If you kicked a heroin habit, good for you! Societally we still can’t use “suck it up you pansies” as a drug rehab strategy just on your say-so.
If you want to form a habit of doing sports for example, it certainly makes a difference whether you see yourself as a unsporty lazy-ass that will never achieve anything, or whether you see yourself as a unsporty person still looking for a way to get into this and make it part of your life.
What I think is important is to break habits out of band. If you are eating unhealthy or too much a good starting point is to limit your food ordering, cook yourself more. And then you can control what you can cook by buying the right things in the right amount. Ideally you don't go grocery shopping hungry then.
So make following your habit the thing that requires extra steps and is complicated, while the better alternative should be easy, available and fill you with some sort of joy. For me jogging became about listening to new music albums or my favourite podcast while exploring new parts of town. So instead of just moving my body, the sports part was actually just a nice side effect to an activity I actively enjoyed.
Sure, depending on your condition, such simple tricks might not work for everybody, but my point is: The mind is powerful. It tricks you into many bad habits, it can also trick you into the good ones if you wield it the right way.
Raw willpower alone will not help you, you also need to identify patterns and avoid creating situations where you fall back, depending on your situation this might mean even things like totally restructuring your life, cutting off contact, moving somewhere else, etc.
People need to have the "willpower" and commitment to change themselves, that is different from expecting them to not do drugs when they're in withdrawal and holding the drugs in their hands.
This is why there are things like gambling blacklists, where gambling addicts can register themselves so that they can't relapse in a moment of weakness. They need the willpower to register themselves so that they don't have to rely on the willpower to not go into a casino when they pass by.
Smart strategy can make things easier, but there is no strategy that makes it easier to stop heroin than do to keep it.
It advertises the idea that with the right circumstances, you can make it so that the desirable option is always the easiest option - this simply isnt true.
It's a terrible, terrible idea to just "stop taking heroin". Pray tell, if you see someone who is an heroin addict and they say they are going to stop it and make no changes to their life, do you believe for a single second they are going to succeed? Hell no.
>Smart strategy can make things easier, but there is no strategy that makes it easier to stop heroin than do to keep it.
You then say:
>Want to stop taking heroin? Stop surrounding yourself with people who take heroin. See a medical professional. Get away from wherever you get the heroin. Try to get your life in order so you have other things to look forward to.
Those things are all a complex sequence of tasks that requires a huge amount of planning, logistics, task initiation, etc etc. Not to mention money, uncertainty, fear etc. They are literally orders of magnitude more difficult for a person to do than continuing to take heroin.
It'd be like if I told you, "want to stop being hungry for breakfast in the morning? Just go change your whole life instead of eating a bagel."
My point is the inverse. Resisting the urge to do heroin is a necessary part of every solution. Necessary but not sufficient
If your strategy is exert no willpower with respect to your cravings, it doesnt matter how much support you have or how many life changes you make.
The reason why so many people hire a coach for physical activities, diet or even life decisions isn't so much that these are extremely specialized domains that need high expertise; it's that having someone make the decision, i.e. not relying on willpower, is often more effective and easier. It also leads to accountability: you have to show results to someone else, not just to your brain. And for most people, that's also more effective and easier than willpower.
Telling people to get over themselves and take charge is generally a well-meaning, but often misleading call to action. And after a couple of failures, the lesson they'll learn is that they're weak and ineffective and there's nothing that can be done about it, which compounds the problem instead of solving it.
The coach isn't a contradiction to willpower. You still make the choice to get up and go when you are lazy, you have just changed the incentives and accountability.
It also takes willpower and initiative to hire a coach.
If you avoid anything difficult and quit the second things get hard, no a mount of support will help.
By all means, use every trick in the book to make it easier. However, you are setting yourself up for failure in life if you avoid everything that requires effort, or think everything can be made easy with enough tricks
Thats a weird observation to make. can you point to where anyone has said that?
I certainty havent said things require the same effort and will power, just that any action with effort requires some willpower.
Do you have any other examples where you think critical thinking abilities cannot be universally applied?
Okay,singing requires manipulation of your voice (diaphragm + airways. You also need to know the correct posture to keep,but its not 100% necessary).
Dancing requires manipulation of your feet, legs, hips, shoulders, arms, hands, and head. Sometimes your belly and butt as well.
Just having a sense of rhythm isn't good enough. You can bob along to a rhythm with 100% accuracy, and not be "dancing." You need to know how to move your body in a way that is rhythmically accurate and pleasing to the eye, coordinating different body parts in alternating, but synchronized patterns. It's a totally different skill set. Musicians,for example, are often very reluctant dancers.
“Preposterous, my vast intellect can easily overcome anything!”
I think a significant factor is tech skews young. Once your gem turns black, it's time for carousel. (Amusingly, if you understand that reference, you're probably already older than many tech companies are comfortable with).
That statement itself seems like it would be a cognitive bias.
Computer Science is the worst named discipline. Many times when reading code it's like a window into someone else's mind, or a direct window into your own confused mess of a mind from the past.
Problem is, it's really really complicated, and no matter how good you get, or how much practice you put in, it still feels like we humans are trying to fly by flapping our arms.
I find that interesting.
For the record, the only cognitive fallacy I admit to is denial.