forcing yourself to do what you know you ought to instead of what is fun & easy.
I had difficulty engaging with most of your article from this point on, because your premise seems to be that Work is hard and problematic and we must be forced to do it.
This premise is not just epistemically false: believing it has bad instrumental effects as well.
Ask anybody who’s actually productive—especially those who make a lot of money by being productive, and nearly all of them will tell you that they love their work. (The rest will probably say they love money, or prestige, or whatever other result their work gets for them.)
IOW, instrumental observation shows that the driving factor of high productivity is loving something more, not forcing yourself to do something you love less.
It used to perplex me when I read about people who liked what they did so much that there was nothing they’d rather do. There didn’t seem to be any sort of work I liked that much. If I had a choice of (a) spending the next hour working on something or (b) be teleported to Rome and spend the next hour wandering about, was there any sort of work I’d prefer? Honestly, no.
But the fact is, almost anyone would rather, at any given moment, float about in the Carribbean, or have sex, or eat some delicious food, than work on hard problems. The rule about doing what you love assumes a certain length of time. It doesn’t mean, do what will make you happiest this second, but what will make you happiest over some longer period, like a week or a month.
Unproductive pleasures pall eventually. After a while you get tired of lying on the beach. If you want to stay happy, you have to do something.
As a lower bound, you have to like your work more than any unproductive pleasure. You have to like what you do enough that the concept of “spare time” seems mistaken. Which is not to say you have to spend all your time working. You can only work so much before you get tired and start to screw up. Then you want to do something else—even something mindless. But you don’t regard this time as the prize and the time you spend working as the pain you endure to earn it.
I put the lower bound there for practical reasons. If your work is not your favorite thing to do, you’ll have terrible problems with procrastination. You’ll have to force yourself to work, and when you resort to that the results are distinctly inferior.
The way to work for long periods on something is to be interested in it. Few to no people have the discipline to make themselves work on something that bores them for many hours straight without paging it out. Probably none of the people whose work I admire do. Their trick is to work on stuff they like.
The emphasis is mine, and note that Graham knows a lot of extremely successful people.
Patri links to Paul Graham, but IIRC those links advise one to remove distractions and temptations from one’s office and from one’s life so that one does not have to exert willpower to resist the distractions and temptations. ADDED. The thinking behind that, which is supported by psychology experiments, is that simply successfully resisting a temptation (such as refraining from eating from a plate of fresh cookies left in a waiting room by a psychology researcher) depletes a person’s daily reserve of willpower so that the reserve is unavailable for other things (such as keeping oneself at a tedious task).
In his essays, Graham probably never advised building willpower by forcing yourself to do things you do not like. (I’ve read most of his essays.)
Some people will not be able significantly to increase their ability to exert willpower that way. If you can keep on building up your willpower that way, then congratulations! you are probably headed for great things. Just make sure that you are not just fooling yourself. The rest of us are best advised to learn some tricks, like removing reminders of temptations from our awareness so that we deplete less of our precious reserves of willpower resisting the temptations.
Sure, there are two ways to work on the problem. One is to increase willpower. The other is to learn tricks not to use it. I agree the second one is better. But let’s take this back to the context of Less Wrong and its effects.
Paul Graham’s tricks include turning off the internet. The “distractions and temptations” he wants you to remove from your office are things like Less Wrong. The existence of Less Wrong is the existence of a temptation tuned to those who wish to become more rational and more effective at achieving their goals. This makes it just as bad a thing in Graham’s analysis as in mine!
“Working on stuff you like”, and “rationalizing that stuff you like is work” are very different. The former is great when you can do it. The latter is the type of rationalization that Paul talked about in his recent essay Self-Indulgence, where the wost time-wasters are those that don’t feel like time-wasters:
The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work. When you spend time having fun, you know you’re being self-indulgent. Alarms start to go off fairly quickly. If I woke up one morning and sat down on the sofa and watched TV all day, I’d feel like something was terribly wrong. Just thinking about it makes me wince. I’d start to feel uncomfortable after sitting on a sofa watching TV for 2 hours, let alone a whole day.
And yet I’ve definitely had days when I might as well have sat in front of a TV all day—days at the end of which, if I asked myself what I got done that day, the answer would have been: basically, nothing. I feel bad after these days too, but nothing like as bad as I’d feel if I spent the whole day on the sofa watching TV. If I spent a whole day watching TV I’d feel like I was descending into perdition. But the same alarms don’t go off on the days when I get nothing done, because I’m doing stuff that seems, superficially, like real work.
That is what I am claiming Less Wrong is—something that seems, superficially, like real personal growth work.
Yes, exactly. And getting yourself to do this work for long-term reasons, when at the moment you would rather read Less Wrong or check Digg or Reddit, is the skill of “consciously directing attention”, which is a core skill of instrumental rationality.
And Less Wrong not only makes it hard to do this, it promotes a value of this not being important through the shared idea that reading Less Wrong is growth work, or will make you more rational and better at your job, rather than admitting that it’s a shiny distracting, much more like being teleported to Rome than like doing your work.
I’d read this article before but it was useful to read it again in the context of this discussion. According to Paul Graham, my suspicion that most people who say they like their jobs are lying is correct. However he also claims that a few people genuinely do find something they love to do. He also makes a point of saying in this essay that it is very difficult to find something you love to do and can get paid for. I find myself still wondering whether anyone (i.e. me) can find something they love to do and get paid for it or whether it takes the combination of a certain personality type with the right kind of work to achieve that.
As a lower bound, you have to like your work more than any unproductive pleasure. You have to like what you do enough that the concept of “spare time” seems mistaken.
I find it difficult to imagine crossing this lower bound for anything I’d have to spend 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year on until retirement or death. I find it more plausible for something (or a series of somethings) with a more flexible schedule. I’ve been trying to figure out possible candidates that would also bring in sufficient income and haven’t had much success so far. As Paul Graham points out in the essay, if it was that easy it would be a lot more common than it is.
Ask anybody who’s actually productive—especially those who make a lot of money by being productive, and nearly all of them will tell you that they love their work.
I have noticed this pattern but have always been a little skeptical because there seem to be obvious signalling reasons to make this claim irrespective of its truth. I’ve also considered the possibility that there are personality types who are telling the truth when they basically claim to be happy and motivated all the time. The third possibility I’ve considered is that people mean something different by ‘love my work’ than I understand by it—not that they are literally full of enjoyment and motivation all the time while working.
I don’t believe I’ve ever met anyone who I’ve had what felt like an honest conversation with about work who literally ‘loved their work’. They may enjoy some parts of it but much of it is still effortful and not the most enjoyable thing they could think of doing at any given moment.
