I would recommend reading Don’t Shoot the Dog (a book about conditioning in general), which provides some background for this advice. (But maybe it already is in the book, and you just didn’t mention it in the summary.) For example...
It’s very important psychologically to count the stupid simple behavior alone as a success.
..this is “obvious in hindsight” when you think about conditioning. If you want the habit to establish firmly, you need to reward it, emotionally, even if it is merely a small part of a large picture. People often make a mistake that they are trying to reward too large chunks of work, but that’s wrong—conditioning works best at small chunks, because timing is critical (the best reward is the immediate reward).
Imagine that your goal is “eat healthy food, exercise and develop huge muscles, improve sex life, find a better job, and make tons of money”, but all you actually managed to do during the last month is “do 10 push-ups (almost) every morning”. There are two ways to react to this:
a) Say “this is great, I am exercising regularly, and this body is becoming stronger and stronger every day” after each exercise. If you do this, the little monkey in your head, responsible for regularity of exercise, will feel really happy, and will make you want to exercise every day.
Yes, there are more things to do, but you can work on them later. And with the exercise-management monkey working happily on its task, you will have one less thing to worry about.
b) Say “okay, this sucks, I barely do the 10 push-ups, and I completely failed at all the remaining goals” after each exercise. If you do this, the little monkey in your head, responsible for regularity of exercise, will feel sad and commit suicide, so the next day you will have a huge “ugh field” around the idea of exercise.
Now this is strictly worse than the previous option. And yet many people will do exactly this. Why? Something about signalling and status hierarchies… you probably instinctively feel a need to kick yourself, to prevent the alpha of the group kicking you instead. (What could help overcome this instinct would probably be to imagine a “reference group” consisting of people who are not exercising at all—clearly your habit of doing 10 push-ups a day makes you superior to all of them. A time to celebrate victory!)
bootstrapping just a few habits at a time
If you try to bootstrap 5 habits at a time, and only 2 stick, and the remaining 3 fail, what you should do is reward yourself for getting from level zero to level two. (The remaining habits you can work with in the future, when the two already established ones will be done mostly automatically.)
I recently stumbled across this video, which is making me rethink the Mini Habits thesis.
In summary, Dr. K specifically calls out that many people focus on habits to avoid running out of willpower but considers good habits and discipline to be separate things. He says “discipline” is not the exertion of willpower either, but rather it’s a particular emotion: resolve.
To help explain what “resolve” means, he said that the opposite emotion is doubt. I think the cultivation of doubt is super important to our practice of epistemic rationality, but (according to Dr. K) to become disciplined, one must cultivate its opposite, resolve. So perhaps our epistemic skills have come at the cost of neglecting our agency. Resolve seems pretty dangerous if it’s aimed at the wrong goals, so (if this works) I think it’s important to cultivate both and to choose goals very carefully. On the other hand, too much doubt might also be unhealthy in the long term as it tends to numb all the other emotions over time.
Dr. K says that for the practice of cultivating resolve, one shouldn’t start with something too important. One should pick something relatively easy/medium difficulty. His example was giving up ice cream for ten years. That particular resolution might not be appropriate for everyone, but it kind of indicates the level to aim for. It’s not saving the world, but it’s not trivial either. One should meditate on one’s feeling of resolve about the practice resolution daily for at least a few minutes. Just stoke the emotion and amp it up.
His example was giving up ice cream for 10 years, but it doesn’t take 10 years to see some progress. He says to move on to a more important resolve after cultivating the unimportant practice one daily for about 30 days. Then you can meditate on the important one daily for 15-20 minutes.
Great summary, and also great advice!
I would recommend reading Don’t Shoot the Dog (a book about conditioning in general), which provides some background for this advice. (But maybe it already is in the book, and you just didn’t mention it in the summary.) For example...
..this is “obvious in hindsight” when you think about conditioning. If you want the habit to establish firmly, you need to reward it, emotionally, even if it is merely a small part of a large picture. People often make a mistake that they are trying to reward too large chunks of work, but that’s wrong—conditioning works best at small chunks, because timing is critical (the best reward is the immediate reward).
Imagine that your goal is “eat healthy food, exercise and develop huge muscles, improve sex life, find a better job, and make tons of money”, but all you actually managed to do during the last month is “do 10 push-ups (almost) every morning”. There are two ways to react to this:
a) Say “this is great, I am exercising regularly, and this body is becoming stronger and stronger every day” after each exercise. If you do this, the little monkey in your head, responsible for regularity of exercise, will feel really happy, and will make you want to exercise every day.
Yes, there are more things to do, but you can work on them later. And with the exercise-management monkey working happily on its task, you will have one less thing to worry about.
b) Say “okay, this sucks, I barely do the 10 push-ups, and I completely failed at all the remaining goals” after each exercise. If you do this, the little monkey in your head, responsible for regularity of exercise, will feel sad and commit suicide, so the next day you will have a huge “ugh field” around the idea of exercise.
Now this is strictly worse than the previous option. And yet many people will do exactly this. Why? Something about signalling and status hierarchies… you probably instinctively feel a need to kick yourself, to prevent the alpha of the group kicking you instead. (What could help overcome this instinct would probably be to imagine a “reference group” consisting of people who are not exercising at all—clearly your habit of doing 10 push-ups a day makes you superior to all of them. A time to celebrate victory!)
If you try to bootstrap 5 habits at a time, and only 2 stick, and the remaining 3 fail, what you should do is reward yourself for getting from level zero to level two. (The remaining habits you can work with in the future, when the two already established ones will be done mostly automatically.)
I recently stumbled across this video, which is making me rethink the Mini Habits thesis.
In summary, Dr. K specifically calls out that many people focus on habits to avoid running out of willpower but considers good habits and discipline to be separate things. He says “discipline” is not the exertion of willpower either, but rather it’s a particular emotion: resolve.
To help explain what “resolve” means, he said that the opposite emotion is doubt. I think the cultivation of doubt is super important to our practice of epistemic rationality, but (according to Dr. K) to become disciplined, one must cultivate its opposite, resolve. So perhaps our epistemic skills have come at the cost of neglecting our agency. Resolve seems pretty dangerous if it’s aimed at the wrong goals, so (if this works) I think it’s important to cultivate both and to choose goals very carefully. On the other hand, too much doubt might also be unhealthy in the long term as it tends to numb all the other emotions over time.
Dr. K says that for the practice of cultivating resolve, one shouldn’t start with something too important. One should pick something relatively easy/medium difficulty. His example was giving up ice cream for ten years. That particular resolution might not be appropriate for everyone, but it kind of indicates the level to aim for. It’s not saving the world, but it’s not trivial either. One should meditate on one’s feeling of resolve about the practice resolution daily for at least a few minutes. Just stoke the emotion and amp it up.
His example was giving up ice cream for 10 years, but it doesn’t take 10 years to see some progress. He says to move on to a more important resolve after cultivating the unimportant practice one daily for about 30 days. Then you can meditate on the important one daily for 15-20 minutes.