Steve Jobs created Apple, which owns ~0.1%+ of the world’s wealth.
Apple does not own itself. Ownership of Apple may represent a thousandth of the total world wealth, but that’s a different thing.
Their problems come from them spending their time trying to do work that they find boring. If you find your work boring, it’s very likely that you should be doing something else.
Suppose that 1) I care about my personal satisfaction and fun while working, and 2) I care about the effects that my work has on the world. It’s may be that the work you find satisfying—the part you could throw your whole self into and become truly great and exceptional at—is work that no one else cares about, and so won’t get you anything in the way of status or sustenance or ‘secondary satisfaction.’
If I can applaud the example of Ethan Dickinson, my impression is that the sort of work he finds innately most satisfying, and the sort of thing that he can’t not do (as evidenced by his Facebook feed), is related to linguistics. But what he spends most of his time on is programming software, because that pays considerably more than linguistics, and then he can donate that money to MIRI.
I don’t know how he feels about programming, but if he were to ask “hey, how do I do something despite not having innate motivation for it?”, I would not want to advise him to quit what he does and do what he’s innately motivated to do instead. I would point instead to the resources our culture has built up to enhance discipline.
So discipline is important, and indirect satisfaction are important. But I’m not arguing that direct satisfaction and raw enthusiasm are unimportant either; the moderate path is to simultaneously optimize for all four together, and figure out what the right tradeoff between them is.
Which resources would you recommend for enhancing discipline?
(You have recommended a few things in particular to me before, but I’m writing this to see what other recommendations you would have, and for others’ benefit.)
I know you like to do literature dives, and that’s something that I haven’t done in this area. The primary name is Angela Lee Duckworth and the modern term is grit.
I think you know many of the systematic tricks, like scheduling your day and using Beeminder, but I’ll talk a bit about them for the benefit of others.
Scheduling and task organization are highly connected, so first I’ll talk about systems that build on todo lists.
People seem to vary widely in what sort of schedules and todo lists they prefer. The most famous book in this area is Getting Things Done, and many other systems are modifications or reactions to it, of which the one I find most interesting is Zen To Done.
The core insight of Getting Things Done is that when you have external memory systems, you no longer need to use internal memory systems—instead of your mind constantly cycling through things that need to happen in order to make sure that they’re remembered, that attention can be freed up for the task at hand.
Another key insight is the Most Important Task, and a related visualization is the Big Rocks (i.e. first block out time and energy for the big important things, and prioritize them over tiny pebbles and sand that you could do afterwards).
There’s some generalized motivation advice out there (like this list of 20 tips), but that is a bit more general than this question, since maybe motivation-enhancing techniques deal with changing the goal to a more palatable one, whereas the discipline under discussion here is mostly about manufacturing indirect motivation for goals.
Of these techniques, I think the cluster that this crowd would benefit from the most are the various social ones—surround yourself with people who care about the thing you want to do, who will be disappointed if you don’t do that thing, and so on. Beeminder is a way to disappoint yourself if you fail (the part I use it for is mostly to remind myself to do things that don’t otherwise fit into a routine nicely), but the way you have it set up where it emails your advisor if you fail is a good example of using social opprobrium as motivation.
Paul Graham claims that startup founders seem way more motivated by fear of failure than by lust for success, and this seems like a primary but ugly component of discipline.
Music seems to have significant effects on mood and motivation. (This may be a less useful recommendation for you because of the tinnitus, but maybe not.) Here’s a playlist I came across recently that’s optimized for programming, for example.
Being inspired by or emulating others is comparable to the “surround yourself by people you want to be like” technique described earlier. I’ve found reading biographies useful for tips and motivation. You in particular would like Lives of the Engineers, I think, but in general any historical figure that seemed like a badass probably has a good biography written about them. (Theodore Roosevelt, for example, famously gave a speech after being shot, and I found The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt an engaging read.)
I’ve found fictional characters useful for this as well; asking questions like “would Zuko give up now?” is often good for an additional rep or two while exercising, say.
It also seems like this may be the sort of thing where poetry / quotations / etc. may be helpful.
Nate’s series of blog posts on why to avoid being motivated by shame or guilt is a strong one, and highly related to avoiding the failure modes of many of the discipline techniques that I’m talking about, as well as positive alternatives.
It’s also worth pointing out that most things are marathons, not sprints. (This is a recurring theme of Duckworth’s discussion of grit, and a major feature of Nate’s most recent blog post.) Being able to tell the difference between depleting renewable resources and nonrenewable resources is a core part of disciplined effort over a long period of time.
I responded. Incidentally, Less Wrong has a neat feature where if you click the envelope icon at the bottom right of a comment, you’ll get replies to that comment in your inbox as if you had written the comment yourself.