Could you clarify exactly what you think productive people mean when they say they ‘love their work’ and explain what leads you to believe that it is literally true?
As someone who loves his work, here is how I see it.
No one is happy and motivated at all times when working. For any substantial work, that work is divided into many different things. Some of those things are inevitably going to be things that you do not love, and some will be things that you actively dislike. Loving your work means loving the composite of the things you love and the things you don’t love, and it means that the parts you love give you the motivation to do the things you don’t.
In my job, there’s a core task. I spend the bulk of my time actively engaged work time either on that task or trying to find ways to do that task better. I love both of these tasks, but I also spend a large amount of time waiting for these tasks to reach a point where they become engaging, and I have to deal with people many of whom I’d prefer not to deal with, and I have to do things like maintain all the computers and connections and programs necessary for this work.
But that’s true of anything! I love eating, but there are subsets of this task I don’t enjoy, and that’s even more true of baking or cooking. It’s true when I play a game, or write an article, or watch a television show (gotta skip those ads!), or anything else I can think of. There’s nothing special about work.
But that’s true of anything! I love eating, but there are subsets of this task I don’t enjoy, and that’s even more true of baking or cooking. It’s true when I play a game, or write an article, or watch a television show (gotta skip those ads!), or anything else I can think of. There’s nothing special about work.
Ok, this makes more sense to me. There are certainly things which I would say I ‘love’ doing which I do not enjoy every aspect of. In that sense I have never loved work but I can imagine that some people are fortunate enough to do so. I still don’t really understand pjeby’s comment in this context though. I love snowboarding in this sense for example but I still have to make a conscious effort to motivate myself with the sub-tasks required to get to the enjoyable parts.
Working is merely a particularly large and complex sub-task I perform in order to obtain the financial resources to do the things I actually ‘love’ and many (work and non-work) sub-tasks are boring and unpleasant and require motivational hacks to get done, which seems to be the whole point of the kind of self-improvement being discussed.
I have noticed this pattern but have always been a little skeptical because there seem to be obvious signalling reasons to make this claim irrespective of its truth.
But there are also equally obvious signaling reasons to make the opposite claim—i.e., I Am Doing This Work That Is Really Hard Because It Is (And Therefore I Am) Important And Prestigious.
And some people do make that claim. They just usually don’t have much to show for their efforts, by comparison to the people making the other claim.
They may enjoy some parts of it but much of it is still effortful and not the most enjoyable thing they could think of doing at any given moment.
The sensation of “effort” is the sensation of your mind trying to escape whatever you’re actually experiencing in the present moment, whether it’s because you dislike what’s happening or you wish it were something else.
In the absence of that escape attempt, there is no “effort” felt, vs. what you might simply call “exertion” instead. Things just are, and doing happens.
Could you clarify exactly what you think productive people mean when they say they ‘love their work’ and explain what leads you to believe that it is literally true?
I think perhaps you are reading “love” as something like “receive pleasure by”, whereas the intended meaning is more like “create pleasure through”.
When I do something nice for my wife, I “love” what I do in the sense that I am doing it with love—investing myself in it for the sake of the result. This is pleasurable, but not because the activity itself is necessarily pleasurable. It is what I bring to the activity that makes the difference.
To put it another way, “love” in this case is an active verb, where one is the do-er of love-ing. Not a passive verb, in the sense that we might say, “I love this weather we’re having”, but more like the love in “I love you”.
And some people do make that claim. They just usually don’t have much to show for their efforts, by comparison to the people making the other claim.
There seem to me to be successful people who claim that they have had to work hard and overcome obstacles to achieve their success. Thomas Edison’s famous “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.” springs to mind but successful people who claim that ‘damn hard work’ was what brought them success don’t seem as rare as you imply here.
I think perhaps you are reading “love” as something like “receive pleasure by”, whereas the intended meaning is more like “create pleasure through”.
You seem to be saying that people who ‘love their work’ then do not literally enjoy the process of doing their work but take pleasure in the results. This sounds quite plausible but then I wonder why this is in conflict with the idea that ‘Work is hard and problematic and we must be forced to do it.’?
It all seems to come back to the question of how you motivate yourself to do things (or just to start things) that are not intrinsically pleasurable in the moment or intrinsically rewarding.
For example, I do not find it easy to drag myself out of bed at 5am to head out into the wet and cold and take a 2 hour bus ride to go snowboarding but I find it easier to perform this somewhat unpleasant task when motivated by the relatively short term reward of an enjoyable day on the mountain. I find it harder to motivate myself to overcome obstacles at work and avoid procrastination because the reward is distant, abstract and only loosely correlated with my direct actions (and the sub-tasks often feel intrinsically more effortful).
I’m curious if you have insight into how one could go about making distant, abstract and loosely correlated outcomes have the same motivational force as shorter term, more direct actions leading to actually-enjoyed outcomes.
You seem to be saying that people who ‘love their work’ then do not literally enjoy the process of doing their work but take pleasure in the results
You are still not getting what “love” means. I am talking about being loving—the emotional state of giving love to something. This is during the work, not after the work.
If I make breakfast in bed for my wife, I am feeling love as I work. Not love for the process of cooking, but love for my wife.
This is not the same thing as anticipating the result of my wife’s smile.
You’re operating under a false dichotomy between “pleasure now” vs. “pleasure later”, as though these pleasures can only come from things that happen outside you. This is not the case.
I’m curious if you have insight into how one could go about making distant, abstract and loosely correlated outcomes have the same motivational force as shorter term, more direct actions leading to actually-enjoyed outcomes.
The kind of thinking that produced this question is not the kind of thinking that can apply the answer. (Because the assumption behind the question is that motivation is something that happens to you to make you do things, and that is not the same kind of motivation that I’m talking about.)
I’m afraid your examples and explanations aren’t really hitting home for me. I don’t find cooking a motivational challenge in general for example because the rewards are so immediate and so correlated with the process (not to mention that the process does not feel inherently effortful in the way that the kinds of work tasks I struggle with motivationally do).
The particular characteristics of ‘work’ tasks that are not fun and pose motivational challenges seem to be their inherent effortfulness (high degree of conscious attention) but low novelty/interest, the relative distance to achieving any actually pleasurable reward (like eating a tasty meal) and the relatively low (or loosely felt) correlation with high level goals that you actually care about. I just can’t wrap my brain around how ‘being loving’ applies to these kinds of tasks.
I just can’t wrap my brain around how ‘being loving’ applies to these kinds of tasks.
Ok, try this one: Imagine a monk copying a manuscript, who fervently believes he’s doing the Lord’s work, and therefore treats every moment of it as a prayer and meditation.
