Willpower is scarce in this world. Sometimes, you can will yourself out of a mental rut you’re in, but only rarely; more often, sheer force of will alone is not sufficient. If your plan to stop staying up too late playing Civilization is “well I’ll just force myself harder next time,” then this plan is doomed to failure. If it didn’t work last time, it likely won’t work next time. Willpower is a stopgap, not a remedy.
I think that most people’s “coulds” are broken because they put the action nodes in the wrong place. They think that the “choice” occurred at turn 347 of Civilization, when they decided to continue playing one more round (and at each following turn between midnight and 4:00 in the morning).
But that’s not where the choice occurred. If you have to force yourself to change your behavior, then you’ve already missed the real choice node.
The actual choice occurs when you decide whether to play Civilization or not, at the very beginning.
[...] The real choices tend to happen a few minutes before the choices that people beat themselves up about. If you have to apply willpower, you’ve already missed the choice node. (In fact, I’ve previously suggested promising yourself that you’ll never pull yourself out of a situation using willpower — knowing that you won’t save your own ass if you get into a situation where you need willpower to extract yourself really makes you notice the true point of no return when it comes along.)
If you find yourself in a pattern of behavior you don’t like, then I recommend pretending you don’t have any willpower. Imagine you lived in the world where you couldn’t force yourself to stop doing something addicting after starting. In that world, how would you act?
Yes, and nowadays I do recognize that I’m really choosing between going to sleep now or playing some number, not at all necessarily just one, “one more turn”s, and gauge what that distribution looks like and then choose.
#TOOLS
Recognize that your decisions are evidence of what sorts of decisions you’re likely to make when deciding whether to do something; apply multipliers as needed.
Nate Soares on this topic:
Yes, and nowadays I do recognize that I’m really choosing between going to sleep now or playing some number, not at all necessarily just one, “one more turn”s, and gauge what that distribution looks like and then choose.
#TOOLS
Recognize that your decisions are evidence of what sorts of decisions you’re likely to make when deciding whether to do something; apply multipliers as needed.