When people say something helped them a lot, how much did it actually help?
My guess is that people are likely to overestimate this. Like, imagine that life has 1000 different aspects you need to get in order, and one day you find something that makes you better at one of them by 10%.
From your perspective at the moment, it probably feels like a lot. You probably spent a lot of time in the past practicing this thing, with mixed success… and suddenly it improves by 10% almost overnight? That’s wonderful! And because you are focusing on this thing at the moment, it feels like a very important thing.
Globally, increasing one of 1000 things by 10% means improving your life by 0.01%. That’s practically invisible from outside. Yeah, you are now better in one thing, but the other 999 things remained the same.
And you don’t have the same success every day, so an improvement by 0.01% in a day doesn’t translate into a 3% improvement in a year. You probably can’t even repeat the same success in the same thing, because you get diminishing returns.
Numbers obviously made up to illustrate the point.
So when people say something helps them a lot (whether it is the same thing for years, or a different thing every week), I expect something like this to happen. Maybe it feels like a huge change from inside, at the moment when they are focusing on the one thing that improved. But from outside, I don’t expect to see a dramatic change soon.
And it’s not just when other people tell me about their successes. It took me a few dozen epiphanies to realize that even a few dozen epiphanies won’t turn me into a superman. One epiphany achieves even less.
To make an analogy with exercise, what helps is actually doing the exercise over and over again, several times a week, for years. Just one afternoon spent exercising hard changes nothing.
Miracles are cheap, integrating them into your daily routine is hard?
If those things are multiplicative rather than additive, then improving one of them by 10% does make your whole life 10% better.
Obviously real life is more complicated than either a simple additive model or a simple multiplicative model. But I’d expect there to be things that operate multiplicatively. E.g., suppose you have a vitamin deficiency that means your energy levels are perpetually low; that might mean that you’re doing literally everything in your life 10% worse than if that problem were solved.
(Obvious conclusion if the above is anything like right: it’s worth putting some effort into figuring out which problems you have affect everything else so that making them 10% better makes everything 10% better, and which are independent of everything else so that making them 10% better makes everything 0.01% better.)
Yeah, I was specifically thinking about persistent ongoing work more than occasional epiphanies, though of course sometimes the epiphanies can actually be transforming too, and ongoing work is likely to eventually produce them.
On the topic of persistent ongoing work vs occasional epiphanies, I highly recommend “The Holy Sh!t Moment” by James Fell. It’s a bit poppy for my taste, but it dives deeper into that aspect of things and ties really well into the model presented in Unlocking the Emotional Brain.
When people say something helped them a lot, how much did it actually help?
My guess is that people are likely to overestimate this. Like, imagine that life has 1000 different aspects you need to get in order, and one day you find something that makes you better at one of them by 10%.
From your perspective at the moment, it probably feels like a lot. You probably spent a lot of time in the past practicing this thing, with mixed success… and suddenly it improves by 10% almost overnight? That’s wonderful! And because you are focusing on this thing at the moment, it feels like a very important thing.
Globally, increasing one of 1000 things by 10% means improving your life by 0.01%. That’s practically invisible from outside. Yeah, you are now better in one thing, but the other 999 things remained the same.
And you don’t have the same success every day, so an improvement by 0.01% in a day doesn’t translate into a 3% improvement in a year. You probably can’t even repeat the same success in the same thing, because you get diminishing returns.
Numbers obviously made up to illustrate the point.
So when people say something helps them a lot (whether it is the same thing for years, or a different thing every week), I expect something like this to happen. Maybe it feels like a huge change from inside, at the moment when they are focusing on the one thing that improved. But from outside, I don’t expect to see a dramatic change soon.
And it’s not just when other people tell me about their successes. It took me a few dozen epiphanies to realize that even a few dozen epiphanies won’t turn me into a superman. One epiphany achieves even less.
To make an analogy with exercise, what helps is actually doing the exercise over and over again, several times a week, for years. Just one afternoon spent exercising hard changes nothing.
Miracles are cheap, integrating them into your daily routine is hard?
If those things are multiplicative rather than additive, then improving one of them by 10% does make your whole life 10% better.
Obviously real life is more complicated than either a simple additive model or a simple multiplicative model. But I’d expect there to be things that operate multiplicatively. E.g., suppose you have a vitamin deficiency that means your energy levels are perpetually low; that might mean that you’re doing literally everything in your life 10% worse than if that problem were solved.
(Obvious conclusion if the above is anything like right: it’s worth putting some effort into figuring out which problems you have affect everything else so that making them 10% better makes everything 10% better, and which are independent of everything else so that making them 10% better makes everything 0.01% better.)
Yeah, I was specifically thinking about persistent ongoing work more than occasional epiphanies, though of course sometimes the epiphanies can actually be transforming too, and ongoing work is likely to eventually produce them.
On the topic of persistent ongoing work vs occasional epiphanies, I highly recommend “The Holy Sh!t Moment” by James Fell. It’s a bit poppy for my taste, but it dives deeper into that aspect of things and ties really well into the model presented in Unlocking the Emotional Brain.