Note that this is not at all the same state of mind as the monk trying to force himself to work because he’s anticipating a reward in heaven. Rather, the monk feels good now, because the work is important. (e.g. brings glory to god, is the expression of god’s love, or whatever meaningless phrase is used to stand for the perceived inherent goodness of the immediate action.)
IOW, the dimensions you’re using to measure by (novelty, required attention, distance to reward) are not the solution, they’re the problem.
IOW, the dimensions you’re using to measure by (novelty, required attention, distance to reward) are not the solution, they’re the problem.
I wouldn’t really say I’m using them to measure by as a deliberate choice. These are the dimensions which seem to me to be relevant differences between tasks that pose motivational problems and those that don’t. This is partly observational but also based on material and research I’ve encountered over the years on these issues. The lack of motivation comes first however and the dimensions are attempts to identify a pattern.
Convincing myself that my work is important seems a more daunting challenge than finding motivational hacks and also more dangerous—what if I end up like the monk, squandering my efforts on some sub-optimal activity?
Convincing myself that my work is important seems a more daunting challenge than finding motivational hacks and also more dangerous—what if I end up like the monk, squandering my efforts on some sub-optimal activity?
Two things:
You did ask how people could love their work, and
If you aren’t convinced what you’re doing is important, maybe that’s a bigger problem than falsely convincing yourself it’s important!
Note, for example, that lots of people have ended up accidentally doing important things as a direct result of trying to do something stupid that they thought was important. (Like, say, Columbus.)
True, I think a couple of things are getting conflated here (largely my fault because I’m still confused about the distinctions).
A couple of people have said they ‘love their work’ but still have motivational issues with particular sub-tasks of their work. If that is what people generally mean by ‘love their work’ I think I have a better grasp on the idea. If this is what people generally mean then all kinds of motivational hacks for dealing with low-level sub-tasks that are not inherently lovable are useful. They might even be useful for someone like me who does not ‘love their work’ but values the resources it provides to do things they actually want to do.
You originally seemed to be claiming that people who really ‘love their work’ do not suffer from motivational issues on not-inherently-pleasurable sub-tasks or need ways of avoiding being distracted by ‘shiny things’. I find this slightly implausible but it sounds like nice work if you can get it.
If you aren’t convinced what you’re doing is important, maybe that’s a bigger problem than falsely convincing yourself it’s important!
Either sense of ‘loving your work’ above sounds like a great place to be and I’m very interested in attaining such a situation if possible. That seems a bigger / higher level problem than simple motivational hacks can help with however.
For me and the vast majority of people I know however work is merely a particularly large and burdensome sub-task required to attain the resources to pursue things we actually value / consider important. Figuring out if there’s an alternative is a major personal project for me however so I’m open to any and all advice in that area.
Thomas Edison’s famous “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.” springs to mind but successful people who claim that ‘damn hard work’ was what brought them success don’t seem as rare as you imply here.
A quote that would be at least as credible in Edison’s case (and in general): “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent taking credit for other people’s work.”
To put it another way, “love” in this case is an active verb, where one is the do-er of love-ing. Not a passive verb, in the sense that we might say, “I love this weather we’re having”, but more like the love in “I love you”.
There’s enough confusion about what the term “passive verb” means out there already, please don’t add more.
I enjoy my job, I get to do fun stuff, and generally look forward to going to work. Then I come home and program too, for personal projects.
This gets back to my original question of what people mean when they say they ‘love their job’. I’m reasonably well paid and work on reasonably interesting problems and there are certainly worse jobs. I sometimes enjoy aspects of my work and / or get a sense of satisfaction from them. But ‘love’ seems like a completely inappropriate word for something I would walk away from and never look back if I won the lottery tomorrow.
If I won the lottery tomorrow, I’d start a small game company, keep programming on the interesting bits and hire people to do the boring stuff or the stuff I’m not as good at.
Considering I never even played the lottery, that seems pretty unlikely, but still—I wouldn’t want to stop working on cool nifty stuff, unless it was to work on something cooler and niftier.
I love my job so much that if I won the lottery, I would keep doing it too, and I would hire people to do the boring stuff which doesn’t uniquely require me.
Yet, not having won the lottery, it remains the case that, at this job I love SO MUCH that I would keep doing it if I won the lottery, there are many subgoals and tasks which are boring, which aren’t shiny and interesting enough to draw my attention naturally, and which I must force myself to do. And if I don’t do them, my organization will proceed more slowly or not at all.
So to be more effective at this job I love, I either need to win the lottery, or I need to strength my attention-directing muscle.
But ‘love’ seems like a completely inappropriate word for something I would walk away from and never look back if I won the lottery tomorrow.
I think that’s apt, and I think that the people who love their jobs (like Emile) do not fit that description. I haven’t yet held a job that I love. I am, though, studying to enter a field of work that, if I won the lottery, I would still want to work in, because I’m passionate about it. There exist jobs that I would love.
If you still don’t think it’s possible to love your work, what would you do if you won the lottery? Sit on the couch playing video games all day? I doubt it—at least after the first year. Doing nothing, as it turns out, gets really boring after a while, especially for people with curious minds. (This is one of the premises of unschooling; I don’t remember which specific book I read it in, or I’d link it.) You’d find something to do that interested or excited you. Odds are, there’s work to be had which relates to that something. It has the potential to be work that you love.
But I suspect that at least one of us is generalizing from a single example. Either you have not had a job that you loved and are thus assuming that such a thing is impossible, or I am naive and optimistic and don’t understand what appears to me to be cynicism.
If you still don’t think it’s possible to love your work, what would you do if you won the lottery? Sit on the couch playing video games all day? I doubt it—at least after the first year.
Nope, not at all. I’ve got plenty of things I’d do with sufficient free time and resources. None of them that I’ve yet figured out how to get anyone to pay me enough to cover my living expenses though. The reason I work is primarily to fund the things I actually want to do.
I was under the impression that the video game industry was a horrible pit of despair, crunch time, and routine 80-hour weeks that chews up innocent hopefuls who initially think “Cool, I’m making Video Games!” and spits them out when the idealism wears off in a couple of years...
The phenomenon you describe certainly does exist in the games industry but it’s not something I’ve had to deal with a lot (just saying no works wonders) and isn’t the primary reason I don’t love my job.
I’m productive, and I’ve been paid > $100/hr for my work (at Google, before moving to the non-profit sector), and could have multiple offers to do that again in multiple fields anytime I wanted.
I loved parts of my work, sure, but there were also large parts of it that I had to forcibly direct my attention to. The best tasks to be the most productive are rarely the most fun. And in a world of compelling entertainment, reading the latest blogs, books, watching TV, surfing the web, are always fighting for people’s attention. Mine at least. To direct my attention to productive activities, to my consciously chosen goals and the best tasks to achieve them, is hard Work.
