Hope this doesn’t turn into a free-therapy bandwagon, but I have a lot of the same issues as MixedNuts and anonymous259, so if anyone has any tips or other insights they’d like to share with me, that would be delightful.
My main problem seems to be that, if I don’t find something thrilling or fascinating, and it requires much mental or physical effort, I don’t do it, even if I know I need to do it, even if I really want to do it. Immediate rewards and punishments help very little (sometimes they actually make things worse, if the task requires a lot of thought or creativity). There are sometimes exceptions when the boring+mentally/physically-demanding task is to help someone, but that’s only when the person is actually relying on me for something, not just imposing an artificial expectation, and it usually only works if it’s someone I know and care about (except myself).
A related problem is that I rarely find anything thrilling or fascinating (enough to make me actually do it, at least) for very long. In my room I have stacks of books that I’ve only read a few chapters into; on my computer I have probably hundreds of unfinished (or barely started) programs and essays and designs, and countless others that only exist in my mind; on my academic transcripts are many ‘W’s and ’F’s, not because the classes were difficult (a more self-controlled me would have breezed through them), but because I stopped being interested halfway through. So even when something starts out intrinsically motivating for me, the momentum usually doesn’t last.
Like anon259, I can’t offer any money — this sort of problem really gets in the way of wanting/finding/keeping a job — but drop me a PM if gratitude motivates you. :)
To some extent, the purpose of LessWrong is to fix problems with ourselves, and the distinction between errors in reasoning and errors in action is subtle enough that I would hesitate to declare this on- or off-topic.
It should be mentioned, however, that the population of LessWrongers-asking-for-advice is unlikely to be representative of the population of LessWrongers, and even less so of the population of agents-LessWrongers-care-about. This is likely to make generalizations drawn from observations here narrower in scope than we might like.
Hope this doesn’t turn into a free-therapy bandwagon, but I have a lot of the same issues as MixedNuts and anonymous259, so if anyone has any tips or other insights they’d like to share with me, that would be delightful.
My main problem seems to be that, if I don’t find something thrilling or fascinating, and it requires much mental or physical effort, I don’t do it, even if I know I need to do it, even if I really want to do it. Immediate rewards and punishments help very little (sometimes they actually make things worse, if the task requires a lot of thought or creativity). There are sometimes exceptions when the boring+mentally/physically-demanding task is to help someone, but that’s only when the person is actually relying on me for something, not just imposing an artificial expectation, and it usually only works if it’s someone I know and care about (except myself).
A related problem is that I rarely find anything thrilling or fascinating (enough to make me actually do it, at least) for very long. In my room I have stacks of books that I’ve only read a few chapters into; on my computer I have probably hundreds of unfinished (or barely started) programs and essays and designs, and countless others that only exist in my mind; on my academic transcripts are many ‘W’s and ’F’s, not because the classes were difficult (a more self-controlled me would have breezed through them), but because I stopped being interested halfway through. So even when something starts out intrinsically motivating for me, the momentum usually doesn’t last.
Like anon259, I can’t offer any money — this sort of problem really gets in the way of wanting/finding/keeping a job — but drop me a PM if gratitude motivates you. :)
To some extent, the purpose of LessWrong is to fix problems with ourselves, and the distinction between errors in reasoning and errors in action is subtle enough that I would hesitate to declare this on- or off-topic.
It should be mentioned, however, that the population of LessWrongers-asking-for-advice is unlikely to be representative of the population of LessWrongers, and even less so of the population of agents-LessWrongers-care-about. This is likely to make generalizations drawn from observations here narrower in scope than we might like.
Same deal as the other two—PM me IM contact info, we can chat :)