Self-control signals and affords power
today.ucsd.edu
today.ucsd.edu
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/1/15/16863374/wi...
The most likely explanation is that people who report high self-control are really experiencing less temptation.
I'd go for more of a Freudian "people who are somewhat obsessed with self control (therefore mindful of it) are people who struggle with it," coupled with salience bias. People who don't struggle with self control never think about it.
This study is complete garbage.
You have to stay on task (say the color not the word) and this requires a bit of working memory (what was the task?) and requires inhibition of the 'fast system' (system 1, which would just blurt out something), all associated with the PFC (prefrontal cortex).
Obviously it's not perfect, but at least very simple, quantitative, cheap, etc.
Power is about managing conflicts, being able to control yourself while going through one is a huge advantage. Being able to evaluate your options, using the right amount of time for decision making, thinking through what you are actually going to say before starting to speak, these are all skills that depend on self-control.
Yes, it's not 1:1 power, but as the submission title states, it signals it. (Hence the movie cliches about extremely cool guys, don't even flinch while an explosion is going on, and the memes about how millenials flinch when the phone rings, etc.)
In the original qualitative write-ups for the Marshmallow Test, they described the children using all sorts of distraction strategies to basically make themselves forget that there's a tasty marshmallow sitting right in front of them. Maybe this is all that self-control is - having enough self-awareness (and valuing your future self highly enough) to direct your attention elsewhere so that temptations disappear from your view. It fits with the neuroscience we know about consciousness as well (that it's effectively a brain network which taps into the other brain networks and can observe and direct their firing) and even into how attention mechanisms in GPTs work.
It also is how most mature adults approach the world. If you're an alcoholic, don't go to the bar. If you're married, don't go to the strip club. If you want to lose weight, put less food on your plate. Most of what we know of as self-control is really having the skills to avoid temptation.
You may be right that if abstaining becomes habitual amd automatic enough, that could be indiscernable from a state in which you have no temptation. But I'd argue it's only "self-control" for the purpose of measuring willpower as long as it requires some degree of conscious decision making.
Funny you mention this, because I have the personal experience to answer your question, yes there is a distinction. I've told the story here before, but I'll tell it again. As a teen / young adult, could eat as much food as a wanted and burn it all away. A daily food intake might be a sandwich and chips for lunch, 2-3 full bowls of cereal and milk for an afternoon "snack". Dinner, with seconds. And then depending on the evening, cookies, chips, cracker and cheese or icecream for an evening snack. I left high school on the "needs a few more pounds" side of the weight scale. And that ability to eat that much food (and the appetite to back it up) never left. But the burning of the calories did. As I got older, weight kept climbing. Oh sure, I did the "put less food on the plate" thing. I did calorie counting. Even managed to lose some weight doing it. A whole 30 pounds at my best over an agonizing year. Every day was a constant battle with myself to look at the goals of where I wanted to be and fight every fiber of my being to not eat more food. I was hungry all the time. And it never stuck. No matter what I did I couldn't keep up with it.
And I assumed it was a lack of self control. A lack of will power. I assumed I just needed to try harder. And try harder I did. Time and time and time again. Nothing. Then recently I started a medication, with a side effect of reducing your appetite. Suddenly, I'm losing weight with ease. And I learned something interesting. The first week, I was convinced I was having anxiety attacks. Like clockwork every day, around 6 hours after taking the meds, my stomach would start knotting up. I'd start feeling this weird feeling like something was wrong and I needed to do something about it. And then it hit me, ~6 hours after taking the medications was also lunch time, or dinner time. I was getting hungry. And what was novel was realizing I'd never NOT been hungry my entire life since I was a teenager. I thought I was having anxiety attacks because I had never once felt the feeling of not being hungry turning into hunger. I stopped eating when I physically couldn't eat any more food, or the food ran out, never because I was satiated by the food. "Getting hungry" again was just the feeling of being stuffed going away. But I was always hungry.