Yes, there are moments of flow, moments we love, moments that draw our attention. And the more of those, the better we’ve chosen our work. But I think you have a huge selection bias—it may be that the most productive people are the ones who enjoy a coincidence between what they do and what draws their attention, but I doubt that very many jobs offer that overlap or that we can employ very many people that way. Hence, for most people, the way to be more productive is to get better at directing their attention.
As another angle, I completely love my current employment role—running an organization trying to build startup countries on the ocean. I love the mission I work on, I love the people I work with, I am one of those incredibly fortunate people who is doing what they love. But the tasks I need to accomplish each day to work towards my audacious and inspiring goal? Yawn. Bleh. I think that’s just because inspiring goals often require boring subgoals and tasks, not because I haven’t picked the right job.
But the tasks I need to accomplish each day to work towards my audacious and inspiring goal? Yawn. Bleh. I think that’s just because inspiring goals often require boring subgoals and tasks, not because I haven’t picked the right job.
You are indeed lucky to have such inspiring goals. For many people in modern workplaces, the trouble is that they not only have no such exalted motivating goals, but they don’t even have any clear sense of what exactly their work is supposed to achieve—or worse, they often clearly see that the tedious tasks they must perform are completely pointless and useless in the overall scheme of things. I mean the sort of thing which is the basic running theme of Dilbert.
This can have such soul-crushing effects that it’s hard to find motivation even for living, let alone productivity. The real challenge is how to force yourself to be productive (or “productive”?) in ways necessary to prosper in such an environment if you’re condemned to it, as increasing numbers of people are.
The real challenge is how to force yourself to be productive (or “productive”?) in ways necessary to prosper in such an environment if you’re condemned to it, as increasing numbers of people are.
Since I can’t double-upvote this I’ll just add my agreement. Figuring out a way out of this trap has been one of my dominant top-level goals for at least a year and something I’ve been thinking a lot about for longer than that but it is a difficult problem. I know quite a few intelligent and ‘successful’ (by most conventional measures) individuals who are deeply unsatisfied with their careers but have great difficulty breaking out of the cycle.
There is nothing wrong with fun things, done with fun time, and known to be fun. This is why HP&TMoR is great.
The problem is fun things, done with work time, and used to check off boxes like “personal growth towards rationality”. Like Less Wrong. Or reading a book about Procrastination but never following it’s system. Or reading a book about time management but never making it a habit. Or watching videos on the internet of workout routines but not going to the gym. All of these are the same—they have the purported goal of personal growth, yet they involve only the intellectual background research and setup needed in small amounts at the beginning before starting a growth program in real life, and none of the practice and dedication to forming new habits in real life that actually result in growth.
What’s wrong is that in fact a fun thing can be productive and “if it’s fun it’s not productive” is wrong—insofar as pjeby is right and I understand him right and you disagree.
A fun thing can be unproductive too of course. I’m not challenging the unproductivity of any of your example fun activities.
“The War of Art” is a counterexample—a successful book by a very successful writer, who is paid for writing, all about how brutally hard it is to force yourself to write (or express yourself artistically in any way), and with various methods, tactics, and inspirational stories to overcome this.
This book illustrates how your conflation of “love” and “easy to do” is wrong—these writers may love writing, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy for them to sit down and start filling the screen with words. The difficulty, in many cases (certainly rings true for me, and others I know) is in starting certain tasks, those w/ strong ugh fields. So one might love one’s work, and still need to force oneself to start the right tasks.
Wait. You’re claiming that the goals chosen by your executive function just happen to correspond to a succession of enjoyable activities for the rest of your brain? I know there’s a lot of diversity in brain-space, but there’s not so much that you couldn’t find 100,000+ people with a nearly identical motivational system. What if I’m one of them? If so, I’ll gladly pay you $500/mo for the privilege of doing all your fun work… and will successfully complete all your goals as a by-product! Boom! Win-Win! Then you can free yourself up to do something more high-value. And if your next goal turns out to be as fun and exciting, Boom!! -- you can do it again and get another customer like me to pay you for the pleasure of taking on all that work too.
If your work is always fun, you have either
a) Aimed so low in life that referring to what you do as “having goals” is laughable
or
b) Deluded yourself that your work = enjoyable for signaling and/or motivational reasons
FACT: The #1 trait of effective people is being able to consistently do things they don’t want to do.
Not all of your work should be awful, but if a non-trivial part of what you do isn’t boring or stressful, then your goals would already be fulfilled by others. And if other people fulfilling your goals doesn’t work for your particular goals, consider the possibility that what you have are not goals, but simply desires.
Wait. You’re claiming that the goals chosen by your executive function just happen to correspond to a succession of enjoyable activities for the rest of your brain?
Nope. See my second comment, here for a better explanation of “love” in this context.
if a non-trivial part of what you do isn’t boring or stressful,
If it were impossible to love something boring or stressful, a lot of relationships would be in jeopardy. ;-)
Not all of your work should be awful, but if a non-trivial part of what you do isn’t boring or stressful, then your goals would already be fulfilled by others.
Well, unless you’re unusually capable for some reason or other. Lots of people write novels, perform music, act in plays or movies, or compete in sports. Very few people become Stephen King, Madonna, Russel Crowe, or Roger Clemens.
In general, though, if any given job wasn’t either difficult (such that few people can do it as well as you can), extremely time-consuming (so that you can’t both do it and have a “day job”) or less than optimally entertaining, it seems as though you’d have people doing it for free.
I know there’s a lot of diversity in brain-space, but there’s not so much that you couldn’t find 100,000+ people with a nearly identical motivational system. [Rest of argument omitted]
Unless I misunderstand, your argument works only for those goals held by pjeby that do not refer to pjeby. For example, would you really pay pjeby $500 / mo to make pjeby’s wife happier (as opposed to making your own wife happier)?
Or is making one’s wife happier “simply a desire” in your terminology?
Exactly. It’s not really a goal when you don’t care about the results. If the dominating term in your decision to do something is that the result be YOURS (i.e., profit being created in YOUR bank account, YOU making your wife happy, credit for YOU achieving something, etc), you might as well just call it “shit you want to be yours”.
Most people are referenced in all their “goals”. But that’s because most people don’t actually have goals in any meaningful sense beyond wanting a ton of shit to be theirs. If you notice that most all your goals wouldn’t be desirable if they didn’t include you, maybe you should look into actually finding something you care about besides yourself. I know you can do it—heck, even most PUAs end up caring about things outside of themselves (after they try everything else first and it doesn’t work).
