in doing the thing may be your subconscious yelling at you: "wtf are you doing, stop, this isn't good for us".
Records - keeping track of our behavior throughout the day
Rewards - giving ourselves positive reinforcement for engaging in a behavior
Routines - building the new behavior around an existing daily habit
Relationships - finding a friend to do the new behavior with, or who you can talk to about the progress you’re making
Reflecting - taking time to reflect on the progress you’re making through journaling, discussion with a friend, or in your mind
Restructuring - making changes to the environment to make it easier to do the new behavior – i.e., throwing out unhealthy food or preparing at night for a morning run
I don't agree with this mindset. being "loving and playful" doesn't solve client's problems.
I've spent quite a bit of time struggling to implement serious changes, because that's how I thought about them: serious changes. When framed this way, it sounds difficult. If you happen to be depressed, it sounds impossible.
The good news is that there are approaches that can help bring about serious change without requiring an outflow of willpower - willpower you don't have because you don't have the self-discipline.
Starting with small core habit changes makes all of this more possible. At some point, I was able to convince myself that if I'm willing to spend <n> hours on distraction each day, I can commit to 10 minutes of mindfulness each morning.
That 10 minute commitment became a snowball of positive change. The end result was a lot of change, yes, but it does not require a herculean effort or some impossible transformation. It's more like laying bricks. Each brick is manageable. The resulting wall is much greater than the sum of the individual bricks.
I wouldn't call this a shortcut, but it was certainly a lot easier than trying to just "fix" everyone through sheer force of will.
Which particular flavor / approach to mindfulness training did you apply that led to this outcome?
I’ve since been using the Waking Up app also created by Harris. The introductory course is a flavor of Vipassana or “seeing things as they are”, and that’s where I started.
Harris has an extensive background and relationships with many meditation teachers and experts across various disciplines, and he tries to distill the best bits from each into the core meditation course.
In addition to the core practices, the app has a deep library of content from other expert teachers ranging from theory/philosophy to guided practice, and I’ve found it fascinating to try meditations from various schools of thought. Some of the extra content goes down some (secular) Buddhism rabbit holes if that’s of any interest.
(Not affiliated with Harris, but I’m a pretty happy user).
The point is that small changes are often achievable in situations where large changes are not. It's a classic case of breaking a large problem into small enough chunks to make it possible to tackle.
This is a drastically different undertaking and is far more likely to succeed than any kind of "big bang" approach.
The process of therapy, whether that's CBT, ACT, etc. are all about making incremental changes that eventually all combine to rewire how you think and/or act. The entire therapy journey consists of these kinds of small changes along with active processing of past events to free up mental capacity. I'm highlighting therapy here because the related disciplines have been studied extensively.
The same concepts apply in other contexts (and are common in fields like software). Outside of traditional methods of therapy, practices like mindfulness meditation have been studied quite a bit, and there is a growing body of research on its benefits [0]. In particular, it seems to lower friction for hard things by helping you see more clearly the reality of why you're struggling with doing things, and why not doing them is often worse in the long run.
> I would challenge that from the getgo.
To clarify, what are you challenging, specifically? The idea that small changes are easier to execute than large ones?
This has been the subject of deep exploration across many walks of life, and on the personal improvement front is at the center of books like Atomic Habits, which itself is based on a foundation of research. The reason small changes work is that we absorb them into our daily routines until they no longer require active thinking to accomplish.
Part of what happens is that you also start confronting the bad reasoning you've been using to justify not acting. Embarrassingly, I had to re-establish basic habits like brushing my teeth. Clarity through mindfulness led to the realization that avoiding the tiny annoyance of doing this each day would be far less painful than the eventual dental issues I would otherwise suffer. I always knew that, but pausing to actually think clearly is what turned that knowing into a deep realization.
- [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_meditation (linking to Wikipedia as a shortcut to the extensive references in the article if you're curious).
How would you explain getting into the state of “already doing so as part of a larger motivation” in that case? The fact that people manage to get into that state undermines the premise of your challenge. If what you say is true, no one would rise to the level of “already doing”, which is an act that started at some point.
> In every case where I see someone change there's so many factors that went into it that just obviously would lead you to understand how it's intuitive that they would have done so.
This is called life. The causes and conditions of change are tautologically the reason that people change, yes. But is this a surprise?
If there is nothing to change or no reason to change, why would someone try?
By definition, if someone finds themselves in a position that would benefit from change, that falls under your “other things of the sort”.
The factors that lead to change are innumerable and different for each person. Some of the causes include exposure to new information. For me, I stumbled on some useful books like “Learned Optimism”, which details the history of the discovery of learned helplessness. It opened my eyes to some things about myself that I didn’t understand, and was one of many things that led to a change of mind.
Causes and conditions that lead to change include reading comment threads like this one. Exposing yourself to information that challenges your assumptions is another potent change agent.
So discipline is not an on or off switch for a person, it's more granular and nuanced than that.
I still have hard things to overcome.