Since starting the medication, I've lost close to 50 pounds. And it's SOOO much easier than it's ever been in the past. I can eat a normal meal, and just be satisfied with that. I can think to myself "I'm hungry, I should get a snack", and then follow that thought up with "I'm about to have lunch/dinner in an hour, I can wait" and actually follow through on that. I can stop thinking about that snack. I can count my calories for the day, see that I'm at my limit and just make the decision to stop eating any more food. Heck there are days where I have to make the conscious decision to make and eat more food because I'm too far under my limit for the day, but I've just not been hungry that day.
So yes, I'm putting less food on my plate, just like I could and did before the medication. But let me assure you that doing the things to "avoid temptation" is a hell of a lot easier when your body and mind aren't actively working against you.
In real life, how often are these true for power that matters?
- as an IC, I generally don't have the information an exec has, and cannot easily judge which choices are aligned with stated goals
- as a voter, I'm regularly unsure which goals that a politician says publicly are their real goals
- and for any situation where I'm close enough to judge the actual suitability of actions, and the intents of the participants, I probably have enough of a stake that my view of who should be in control is swayed by what outcome I want
It can definitely be interesting to see how the personality one projects can influence the social dynamics of a peer group (with the usual caveats that studying people in laboratory conditions for something iterated and evolving like social relationships is famously fraught in the first place), but this notion of power as something that's given to people by social perception on a moment-to-moment basis seems ill-suited to describe the real world, where in many contexts the relevant power is official and considerably less up for social negotiation
Some power derives from charisma, force of personality, or social fluency. But lots of power, from the perspective of the people it is acting on, derives from or relies on nothing of the sort, and merely requires that consequences can be enacted for failure to cooperate with the power dynamic at play
This narrative is not insignificant. A lot of powerful people love to tell a story where power is just a personal competency, and consequently, that anyone's lack of power in any circumstance is, as the gamers say, a skill issue
We could call a language a social illusion. There's nothing red about the word red. And the distinction we draw between "earth" and "sky" is not one that the universe appears to use in its operation. Language does, however, require us to negotiate symbols, their meanings, and the consequences stemming from them. Like in how I rejected your definition of "official" with a rationale which you may attempt to overcome, accommodate... or just walk away from. And like in how we have structured our interactions so far as a contest of truths with bold and uncompromising assertions, when the option remains available to switch to a search for truth with tentative and attackable statements.
It's exactly with the same with governments and other organizations, all based on language as they are. We make them up. We make up rules for making them up. Occasionally someone hits someone else with a big stick. But although the stick is real, the reasons why we do things, and the reasons why we believe we can do things with these consequences or those, are things we all work together or in opposition to establish. "Official" included.
I suppose this is theoretically a good practice, but only if you're already operating in a high-trust environment. If you're not, it starts to feel like you're never good enough, because absolutely every victory, no matter how big or small, is followed up with "but it could be better...". Which is, again technically accurate, but part of the finesse of being a good people-manager is understanding that humans are not robots who can simply process and accept criticism without any emotional hangups.
For someone, like me a few years ago, who is undisciplined and has not spent time cultivating self-control this is hard to hear. If you find yourself making excuses when you read this article for why the power hierarchy is against you, or that there is bias in the results of this study (as some of the comments here allude to), then you should consider reevaluating why you are making excuses. It's a sign that this post triggered you and your response was to make an excuse rather than accept a correlation that speaks to an underlying hard truth. Once you start digging into "why did I make an excuse" and chase that feeling over and over whenever you find yourself making excuses, you will start to realize that you can't think of a reason why you made an excuse, it's just what you've done and reinforced in the past. If you've read this comment this far and you have a spark of curiosity and relate to not knowing why you are making excuses, I suggest you take this moment to chase it down and gain agency over your own life. Some would say this is your red pill moment. 'The Daily Stoic' woke me up, I highly recommend it. Discipline equals freedom, my friend, and we sorely need you.
Good work is the key to good fortune / Winners take that praise / Losers seldom take that blame
In fact I will double down on this book so much, that I will personally buy a copy for anyone who sends me an email cory@linux.com. No one will know you asked for a copy and I ask for nothing in return.
A huge amount of which appears to be consumed and re-re-gurgitated by adolescent gamers
This is the real key. Management is about controlling others and not letting others control you without compensation.
> I would personally trust others who have self-control more than those who don't for time-sensitive and critical tasks because I can rely on them to regulate their emotions and give honest answers, as well as hold themselves accountable.
