Not mr-hire, but I got a lot of value from things more in the space of “improve your ability to control the elephant.” I expect the lowest hanging fruit will vary from person to person, and part of the point of this post was to alert people to the fact that there are different strategies that they might not be considering (either for themselves or people they’re giving advice to)
I think there was a general skill of “learn how to focus on a task”, which I learned by combination of:
– finding projects that I cared enough about to actually want to focus on them (importantly, this was not sufficient to keep me going through the less shiny parts after the honeymoon period and in some cases even during the honeymoon period)
– getting SelfControl.app, which wouldn’t have worked on it’s own if I’d just been forcing myself to use it
– establishing persistent habits and meta-habits to stay focused and to build incentive loops for myself.
Once I gained the relevant skills, they remained applicable even in areas that were less viscerally exciting.
Most of the lack-of-system-1-yumminess I fixed by changing my environment rather than changing myself.
This makes sense, but I also want to register that I viscerally dislike “controlling the elephant” as a frame, in roughly the same way as I viscerally dislike “controlling children” as a frame.
Not mr-hire, but I got a lot of value from things more in the space of “improve your ability to control the elephant.” I expect the lowest hanging fruit will vary from person to person, and part of the point of this post was to alert people to the fact that there are different strategies that they might not be considering (either for themselves or people they’re giving advice to)
I think there was a general skill of “learn how to focus on a task”, which I learned by combination of:
– finding projects that I cared enough about to actually want to focus on them (importantly, this was not sufficient to keep me going through the less shiny parts after the honeymoon period and in some cases even during the honeymoon period)
– getting SelfControl.app, which wouldn’t have worked on it’s own if I’d just been forcing myself to use it
– establishing persistent habits and meta-habits to stay focused and to build incentive loops for myself.
Once I gained the relevant skills, they remained applicable even in areas that were less viscerally exciting.
Most of the lack-of-system-1-yumminess I fixed by changing my environment rather than changing myself.
This makes sense, but I also want to register that I viscerally dislike “controlling the elephant” as a frame, in roughly the same way as I viscerally dislike “controlling children” as a frame.