Just remember, if it’s actually a goal, you wouldn’t care who achieved it and you would gladly welcome more effective or efficient ways to achieve it… including other people doing it in place of you.
Just remember, if it’s actually a goal, you wouldn’t care who achieved it and you would gladly welcome more effective or efficient ways to achieve it… including other people doing it in place of you.
This has even more weight if you accept that the algorithm embodied by ‘you’ is probabilistically extremely similar to other algorithms out there in the multiverse, with no easy way to distinguish between them in any meaningful sense. So even when you have preferences over ‘your’ brain states corresponding to ‘you’ being satisfied outside of any external accomplishments getting achieved, there’s still a philosophical arbitrarity in fulfilling ‘your’ preferences instead of anyone else’s that I’d bet leads to decision theoretic spaciotemporal inconsistency in a way it’d be difficult for me cache out right now.
(In practice humans can’t even come close to avoiding such conundrums but it seems best to be aware that such a higher standard of decision theoretic and philosophical optimality exists.)
I had a similar thought on the distinction between “shiny/fun” versus “hard”, but I still support the basic premise of the article. As it stands, I find LW valuable in a dual role… i.e. both for developing the right attitude towards self help and also as a “fun/shiny” thing. At the same time, I suppose there is a lot of scope for improvement with its role pertaining to the self help goals.
As another data point for patrissimo, I also had difficulty from the same point and for the same reason. I think it would be good to consider editing that section, either to change that proposition itself or to counteract this reaction.
I don’t disagree that LW can be a massively addictive waste of time, it’s only the “work != fun” part of the article that I object to. (Of the bits I read, anyway.)
I agree that “work” should highly correlate to fun, under normal circumstances. Still, there is a lot of drudgery on the way to accomplishing goals that needs to be overcome, and there are circumstances where fun might just not be appropriate.
OP gives one example:
You may experience flow states once your attention is focused where it should be, but unless you have the incredible and rare fortune to have what is shiny match up with what is useful, the act of starting and maintaining focus and improving your ability to do so will be hard work.
Others that come to mind:
Running your own business is fun, having to fire people is not.
Exercise is fun once you get into the rhythm, but I had to trick myself into the gym for the first couple of month.
Having kids can be fun, changing diapers is not
Some possibly rational actions cannot ever be fun
Killing people is not fun, unless you have psychopathic tendencies
If all you mean is that the post overemphasized the necessity of occasional pain, I agree, and upvoted thusly
The claim was “work != letting your attention drift to wherever it wants to go”.
Once you have disciplined yourself to direct your attention, it can be fun to execute a task, sure. But I am very skeptical that very many jobs consist of letting your attention drift to whatever is most shiny, with no effort to direct it. Even in those jobs, I suspect the workers would be more effective were they occasionally to direct their attention to what is most useful rather than most shiny.
I had difficulty engaging with most of your article from this point on, because your premise seems to be that Work is hard and problematic and we must be forced to do it.
This premise is not just epistemically false: believing it has bad instrumental effects as well.
Ask anybody who’s actually productive—especially those who make a lot of money by being productive, and nearly all of them will tell you that they love their work. (The rest will probably say they love money, or prestige, or whatever other result their work gets for them.)
IOW, instrumental observation shows that the driving factor of high productivity is loving something more, not forcing yourself to do something you love less.
Paul Graham on “How to do what you love”:
Another quote from Paul Graham:
The emphasis is mine, and note that Graham knows a lot of extremely successful people.
Patri links to Paul Graham, but IIRC those links advise one to remove distractions and temptations from one’s office and from one’s life so that one does not have to exert willpower to resist the distractions and temptations. ADDED. The thinking behind that, which is supported by psychology experiments, is that simply successfully resisting a temptation (such as refraining from eating from a plate of fresh cookies left in a waiting room by a psychology researcher) depletes a person’s daily reserve of willpower so that the reserve is unavailable for other things (such as keeping oneself at a tedious task).
In his essays, Graham probably never advised building willpower by forcing yourself to do things you do not like. (I’ve read most of his essays.)
Some people will not be able significantly to increase their ability to exert willpower that way. If you can keep on building up your willpower that way, then congratulations! you are probably headed for great things. Just make sure that you are not just fooling yourself. The rest of us are best advised to learn some tricks, like removing reminders of temptations from our awareness so that we deplete less of our precious reserves of willpower resisting the temptations.
Sure, there are two ways to work on the problem. One is to increase willpower. The other is to learn tricks not to use it. I agree the second one is better. But let’s take this back to the context of Less Wrong and its effects.
Paul Graham’s tricks include turning off the internet. The “distractions and temptations” he wants you to remove from your office are things like Less Wrong. The existence of Less Wrong is the existence of a temptation tuned to those who wish to become more rational and more effective at achieving their goals. This makes it just as bad a thing in Graham’s analysis as in mine!
“Working on stuff you like”, and “rationalizing that stuff you like is work” are very different. The former is great when you can do it. The latter is the type of rationalization that Paul talked about in his recent essay Self-Indulgence, where the wost time-wasters are those that don’t feel like time-wasters:
That is what I am claiming Less Wrong is—something that seems, superficially, like real personal growth work.
Yes, exactly. And getting yourself to do this work for long-term reasons, when at the moment you would rather read Less Wrong or check Digg or Reddit, is the skill of “consciously directing attention”, which is a core skill of instrumental rationality.
And Less Wrong not only makes it hard to do this, it promotes a value of this not being important through the shared idea that reading Less Wrong is growth work, or will make you more rational and better at your job, rather than admitting that it’s a shiny distracting, much more like being teleported to Rome than like doing your work.
I’d read this article before but it was useful to read it again in the context of this discussion. According to Paul Graham, my suspicion that most people who say they like their jobs are lying is correct. However he also claims that a few people genuinely do find something they love to do. He also makes a point of saying in this essay that it is very difficult to find something you love to do and can get paid for. I find myself still wondering whether anyone (i.e. me) can find something they love to do and get paid for it or whether it takes the combination of a certain personality type with the right kind of work to achieve that.
I find it difficult to imagine crossing this lower bound for anything I’d have to spend 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year on until retirement or death. I find it more plausible for something (or a series of somethings) with a more flexible schedule. I’ve been trying to figure out possible candidates that would also bring in sufficient income and haven’t had much success so far. As Paul Graham points out in the essay, if it was that easy it would be a lot more common than it is.
I have noticed this pattern but have always been a little skeptical because there seem to be obvious signalling reasons to make this claim irrespective of its truth. I’ve also considered the possibility that there are personality types who are telling the truth when they basically claim to be happy and motivated all the time. The third possibility I’ve considered is that people mean something different by ‘love my work’ than I understand by it—not that they are literally full of enjoyment and motivation all the time while working.
