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Comment by noemit | Hacker News Reader

I don't think this guy has really built or broken many habits. None of what he says is wrong per se, it's just wordy. You don't need such a deep understanding of the brain to build/break habits. You just need a reason.

If you really wanted to do that habit or get rid of a habit, you just would.

Most of you live high agency lives and are making decisions every day that are creating your life exactly how you have decided to make it. A lot of stuff feels "hard" but you just don't want it bad enough.

One example is how easy it is for 99% of women to quit social drinking when they get pregnant. These same people, without such a clear and strong motivation, would probably "slip up" and struggle with 9 months of sobriety.

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> If you really wanted to do that habit or get rid of a habit, you just would.

This is ridiculously naïve. You seem to be completely forgetting the existence of addiction.

> One example is how easy it is for 99% of women to quit social drinking when they get pregnant.

Because they weren't addicted to drinking, like most healthy people.

Do you think a single fat person wants to be fat? It's uncomfortable, inconvenient and embarrassing; nobody wants it, and they know exactly what causes it. The reason more than half of our population is overweight is they are addicted to food and our society not only enables it but encourages and reinforces it. They can't "just stop".

I think about when I quit smoking. I failed several times because I didn't really want to quit smoking. But then, when I really had had enough of smoking, and actually wanted to quit, addiction was in the way. I failed a couple of times because the consequences of stopping were so severe (headaches, anxiety, fatigue). Then I added a non-rewarding nicotine replacement (patches) to prevent the withdrawal symptoms, and suddenly quitting was manageable.

You can't just quit food, though.

...and you seem to have quickly conflated habit with *addiction*.

It could be a valid point to bring up, but being combative/aggressive with it doesn't benefit the conversation. You could word it as something "perhaps some people need to question if something is a bad habit, or if they are addicted...", rather than calling parent 'ridiculously naive'

This seems a semantic carving of the discussion to match the argument though.

> Person 1: Just stop it. Want harder.

> Person 2: I can't.

> Person 1: Well, you have an addiction then, not just a bad habit; my point was about habits.

If we grant this: then the great-grandparent's response fails to inform us of anything beyond merely how we choose to define words. The advice works until it doesn't, which is tautologically true but not useful.

You seem to have taken the message 'want harder' from the original comment.

I took the original comment as question if you actually want the habit or are just doing it out of social or self pressure, or just for the sake of 'that seems like a good thing'.

Emphasising that you are free to drop habits, rather than pressuring yourself to achieve something that you might not really want.

Most people aren't addicted to bad habits. Thats why I said 99% of people. Alcoholism, real alcoholism, is not actually that common.

You're almost right. Habits don't just show up – we engage in them because they give us something useful back. The trouble is this useful thing is often optimised for the short-term, and habits can have negative long-term consequences.

The alcohol thing is a good example: when not pregnant, it gives us short-term pleasure, at long-term cost. When pregnant, the cost of alcohol is moved up to the now and so it's easier to get out of the habit. It's not about strength of motivation, it's about immediacy of consequences.

I have heard rumours that some people are able to channel motivation to pursue what's good in the long term even when it goes against short-term gains, but I believe this ability is more rare than it may appear. For many, it's more effective to try to re-arrange the environment such that the consequence profile aligns with the long-term goals.

Yep, all great points. If you want to go deeper, I think we can actually trick ourselves into being "pregnant" by creating some sort of urgency in our lives. An investor I worked with once told me the best way to be a successful entrepreneur is to become unhirable (through scandal or something like that) because then you would absolutely have to make it in business on your own.

When you live a high agency life, you have to screw it up in strategic ways to push you towards success. I actually chose to have children when I felt like I was making too much money and it was making my life a little too easy. (It wasn't the only factor, but it was a conscious factor).

And it worked - I have way less time, way more important things, and my software projects have become much more hyper focused and I goto market and test things much earlier, I simply dont have the luxury to sit around and think like I used to.

"just try harder" isn't a strategy or good advice.

I don't think the parent's advice is anything to do with "just try harder"...I think he's saying that we try to create habits for things we don't really care about...just stuff we think we should do for productivity or health or whatever.

You don't need to 'try harder'; you need to question your motivation for the habit in the first place. Either a thought will click that clarifies why a habit is actually important, or you'll realise you are pressuring yourself to take on a habit that doesn't really matter to you (when you strip away the bullshit)

edit: and if the importance finally clicks for you, you'll generally just start working on the habit. I struggled with weight for years, and then eventually motivation/understanding clicked and I lost 6stone/40kg/90lb in around 18 months (and have lost a little more since, and kept it off for years).

I'm not a dude, but yep you get it.

"Just try harder" is not the follow up to "You don't want it bad enough."

Sometimes you just have to accept that you don't want it. And that at some point the time will come when you will want it bad enough, like it did for you.

> A lot of stuff feels "hard" but you just don't want it bad enough.

Reminds me of the Eric Thomas speech where he tells the class they don't want it bad enough.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vuetQSwFW8

> Most of you live high agency lives and are making decisions every day that are creating your life exactly how you have decided to make it.

Most of us dont. I certainly have very little choice over my day to day life.

You could copy/paste this paragraph and create the shortest book on self-motivation ever created.

Jokes apart, what you wrote is really true and made really think about it.

I think Shia LeBouf has this beat with “do itttt!”

Most motivation/self-help books are reiterating the same things in different ways.

And it's probably okay, because each wording/phrasing can make the message "click" for different people. Same thing with the timing. Reading something when you're 18 and when you're 30 can be totally different.

Yeah, I was a recreational amateur beer drinker, to the point where it was almost my social identity. Would lie if I'd say i never tried to tone down

After I was diagnosed with gluten intolerance, I stopped drinking it overnight without any problem. Very interesting, but it just comes down that the consequence overweight the immediate gain. Hangovers were never a big enough reason for me to stop drinking, but the overall negative consequences of being glutened overweighted that

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