I found a hardware bug in my brain, and I need help, please.
Dan Savage once advised an anxious 15-year-old boy to stop worrying about getting his 15-year-old self laid and go do interesting, social, skill-improving things so that it would be easy to get his 21-year-old self laid. IMHO, this is good advice, and can be applied to any number of goals besides sex: love, friendship, career, fame, wealth, whatever floats your boat.
My problem is that whenever I try to follow advice like that, I find myself irrationally convinced that one or two days of skill-building are enough, and that I should start investing significant resources in putting myself on the market immediately, even though I know from experience that this is likely to (a) not be useful, (b) not be fun, and (c) probably even be a little depressing.
Usually I am good at learning from my mistakes, but I am surprised to find that I am consistently failing to learn from my experience here. Although this is not literally what I am doing, a crude caricature of my schedule goes something like this: Day 1, I go to the gym; day 2, I go to craigslist and strike out; day 3, I go to the gym; day 4, I go to craigslist and strike out, and so on for weeks.
No tips on how to use Craig’s List, please; the problem is not domain-specific knowledge about marketing. I know this beause when I have the relevant skills, I’m pretty successful at finding love/sex/friendship/career/fame/money.
I’m looking for advice on how to really convince myself that I need to build skills for a long time before marketing myself.
I find it useful in similar situations to set very specific, non-time-based goals, e.g. “be able to comfortably bike N miles” or “be able to comfortably do X sit-ups”.
...on reflection, that advice isn’t as well-phrased as it could be. “Be able to comfortably bike for an hour without resting” would also be a valid example, even though it has a time element to it. The point is to have a specific, objectively-observable thing to accomplish that’s as close to my actual goal as possible. If I were to instead state my goal as ‘go to the gym twice a week for 3 months’, my brain would count it as a success even if I only did 5 minutes of actual exercise each time. (And, because my brain knows that about itself, and knows that meeting the stated goal won’t help with the actual goal, it’s unlikely to even attempt to meet the stated goal, but that seems like a deeper level of complication than you’re experiencing.)
I usually stick to goals where at least a ballpark value of N is obvious from the context—I don’t have any well-tested advice on what to do when it’s not.
I found a hardware bug in my brain, and I need help, please.
Dan Savage once advised an anxious 15-year-old boy to stop worrying about getting his 15-year-old self laid and go do interesting, social, skill-improving things so that it would be easy to get his 21-year-old self laid. IMHO, this is good advice, and can be applied to any number of goals besides sex: love, friendship, career, fame, wealth, whatever floats your boat.
My problem is that whenever I try to follow advice like that, I find myself irrationally convinced that one or two days of skill-building are enough, and that I should start investing significant resources in putting myself on the market immediately, even though I know from experience that this is likely to (a) not be useful, (b) not be fun, and (c) probably even be a little depressing.
Usually I am good at learning from my mistakes, but I am surprised to find that I am consistently failing to learn from my experience here. Although this is not literally what I am doing, a crude caricature of my schedule goes something like this: Day 1, I go to the gym; day 2, I go to craigslist and strike out; day 3, I go to the gym; day 4, I go to craigslist and strike out, and so on for weeks.
No tips on how to use Craig’s List, please; the problem is not domain-specific knowledge about marketing. I know this beause when I have the relevant skills, I’m pretty successful at finding love/sex/friendship/career/fame/money.
I’m looking for advice on how to really convince myself that I need to build skills for a long time before marketing myself.
Go meta: build the skill of building skills for a long time.
Well, yes, that’s precisely what I want to do.
Any advice on how?
I was going to say that same exact thing in 10x as many words.
I find it useful in similar situations to set very specific, non-time-based goals, e.g. “be able to comfortably bike N miles” or “be able to comfortably do X sit-ups”.
Interesting. How do you choose N? Do you have any sense of how or why this works for you?
...on reflection, that advice isn’t as well-phrased as it could be. “Be able to comfortably bike for an hour without resting” would also be a valid example, even though it has a time element to it. The point is to have a specific, objectively-observable thing to accomplish that’s as close to my actual goal as possible. If I were to instead state my goal as ‘go to the gym twice a week for 3 months’, my brain would count it as a success even if I only did 5 minutes of actual exercise each time. (And, because my brain knows that about itself, and knows that meeting the stated goal won’t help with the actual goal, it’s unlikely to even attempt to meet the stated goal, but that seems like a deeper level of complication than you’re experiencing.)
I usually stick to goals where at least a ballpark value of N is obvious from the context—I don’t have any well-tested advice on what to do when it’s not.