I don’t believe I’ve ever met anyone who I’ve had what felt like an honest conversation with about work who literally ‘loved their work’. They may enjoy some parts of it but much of it is still effortful and not the most enjoyable thing they could think of doing at any given moment.
Could you clarify exactly what you think productive people mean when they say they ‘love their work’ and explain what leads you to believe that it is literally true?
As someone who loves his work, here is how I see it.
No one is happy and motivated at all times when working. For any substantial work, that work is divided into many different things. Some of those things are inevitably going to be things that you do not love, and some will be things that you actively dislike. Loving your work means loving the composite of the things you love and the things you don’t love, and it means that the parts you love give you the motivation to do the things you don’t.
In my job, there’s a core task. I spend the bulk of my time actively engaged work time either on that task or trying to find ways to do that task better. I love both of these tasks, but I also spend a large amount of time waiting for these tasks to reach a point where they become engaging, and I have to deal with people many of whom I’d prefer not to deal with, and I have to do things like maintain all the computers and connections and programs necessary for this work.
But that’s true of anything! I love eating, but there are subsets of this task I don’t enjoy, and that’s even more true of baking or cooking. It’s true when I play a game, or write an article, or watch a television show (gotta skip those ads!), or anything else I can think of. There’s nothing special about work.
Ok, this makes more sense to me. There are certainly things which I would say I ‘love’ doing which I do not enjoy every aspect of. In that sense I have never loved work but I can imagine that some people are fortunate enough to do so. I still don’t really understand pjeby’s comment in this context though. I love snowboarding in this sense for example but I still have to make a conscious effort to motivate myself with the sub-tasks required to get to the enjoyable parts.
Working is merely a particularly large and complex sub-task I perform in order to obtain the financial resources to do the things I actually ‘love’ and many (work and non-work) sub-tasks are boring and unpleasant and require motivational hacks to get done, which seems to be the whole point of the kind of self-improvement being discussed.
But there are also equally obvious signaling reasons to make the opposite claim—i.e., I Am Doing This Work That Is Really Hard Because It Is (And Therefore I Am) Important And Prestigious.
And some people do make that claim. They just usually don’t have much to show for their efforts, by comparison to the people making the other claim.
The sensation of “effort” is the sensation of your mind trying to escape whatever you’re actually experiencing in the present moment, whether it’s because you dislike what’s happening or you wish it were something else.
In the absence of that escape attempt, there is no “effort” felt, vs. what you might simply call “exertion” instead. Things just are, and doing happens.
I think perhaps you are reading “love” as something like “receive pleasure by”, whereas the intended meaning is more like “create pleasure through”.
When I do something nice for my wife, I “love” what I do in the sense that I am doing it with love—investing myself in it for the sake of the result. This is pleasurable, but not because the activity itself is necessarily pleasurable. It is what I bring to the activity that makes the difference.
To put it another way, “love” in this case is an active verb, where one is the do-er of love-ing. Not a passive verb, in the sense that we might say, “I love this weather we’re having”, but more like the love in “I love you”.
There seem to me to be successful people who claim that they have had to work hard and overcome obstacles to achieve their success. Thomas Edison’s famous “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.” springs to mind but successful people who claim that ‘damn hard work’ was what brought them success don’t seem as rare as you imply here.
You seem to be saying that people who ‘love their work’ then do not literally enjoy the process of doing their work but take pleasure in the results. This sounds quite plausible but then I wonder why this is in conflict with the idea that ‘Work is hard and problematic and we must be forced to do it.’?
It all seems to come back to the question of how you motivate yourself to do things (or just to start things) that are not intrinsically pleasurable in the moment or intrinsically rewarding.
For example, I do not find it easy to drag myself out of bed at 5am to head out into the wet and cold and take a 2 hour bus ride to go snowboarding but I find it easier to perform this somewhat unpleasant task when motivated by the relatively short term reward of an enjoyable day on the mountain. I find it harder to motivate myself to overcome obstacles at work and avoid procrastination because the reward is distant, abstract and only loosely correlated with my direct actions (and the sub-tasks often feel intrinsically more effortful).
I’m curious if you have insight into how one could go about making distant, abstract and loosely correlated outcomes have the same motivational force as shorter term, more direct actions leading to actually-enjoyed outcomes.
You are still not getting what “love” means. I am talking about being loving—the emotional state of giving love to something. This is during the work, not after the work.
If I make breakfast in bed for my wife, I am feeling love as I work. Not love for the process of cooking, but love for my wife.
This is not the same thing as anticipating the result of my wife’s smile.
You’re operating under a false dichotomy between “pleasure now” vs. “pleasure later”, as though these pleasures can only come from things that happen outside you. This is not the case.
The kind of thinking that produced this question is not the kind of thinking that can apply the answer. (Because the assumption behind the question is that motivation is something that happens to you to make you do things, and that is not the same kind of motivation that I’m talking about.)
I’m afraid your examples and explanations aren’t really hitting home for me. I don’t find cooking a motivational challenge in general for example because the rewards are so immediate and so correlated with the process (not to mention that the process does not feel inherently effortful in the way that the kinds of work tasks I struggle with motivationally do).
The particular characteristics of ‘work’ tasks that are not fun and pose motivational challenges seem to be their inherent effortfulness (high degree of conscious attention) but low novelty/interest, the relative distance to achieving any actually pleasurable reward (like eating a tasty meal) and the relatively low (or loosely felt) correlation with high level goals that you actually care about. I just can’t wrap my brain around how ‘being loving’ applies to these kinds of tasks.
Ok, try this one: Imagine a monk copying a manuscript, who fervently believes he’s doing the Lord’s work, and therefore treats every moment of it as a prayer and meditation.
Note that this is not at all the same state of mind as the monk trying to force himself to work because he’s anticipating a reward in heaven. Rather, the monk feels good now, because the work is important. (e.g. brings glory to god, is the expression of god’s love, or whatever meaningless phrase is used to stand for the perceived inherent goodness of the immediate action.)
IOW, the dimensions you’re using to measure by (novelty, required attention, distance to reward) are not the solution, they’re the problem.
I wouldn’t really say I’m using them to measure by as a deliberate choice. These are the dimensions which seem to me to be relevant differences between tasks that pose motivational problems and those that don’t. This is partly observational but also based on material and research I’ve encountered over the years on these issues. The lack of motivation comes first however and the dimensions are attempts to identify a pattern.
Convincing myself that my work is important seems a more daunting challenge than finding motivational hacks and also more dangerous—what if I end up like the monk, squandering my efforts on some sub-optimal activity?