Of course you would, and if they wanted to be in your shoes they would do well to learn mastery over others as well as you have.
Learning the language of self-control may be a path to that, especially if you have not heard it before. However, it can also be a path to being controlled, as in your example. I grew up in a conservative environment, so that was my problem: I was heavily indoctrinated in the language of self-control, responsibility, and accountability, and these made me easy to exploit. My own "red pill" moment involved understanding these as tools of power rather than facts of the world, thereby freeing myself to better represent my own interests.
Can you give some clearer examples? I am curious how this is done in those circles.
The best example I can think of is that 85% of the kids in my High School had the same haircut and rarely left the area. Suddenly mTV arrived on cable and the kids and hairstyles went wild. I know of parents calling the cable company to get mTV removed from the home(unsuccessfully).
It is simply a cultural standard.
Now, it doesn't always mean that this is a way someone is manipulating you. Self-control is realizing that this ego-stroke feeling of making you feel important does not mean to need to involve yourself or act. You need to separate the emotion from the decision-making process and realize that others can use your emotions to manipulate you. It's up to you to decide whether you can trust this person or not, you just need to be aware that the emotion could have been intentional or unintentional.
So the defining thing isn't reacting to a shiny thing, it is what you do after that initial thought and whether you can see yourself falling in the ever-same traps and do something against it.
> ...this post triggered you
Definitely the language choices of an unbiased perspective from someone who doesn't have an axe to grind
this may not always be true by the way. such constant observation of yourself, constantly asking yourself what such and such a thing means or came from - may eventually lead you to notice the cognitive jump you take - the experience you had all those years ago plus the new thought pattern you started to let yourself believe - which became compressed and hidden by the familiarity and comfort of having no problems due to the resulting dissociation. Before you let yourself believe there was no reason, consider deferring belief permanently until you remember what impression you had which caused 'what is'. Far along that path lies deep self-knowledge and therefore deep knowledge of the world. Most people aren't as interested in seeing the truth as they believe so they give up when they feel more comfortable. It's explained, then, that as a result of not being awakened to what is, their karma inside themselves can still conquer their destiny [1]. Whereas someone who actually respects the truth is going to think more seriously about controlling their karma, at the very least so as not to damage the truth more.
1. What is Destiny?- [link redacted]
Umm... You are confusing self control with confidence and self esteem. They aren't the same thing. Though I can see how becoming more disciplined can lead to more confidence and self esteem.
I've heard it said (I believe by Hormozi on Williamson's podcast) that at a certain level, success becomes mostly about saying no to increasingly great opportunities.
I can confirm this is relevant near the bottom too, at least if you have a high level of openness (personality dimension) and are presented with inspiration on a regular basis.
The 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration quote comes to mind.
The principle of sacrifice comes to mind. It seems to be a choice between sacrificing many small things, or a few great things.
(1) You can spend each day traveling to a new area, planting a new seed wherever you go, but never watering the same area twice. You get to learn about many different seeds, but you never get to stick around somewhere long enough to watch them grow into fruit-bearing plants. Your soul will be full of different experiences, but you will not be able to relish in the details of any particular area (i.e. pluck the fruit from your garden when you are ready to relax and are thinking back on your life)
(2) You can choose to focus on one or a few areas to add depth, learn the fundamentals of how things grow in those areas, and learn to care for and nourish them over time. In the end, you will be left with a beautiful garden that you have perfected and know every detail about that is full of fruit-bearing plants. You can wander this garden and eat the fruit from any of your plants.
Your soul has a finite reach. By focusing on one thing, you are neglecting to focus on another, and there is nothing you can do to change that. It's up to you to choose how you want to live, and not making a choice is also a choice. If you don't make a choice (i.e. a sacrifice of not visiting some areas or not nourishing the area around you), you will be left with the worst of both worlds: a decaying garden and no knowledge of how to grow anything.
For example I can lose 10 pounds in 2 months with diet control and a bit of discipline. But it comes back quickly once the self control goes away. What is the point? Practicing such self control does not give me better self control next time but only brings down self confidence a bit every time.
I guess the ultimate reason is that I do not really enjoy the targets I set. How can I enjoy something I do not but inherently good for me?
