It’s surprisingly hard to consciously notice a bad thing as being a solvable problem, I agree. I will once in a while notice that I’ve been inconvenienced by X for a long time, but only now am I actively aware of it as a discrete entity. It’s a skill I think would be particularly worth learning/improving.
Similarly, with opportunities—this has happened a couple times in my life, but the first I remember was that beforehand, I would hear about people volunteering at animal shelters, and I’d think “that sounds nice/fun”...end of thought. One day, all of a sudden, something clicked, and the thought occurred, “There’s nothing fundamentally special about those people. That thing is a Thing I Could Do. There’s nothing actually stopping me from doing it.” And there wasn’t; I did a Google and made a few calls, and in a few weeks I was cleaning kestrel poop out of a concrete enclosure XP. (These days I hand-feed baby squirrels/possums/rabbits, mostly.) But I remember how much of a revelation it was: those people on the other side of the screen are by-and-large the same kind of people I am—if I want to do what they do I can. If I wanted to drop everything and build thatch houses in a third world country, I could. (I just don’t really want to, haha.)
It’s still a hard skill to learn—I doubt I do it nearly as often as I could, or even perhaps should.
I think the ideal here is to be able to reflexively notice in the moment “this is bad and I should fix it”, and then actually doing something about it. But this is really hard to consistently pull off. For me, a major bottleneck is that it takes a lot of attention and willpower to do this reliably in the moment.
I’ve found that I can get a long way by systematising it—creating a regular time when I dwell on “what opportunities am I currently procrastinating about?” Or “what is a low level inconvenience that I’m not doing anything about?”. I find a weekly review is a great time to go through questions like that.
I find this really, really helpful, because it’s easy to make something like that a routine, and it takes much less willpower than being agenty in the moment. And it also makes it easier to track things when they happen, because I can notice and make a note, and put in the actual effort to fix it during the weekly review
It’s surprisingly hard to consciously notice a bad thing as being a solvable problem, I agree. I will once in a while notice that I’ve been inconvenienced by X for a long time, but only now am I actively aware of it as a discrete entity. It’s a skill I think would be particularly worth learning/improving.
Similarly, with opportunities—this has happened a couple times in my life, but the first I remember was that beforehand, I would hear about people volunteering at animal shelters, and I’d think “that sounds nice/fun”...end of thought. One day, all of a sudden, something clicked, and the thought occurred, “There’s nothing fundamentally special about those people. That thing is a Thing I Could Do. There’s nothing actually stopping me from doing it.” And there wasn’t; I did a Google and made a few calls, and in a few weeks I was cleaning kestrel poop out of a concrete enclosure XP. (These days I hand-feed baby squirrels/possums/rabbits, mostly.) But I remember how much of a revelation it was: those people on the other side of the screen are by-and-large the same kind of people I am—if I want to do what they do I can. If I wanted to drop everything and build thatch houses in a third world country, I could. (I just don’t really want to, haha.)
It’s still a hard skill to learn—I doubt I do it nearly as often as I could, or even perhaps should.
I think the ideal here is to be able to reflexively notice in the moment “this is bad and I should fix it”, and then actually doing something about it. But this is really hard to consistently pull off. For me, a major bottleneck is that it takes a lot of attention and willpower to do this reliably in the moment.
I’ve found that I can get a long way by systematising it—creating a regular time when I dwell on “what opportunities am I currently procrastinating about?” Or “what is a low level inconvenience that I’m not doing anything about?”. I find a weekly review is a great time to go through questions like that.
I find this really, really helpful, because it’s easy to make something like that a routine, and it takes much less willpower than being agenty in the moment. And it also makes it easier to track things when they happen, because I can notice and make a note, and put in the actual effort to fix it during the weekly review