I have a hypothesis I’d like to test. I think the ability to formulate realistically long-term goals and act on them is derivative of certain types of social skills. Specifically the types of social skills that come from engaging in formal social activities where one works in a group of people towards a particular goal. Anecdotally, most of the people I’ve met who are very good planners have conservative and often religious backgrounds, which I think correlates strongly with participation in formal social activities, whereas most people I meet afflicted with poor motivational skills are also adverse to (at least) formal social activities.
The idea is just that planning is derivative of delegation. You can think of planning as delegation to future selves. Learning how to delegate tasks involves learning how to break tasks up, how to judge their difficulty, how to judge how long they’ll take, how to fairly divide them, how to judge when they’re complete, etc. All of these things are useful skills to have for planning alone but in the social context there is much greater feedback to use when developing them. Self-motivation is, in turn, derivative of group motivation; learning how to lead and motivate a group (or even observing others do so) is prior to learning how to motivate oneself over the long-term. Working in a group might, for example, give you a better idea of reward frequency, how long a person can go without a break, what sort of situations will reduce motivation, how much guidance is needed, etc, that you can then apply to planning your own activities. People without this kind of experience might tend to make unrealistic appraisals of their own abilities (I know this is a major part of my own procrastination; I get 3 months to do something but convince myself it can be done in a month, then when I have a month, I convince myself I can do it in a week, then when the week comes, I’m thinking in terms of days and, finally, I’m some sort of superhuman who can do 3 months work overnight).
I’d like to know if anyone has any contrary data points, thoughts, anecdotes, etc.
To the extent that I had agency, it came from applying my robotics management strategies to myself.
Recently though, I’ve started to acquire agency from other sources. This seems to be largely the result of having concrete experience in which I succeed at doing something I expected to be impossible (even if I could verbally tell you that it makes sense that I should be able to do something, that doesn’t mean my anticipations are such that I would act as if I were able to).
I have a hypothesis I’d like to test. I think the ability to formulate realistically long-term goals and act on them is derivative of certain types of social skills. Specifically the types of social skills that come from engaging in formal social activities where one works in a group of people towards a particular goal. Anecdotally, most of the people I’ve met who are very good planners have conservative and often religious backgrounds, which I think correlates strongly with participation in formal social activities, whereas most people I meet afflicted with poor motivational skills are also adverse to (at least) formal social activities.
The idea is just that planning is derivative of delegation. You can think of planning as delegation to future selves. Learning how to delegate tasks involves learning how to break tasks up, how to judge their difficulty, how to judge how long they’ll take, how to fairly divide them, how to judge when they’re complete, etc. All of these things are useful skills to have for planning alone but in the social context there is much greater feedback to use when developing them. Self-motivation is, in turn, derivative of group motivation; learning how to lead and motivate a group (or even observing others do so) is prior to learning how to motivate oneself over the long-term. Working in a group might, for example, give you a better idea of reward frequency, how long a person can go without a break, what sort of situations will reduce motivation, how much guidance is needed, etc, that you can then apply to planning your own activities. People without this kind of experience might tend to make unrealistic appraisals of their own abilities (I know this is a major part of my own procrastination; I get 3 months to do something but convince myself it can be done in a month, then when I have a month, I convince myself I can do it in a week, then when the week comes, I’m thinking in terms of days and, finally, I’m some sort of superhuman who can do 3 months work overnight).
I’d like to know if anyone has any contrary data points, thoughts, anecdotes, etc.
To the extent that I had agency, it came from applying my robotics management strategies to myself.
Recently though, I’ve started to acquire agency from other sources. This seems to be largely the result of having concrete experience in which I succeed at doing something I expected to be impossible (even if I could verbally tell you that it makes sense that I should be able to do something, that doesn’t mean my anticipations are such that I would act as if I were able to).