If you never had a grounding to start with then it's time to find one.
But then again, I probably have no idea what I am going to do with a healthier body.
It is really insightful about how we train ourselves for compliance, but how that training struggles to cope when we interact with violence escalaters (who are common in some parts of society).
I live near a port town and face and threat of violence is easily visible in men and many women.
It's extremely humiliating, and I've gone a lot further than listening to the daily stoic, there's an entire body of scientific literature on how to improve self-control in general and for people like me who seem to have literal neurological abnormalities. I've spent the last few weeks miserable from medication side-effects for instance.
“To motivate their employees, organizations often want employees to set stretch goals – goals that are challenging and hard-to-reach. However, we found that setting a stretch goal and not meeting it makes someone look less powerful than setting an easy goal and surpassing it,” said Rady School PhD student Shuang Wu, the first author of the paper.The practical benefits of a limited versus highly ambitious short-term goal from the outset include an avoidance of 'feature creep' where you're tempted to add more nice-to-have features partway through, more self-confidence that you can achieve the goal with a little effort, and a clearly-identified decision point upon achieving the goal, where you can decide whether to continue on with the project for more ambitious goals, or satisfyingly call the project complete.
In educational psychology, this is known as the "zone of proximal development" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_proximal_development), which I've also heard as called "i+1 planning."
- St Augustine
In other words, self-control doesn't just "lead to" power, it is power.
While my ego would want to agree the truth is staying in power and making money exponentially isn't easy either, and you can't lie your way to lifelong power and fuck you money because eventually people figure you out, your reputation plummets and then you have less power and less opportunity to make money.
That said you choose what game you want to play, if you care more about your craft focus on perfecting it even though that's not gonna make you as much money as pursuing money for its own sake.
Surely we do have very notable exceptions to this.
Take Elon, he does overpromise and you could say he lies about self-driving capabilities but overall he does deliver
The answer is: you kind of have to bring something uniquely valuable to the table. Exceptional skill with people and general intelligence are certainly valuable ingredients, but to really crack the upper tier some kind of domain mastery is what really pushes you over the top. Bonus points if it's a new domain, fast to monetize and scale, hence the rapid rise of tech in the Fortune 500 over the past couple decades through the web and smart phone revolutions.
The exceptions people talk about, of people gaining power by lying, are all exceptionally good at lying.
This helps give me words to understand my mixed feelings about an old post I found on a language learning forum recently, about a person who shared an ambitious goal that appeared unrealistic to achieve on their proposed timeline of six months. The person aimed to start studying as a complete beginner with a language and achieve a 'C1 level' certification by that time (this is an advanced exam that evaluates for fluency in a spoken debate on a scholarly topic, thorough comprehension of spoken debates on the radio, and the ability to write a timed persuasive essay with a limited number of flaws on a nuanced topic).
The responses to the post at the time were largely discouraging. On the one hand, I quietly agreed from personal experience with the other users that the goal simply wasn't feasible for most people: it would have been ambitious (but doable) to employ the same stretch of time to go from the B2 level (the level just below, which is sufficient for immigration to major countries that used the language officially) to the C1 level. But on the other hand, I did feel sympathetic toward the idea of the person setting an ambitious personal goal. The person even tried to make this concrete by including a plan of intense hours of tutoring and television watching per week. The post was a year old when I read it, so I checked the person's user profile to see if they reported the outcome. But the person never gave a written update (neither a post, nor a comment, nor an edit), though the account was active with recent unrelated comments.
My conclusion is that it's best to be supportive of people with ambitious goals to better themselves, but it's most practical to draw a distinction between goals in the short, medium, and long-term. Ambitious goals for self-betterment on any of these timelines ought to be celebrated. But there are risks with short-term goal that skirt too far outside of realism: this can cause someone to push themselves too much to the point of burnout and quitting (it's unclear, but possible, that this might have happened to that person). In my week-to-week life, I've personally seen beginner's burnout happen with overly-eager novices in martial arts.
A set of attainable short-term goals in service of ambitious goals over a longer timeline would be more sustainable. But if one wishes to pursue an ambitious goal in the short-term, that ought to be okay too—as long as the individual understands the burnout risks upfront, to lower the odds of abandoning their goal if they fall short.
