Outsmarting Yourself for Success | Hacker News Reader

Outsmarting Yourself for Success

dextronet.com

47 pointsjirinovotny12 comments

I don't like the tone of this sort of piece. The capitalizations and bolding, the oversimplified assertions of "caveman brain" and "rational brain". It probably has valid advice, but it rings quackery alarms.

It's because it looks like a landing page for an internet marketing ebook. I scrolled to the bottom to make sure it wasn't that or a mailing list full of the secrets for success that somehow got to the frontpage.

It's a landing page for a software to-do list. Somehow the guy lands the HN front page with a vague blog post every 2-3 weeks.

The overuse of exclamation marks makes me cringe when I read this article. Nonetheless, he's got some solid points. I wish he gave more concrete examples rather than just the one on getting up early.

Can't make yourself do something? try this:

- First shut down all distractions , and go lay on bed.

- Don't move or do anything until it is what you want to do.

- go and do it.

I tried this few times, it worked, it usually took me 15 min to 30 min to get up again and start doing work. (maybe for you will be different)

That sounds like a solid plan, and I have tried it in the past but I always get stuck on the problem that I am too smart (or too stupid) to trick myself.

Or, and this may be worse, I look at the problem and say 'yes this would be nice, I like to be financially independent' and then take a look at what it would take to get there and then say 'but honestly the reward is not worth the effort'.

The article is long but the main lesson behind is to identify success paths and failure paths. Then make the changes so that the path of least resistance is the path to success.

I love this and his other posts about goals. I've been researching this topic/field (relevant to what I'm doing) for the longest time and it's better than most other blogs about goals.

This article is just about setting up your environment correctly so you don't need to rely on willpower as much. The book Switch, and the Happiness Hypothesis talked a lot about this.

I have not had much luck with this kind of strategy in the past, although I did successfully quit reddit by editing my hosts file.

tl;dr: Set yourself up so that choosing a path leading to failure is harder than choosing the path leading to success. There is a kernel of truth in all the long-form dramatization.

Good tips but the article was WAY too long. What a distraction...

Slightly tangential but I'm a huge fan of the dextronet's swift to-do list.

I use a combination of swift's to-do list, gmail tasks and lazymeter to keep track of my TODOs. I find the todo list a very important tool in my productivity arsenal.

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