Two things:
You did ask how people could love their work, and
If you aren’t convinced what you’re doing is important, maybe that’s a bigger problem than falsely convincing yourself it’s important!
Note, for example, that lots of people have ended up accidentally doing important things as a direct result of trying to do something stupid that they thought was important. (Like, say, Columbus.)
True, I think a couple of things are getting conflated here (largely my fault because I’m still confused about the distinctions).
A couple of people have said they ‘love their work’ but still have motivational issues with particular sub-tasks of their work. If that is what people generally mean by ‘love their work’ I think I have a better grasp on the idea. If this is what people generally mean then all kinds of motivational hacks for dealing with low-level sub-tasks that are not inherently lovable are useful. They might even be useful for someone like me who does not ‘love their work’ but values the resources it provides to do things they actually want to do.
You originally seemed to be claiming that people who really ‘love their work’ do not suffer from motivational issues on not-inherently-pleasurable sub-tasks or need ways of avoiding being distracted by ‘shiny things’. I find this slightly implausible but it sounds like nice work if you can get it.
Either sense of ‘loving your work’ above sounds like a great place to be and I’m very interested in attaining such a situation if possible. That seems a bigger / higher level problem than simple motivational hacks can help with however.
For me and the vast majority of people I know however work is merely a particularly large and burdensome sub-task required to attain the resources to pursue things we actually value / consider important. Figuring out if there’s an alternative is a major personal project for me however so I’m open to any and all advice in that area.
A quote that would be at least as credible in Edison’s case (and in general): “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent taking credit for other people’s work.”
There’s enough confusion about what the term “passive verb” means out there already, please don’t add more.
You should come and work in the game industry! There are a few here.
I do work in the games industry.
Damn.
Errrm—you should come and work in France, where soul-crushing unpaid overtime is illegal!
I enjoy my job, I get to do fun stuff, and generally look forward to going to work. Then I come home and program too, for personal projects.
This gets back to my original question of what people mean when they say they ‘love their job’. I’m reasonably well paid and work on reasonably interesting problems and there are certainly worse jobs. I sometimes enjoy aspects of my work and / or get a sense of satisfaction from them. But ‘love’ seems like a completely inappropriate word for something I would walk away from and never look back if I won the lottery tomorrow.
If I won the lottery tomorrow, I’d start a small game company, keep programming on the interesting bits and hire people to do the boring stuff or the stuff I’m not as good at.
Considering I never even played the lottery, that seems pretty unlikely, but still—I wouldn’t want to stop working on cool nifty stuff, unless it was to work on something cooler and niftier.
I love my job so much that if I won the lottery, I would keep doing it too, and I would hire people to do the boring stuff which doesn’t uniquely require me.
Yet, not having won the lottery, it remains the case that, at this job I love SO MUCH that I would keep doing it if I won the lottery, there are many subgoals and tasks which are boring, which aren’t shiny and interesting enough to draw my attention naturally, and which I must force myself to do. And if I don’t do them, my organization will proceed more slowly or not at all.
So to be more effective at this job I love, I either need to win the lottery, or I need to strength my attention-directing muscle.
I think that’s apt, and I think that the people who love their jobs (like Emile) do not fit that description. I haven’t yet held a job that I love. I am, though, studying to enter a field of work that, if I won the lottery, I would still want to work in, because I’m passionate about it. There exist jobs that I would love.
If you still don’t think it’s possible to love your work, what would you do if you won the lottery? Sit on the couch playing video games all day? I doubt it—at least after the first year. Doing nothing, as it turns out, gets really boring after a while, especially for people with curious minds. (This is one of the premises of unschooling; I don’t remember which specific book I read it in, or I’d link it.) You’d find something to do that interested or excited you. Odds are, there’s work to be had which relates to that something. It has the potential to be work that you love.
But I suspect that at least one of us is generalizing from a single example. Either you have not had a job that you loved and are thus assuming that such a thing is impossible, or I am naive and optimistic and don’t understand what appears to me to be cynicism.
Nope, not at all. I’ve got plenty of things I’d do with sufficient free time and resources. None of them that I’ve yet figured out how to get anyone to pay me enough to cover my living expenses though. The reason I work is primarily to fund the things I actually want to do.
I was under the impression that the video game industry was a horrible pit of despair, crunch time, and routine 80-hour weeks that chews up innocent hopefuls who initially think “Cool, I’m making Video Games!” and spits them out when the idealism wears off in a couple of years...
The phenomenon you describe certainly does exist in the games industry but it’s not something I’ve had to deal with a lot (just saying no works wonders) and isn’t the primary reason I don’t love my job.
I think the distinction between a “remembering self” and an “experiencing self” might be relevant here: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_memory.html
I’m productive, and I’ve been paid > $100/hr for my work (at Google, before moving to the non-profit sector), and could have multiple offers to do that again in multiple fields anytime I wanted.
I loved parts of my work, sure, but there were also large parts of it that I had to forcibly direct my attention to. The best tasks to be the most productive are rarely the most fun. And in a world of compelling entertainment, reading the latest blogs, books, watching TV, surfing the web, are always fighting for people’s attention. Mine at least. To direct my attention to productive activities, to my consciously chosen goals and the best tasks to achieve them, is hard Work.
Yes, there are moments of flow, moments we love, moments that draw our attention. And the more of those, the better we’ve chosen our work. But I think you have a huge selection bias—it may be that the most productive people are the ones who enjoy a coincidence between what they do and what draws their attention, but I doubt that very many jobs offer that overlap or that we can employ very many people that way. Hence, for most people, the way to be more productive is to get better at directing their attention.
As another angle, I completely love my current employment role—running an organization trying to build startup countries on the ocean. I love the mission I work on, I love the people I work with, I am one of those incredibly fortunate people who is doing what they love. But the tasks I need to accomplish each day to work towards my audacious and inspiring goal? Yawn. Bleh. I think that’s just because inspiring goals often require boring subgoals and tasks, not because I haven’t picked the right job.
patrissimo:
You are indeed lucky to have such inspiring goals. For many people in modern workplaces, the trouble is that they not only have no such exalted motivating goals, but they don’t even have any clear sense of what exactly their work is supposed to achieve—or worse, they often clearly see that the tedious tasks they must perform are completely pointless and useless in the overall scheme of things. I mean the sort of thing which is the basic running theme of Dilbert.
This can have such soul-crushing effects that it’s hard to find motivation even for living, let alone productivity. The real challenge is how to force yourself to be productive (or “productive”?) in ways necessary to prosper in such an environment if you’re condemned to it, as increasing numbers of people are.