The result of the study seems obvious even if the design is a bit primitive.
Part of me sees this research as "doing everything by the book" and consequently failing to capture important insights. For instance, every economic model of humans assumes that we're "rational agents", yet we know that people with poor impulse control (like ElMo, Trump, etc.) are perceived as powerful by a wide swath of the public.
Maybe their "turns down dessert" thought experiments are just that -- thought experiments -- and do not reflect what humans actually do, IRL.
Versus giving up after first or second failure.
Is it still luck that is most important?
I am also not talking about becoming a millionaire.
I am talking about simple things like getting a decent job. If I sent 2 CVs out and gave up can I compare with someone who sent 100 CVs out and got the job? Can I say "he just got lucky"?
If you give up easily or get distracted accomplishing difficult tasks will be impossible.
We all know those people and at least to me they always feel like bit of looser who openly jeopardise their own future.
Trumps of this world only impress naive people of this world, people who buy how to make $1m in a year books.
Trump openly employs wrestling narrative building to win popularity. It doesn't get any basic than that (i am generalising avg trump voter of course, but a man who never worked a day of hard work in his life - is a hero of blue collar, cheated on every single of his 5 wives - christian hero and maybe eveb second coming, all his businesses went bust - a true successful businessmen)
Would you trust trump to run your company? or oversee anything of value?
Once I started doing 100 pushups, 100 situps, 100 air squats, and a 10-km run every day, I found greater strength and focus in my life. I felt I could easily take on just about any task with ease and immediately conquer it!
Eventually, I got into training which used higher-than-normal gravity to maximize resistance and further build strength.
After a while I measured my power, and it was well over 9000!
And "higher IQ leads to power" (on average, population statistic) is not counterintuitive.
> But Steve Jobs could also be a tyrant. He was obsessively controlling, and given to fits of rage, throwing tantrums and yelling at employees and board members.
(quoted).
>Read the internal Tesla employee survey from 2018, where employees called Elon Musk an 'unapproachable tyrant' who fires people 'because of his ego'
(Quoted)
... The list is long ...
I remember interviewing when I was chubbier post-COVID thinking that the only evidence the interviewer has of my self-control and drive is that I have none. Best case scenario, you are interviewing a temporarily embarrassed skinny person.
Noble prize winner James Watson, famous bluntly tell it like it is-er, said he didn't hire fat people for this reason.
(This has since been rectified by reinstating strength training and dietary controls, which I recommend.)
As an overweight person, I don't think it's controversial. You'll also accrue personal and professional benefits from being a tall man and/or good-looking.
However, "fat people have no self-control" is still fatphobia and ignores the interplay of genetic, metabolic, physiological, cultural, socio-economic, and environmental factors that contribute to obesity. There are countless fat people who are incredibly smart and hard-working, and have exquisite discipline in most areas of their life.
First of all, I really find this term to be gross. You should be afraid of being unhealthy.
Second of all, are you posting that you have individual metabolic differences that substantially alter your caloric expenditure?
FYI most studies show very little innate caloric expenditure differences between human beings outside of what can be predicted based on their body mass. Ironically, heavier people burn more calories, not less, innately.
This makes sense because metabolic machinery is complex and so fundamental to life that it would obviously be very tightly tuned genetically.
Lodge a complaint with dictionaries, I guess? https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/fatph...
You can't agree with "you will accrue personal and professional benefits from not being fat" and then pretend fat-scrimination (is that better?) doesn't exist.
Also, using heuristics to make judgments about situations is how intelligence works.
Being fat is bad. Being a normal weight is better in every metric
The quality of life improvement from not being obese is obscene.
Also, I prefer to associate with people who are not fat. Is that a bad thing?
Under-promise, over-deliver.
Why does he still overpromise when he does not need to? Well the latest biography sorta explained it: He can't help himself, he needs the thrill of an ever more difficult problem to solve. (ie. he's psycho)
By whom do you want to be considered powerful?
And how can I maximize the real/perceived performance delta between myself and other participants in that target group?
And how do I do so in a way that doesn't appear threatening to the decision-makers (group "leaders") in that target group?