Apple does not own itself. Ownership of Apple may represent a thousandth of the total world wealth, but that’s a different thing.
Suppose that 1) I care about my personal satisfaction and fun while working, and 2) I care about the effects that my work has on the world. It’s may be that the work you find satisfying—the part you could throw your whole self into and become truly great and exceptional at—is work that no one else cares about, and so won’t get you anything in the way of status or sustenance or ‘secondary satisfaction.’
If I can applaud the example of Ethan Dickinson, my impression is that the sort of work he finds innately most satisfying, and the sort of thing that he can’t not do (as evidenced by his Facebook feed), is related to linguistics. But what he spends most of his time on is programming software, because that pays considerably more than linguistics, and then he can donate that money to MIRI.
I don’t know how he feels about programming, but if he were to ask “hey, how do I do something despite not having innate motivation for it?”, I would not want to advise him to quit what he does and do what he’s innately motivated to do instead. I would point instead to the resources our culture has built up to enhance discipline.
So discipline is important, and indirect satisfaction are important. But I’m not arguing that direct satisfaction and raw enthusiasm are unimportant either; the moderate path is to simultaneously optimize for all four together, and figure out what the right tradeoff between them is.
Which resources would you recommend for enhancing discipline?
(You have recommended a few things in particular to me before, but I’m writing this to see what other recommendations you would have, and for others’ benefit.)
I know you like to do literature dives, and that’s something that I haven’t done in this area. The primary name is Angela Lee Duckworth and the modern term is grit.
I think you know many of the systematic tricks, like scheduling your day and using Beeminder, but I’ll talk a bit about them for the benefit of others.
Scheduling and task organization are highly connected, so first I’ll talk about systems that build on todo lists.
People seem to vary widely in what sort of schedules and todo lists they prefer. The most famous book in this area is Getting Things Done, and many other systems are modifications or reactions to it, of which the one I find most interesting is Zen To Done.
The core insight of Getting Things Done is that when you have external memory systems, you no longer need to use internal memory systems—instead of your mind constantly cycling through things that need to happen in order to make sure that they’re remembered, that attention can be freed up for the task at hand.
Another key insight is the Most Important Task, and a related visualization is the Big Rocks (i.e. first block out time and energy for the big important things, and prioritize them over tiny pebbles and sand that you could do afterwards).
There’s some generalized motivation advice out there (like this list of 20 tips), but that is a bit more general than this question, since maybe motivation-enhancing techniques deal with changing the goal to a more palatable one, whereas the discipline under discussion here is mostly about manufacturing indirect motivation for goals.
Of these techniques, I think the cluster that this crowd would benefit from the most are the various social ones—surround yourself with people who care about the thing you want to do, who will be disappointed if you don’t do that thing, and so on. Beeminder is a way to disappoint yourself if you fail (the part I use it for is mostly to remind myself to do things that don’t otherwise fit into a routine nicely), but the way you have it set up where it emails your advisor if you fail is a good example of using social opprobrium as motivation.
Paul Graham claims that startup founders seem way more motivated by fear of failure than by lust for success, and this seems like a primary but ugly component of discipline.
Music seems to have significant effects on mood and motivation. (This may be a less useful recommendation for you because of the tinnitus, but maybe not.) Here’s a playlist I came across recently that’s optimized for programming, for example.
Being inspired by or emulating others is comparable to the “surround yourself by people you want to be like” technique described earlier. I’ve found reading biographies useful for tips and motivation. You in particular would like Lives of the Engineers, I think, but in general any historical figure that seemed like a badass probably has a good biography written about them. (Theodore Roosevelt, for example, famously gave a speech after being shot, and I found The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt an engaging read.)
I’ve found fictional characters useful for this as well; asking questions like “would Zuko give up now?” is often good for an additional rep or two while exercising, say.
It also seems like this may be the sort of thing where poetry / quotations / etc. may be helpful.
On the topic of character in general, check out KIPP’s list of seven desirable character traits.
Nate’s series of blog posts on why to avoid being motivated by shame or guilt is a strong one, and highly related to avoiding the failure modes of many of the discipline techniques that I’m talking about, as well as positive alternatives.
It’s also worth pointing out that most things are marathons, not sprints. (This is a recurring theme of Duckworth’s discussion of grit, and a major feature of Nate’s most recent blog post.) Being able to tell the difference between depleting renewable resources and nonrenewable resources is a core part of disciplined effort over a long period of time.
I would also like to see these resources. A cursory search yields this, however I don’t think it is sufficiently indepth.
I responded. Incidentally, Less Wrong has a neat feature where if you click the envelope icon at the bottom right of a comment, you’ll get replies to that comment in your inbox as if you had written the comment yourself.