Cultivate the desire to X

Recently I have found myself encouraging people to cultivate the desire to X.

Examples that you might want to cultivate interest in include:

Diet
Organise ones self
Plan for the future
be a goal-oriented thinker
build the tools
Anything else in the list of common human goals
Getting healthy sleep
Being less wrong
Trusting people more
Trusting people less
exercise
interest in a topic (cars, fashion, psychology etc.)

Why do we need to cultivate?

We don’t. But sometimes we can’t just “do”. Lot’s of reasons are reasonable reasons to not be able to just “do” the thing:

Some things are scary
Some things need planning
Some things need research
Some things are hard
Some things are a leap of faith
Some things can be frustrating to accept
Some things seem stupid (well if exercising is so great why don’t I automatically want to do it)
Other excuses exist.

On some level you have decided you want to do X; on some other level you have not yet committed to doing it. Easy tasks can get done quickly. More complicated tasks are not so easy to do right away.

Well if it were easy enough to just successfully do the thing—you can go ahead and do the thing (TTYL flying to the moon tomorrow—yea nope.).

your system 1 wants to do the thing and your system 2 is not sure how.
your system 2 wants to do the thing and your system 1 is not sure it wants to do the thing.

The healthy part of you wants to diet; the social part of you is worried about the impact on your social life.

(now borrowing from Common human goals)

Your desire to live forever wants you to take a medication every morning to increase your longevity; your desire for freedom does not want to be tied down to a bottle of pills every morning.
Your desire for a legacy wants you to stay late at work; your desire for quality family time wants you to leave the office early.

The solution:

The solution is to cultivate the interest; or the desire to do the thing. From the initial point of interest or desire—you can move forward; do some research to either convince your system 2 of the benefits, or work out how to do the thing to convince your system 1 that it is possible/viable/easy enough. Or maybe after some research the thing seems impossible. I offer Cultivating the desire as a step along the way to working it out.

Short post for today; Cultivate the desire to do X.

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