Since I can’t double-upvote this I’ll just add my agreement. Figuring out a way out of this trap has been one of my dominant top-level goals for at least a year and something I’ve been thinking a lot about for longer than that but it is a difficult problem. I know quite a few intelligent and ‘successful’ (by most conventional measures) individuals who are deeply unsatisfied with their careers but have great difficulty breaking out of the cycle.
This could be a selection effect: the people who naturally like effective behaviours succeed, the rest of us will still have to work for it.
Is effectiveness at self-improvement linked to the quantity and health of children?
Oscar is referring to this bias.
In short: “LW is bad because it’s fun” is wrong.
There is nothing wrong with fun things, done with fun time, and known to be fun. This is why HP&TMoR is great.
The problem is fun things, done with work time, and used to check off boxes like “personal growth towards rationality”. Like Less Wrong. Or reading a book about Procrastination but never following it’s system. Or reading a book about time management but never making it a habit. Or watching videos on the internet of workout routines but not going to the gym. All of these are the same—they have the purported goal of personal growth, yet they involve only the intellectual background research and setup needed in small amounts at the beginning before starting a growth program in real life, and none of the practice and dedication to forming new habits in real life that actually result in growth.
Now, what’s wrong with that?
What’s wrong is that in fact a fun thing can be productive and “if it’s fun it’s not productive” is wrong—insofar as pjeby is right and I understand him right and you disagree.
A fun thing can be unproductive too of course. I’m not challenging the unproductivity of any of your example fun activities.
“The War of Art” is a counterexample—a successful book by a very successful writer, who is paid for writing, all about how brutally hard it is to force yourself to write (or express yourself artistically in any way), and with various methods, tactics, and inspirational stories to overcome this.
This book illustrates how your conflation of “love” and “easy to do” is wrong—these writers may love writing, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy for them to sit down and start filling the screen with words. The difficulty, in many cases (certainly rings true for me, and others I know) is in starting certain tasks, those w/ strong ugh fields. So one might love one’s work, and still need to force oneself to start the right tasks.
Wait. You’re claiming that the goals chosen by your executive function just happen to correspond to a succession of enjoyable activities for the rest of your brain? I know there’s a lot of diversity in brain-space, but there’s not so much that you couldn’t find 100,000+ people with a nearly identical motivational system. What if I’m one of them? If so, I’ll gladly pay you $500/mo for the privilege of doing all your fun work… and will successfully complete all your goals as a by-product! Boom! Win-Win! Then you can free yourself up to do something more high-value. And if your next goal turns out to be as fun and exciting, Boom!! -- you can do it again and get another customer like me to pay you for the pleasure of taking on all that work too.
If your work is always fun, you have either
a) Aimed so low in life that referring to what you do as “having goals” is laughable
or
b) Deluded yourself that your work = enjoyable for signaling and/or motivational reasons
FACT: The #1 trait of effective people is being able to consistently do things they don’t want to do.
Not all of your work should be awful, but if a non-trivial part of what you do isn’t boring or stressful, then your goals would already be fulfilled by others. And if other people fulfilling your goals doesn’t work for your particular goals, consider the possibility that what you have are not goals, but simply desires.
Nope. See my second comment, here for a better explanation of “love” in this context.
If it were impossible to love something boring or stressful, a lot of relationships would be in jeopardy. ;-)
Well, unless you’re unusually capable for some reason or other. Lots of people write novels, perform music, act in plays or movies, or compete in sports. Very few people become Stephen King, Madonna, Russel Crowe, or Roger Clemens.
In general, though, if any given job wasn’t either difficult (such that few people can do it as well as you can), extremely time-consuming (so that you can’t both do it and have a “day job”) or less than optimally entertaining, it seems as though you’d have people doing it for free.
Unless I misunderstand, your argument works only for those goals held by pjeby that do not refer to pjeby. For example, would you really pay pjeby $500 / mo to make pjeby’s wife happier (as opposed to making your own wife happier)?
Or is making one’s wife happier “simply a desire” in your terminology?
Exactly. It’s not really a goal when you don’t care about the results. If the dominating term in your decision to do something is that the result be YOURS (i.e., profit being created in YOUR bank account, YOU making your wife happy, credit for YOU achieving something, etc), you might as well just call it “shit you want to be yours”.
Most people are referenced in all their “goals”. But that’s because most people don’t actually have goals in any meaningful sense beyond wanting a ton of shit to be theirs. If you notice that most all your goals wouldn’t be desirable if they didn’t include you, maybe you should look into actually finding something you care about besides yourself. I know you can do it—heck, even most PUAs end up caring about things outside of themselves (after they try everything else first and it doesn’t work).
Just remember, if it’s actually a goal, you wouldn’t care who achieved it and you would gladly welcome more effective or efficient ways to achieve it… including other people doing it in place of you.
This has even more weight if you accept that the algorithm embodied by ‘you’ is probabilistically extremely similar to other algorithms out there in the multiverse, with no easy way to distinguish between them in any meaningful sense. So even when you have preferences over ‘your’ brain states corresponding to ‘you’ being satisfied outside of any external accomplishments getting achieved, there’s still a philosophical arbitrarity in fulfilling ‘your’ preferences instead of anyone else’s that I’d bet leads to decision theoretic spaciotemporal inconsistency in a way it’d be difficult for me cache out right now.
(In practice humans can’t even come close to avoiding such conundrums but it seems best to be aware that such a higher standard of decision theoretic and philosophical optimality exists.)
I had a similar thought on the distinction between “shiny/fun” versus “hard”, but I still support the basic premise of the article. As it stands, I find LW valuable in a dual role… i.e. both for developing the right attitude towards self help and also as a “fun/shiny” thing. At the same time, I suppose there is a lot of scope for improvement with its role pertaining to the self help goals.
As another data point for patrissimo, I also had difficulty from the same point and for the same reason. I think it would be good to consider editing that section, either to change that proposition itself or to counteract this reaction.
Upvoted, but I think you’re both right. I’m surprised you only see one side, I am used to you having deeper psychological insights.
I don’t disagree that LW can be a massively addictive waste of time, it’s only the “work != fun” part of the article that I object to. (Of the bits I read, anyway.)
I agree that “work” should highly correlate to fun, under normal circumstances. Still, there is a lot of drudgery on the way to accomplishing goals that needs to be overcome, and there are circumstances where fun might just not be appropriate.
OP gives one example:
Others that come to mind:
Running your own business is fun, having to fire people is not.
Exercise is fun once you get into the rhythm, but I had to trick myself into the gym for the first couple of month.
Having kids can be fun, changing diapers is not
Some possibly rational actions cannot ever be fun
Killing people is not fun, unless you have psychopathic tendencies
If all you mean is that the post overemphasized the necessity of occasional pain, I agree, and upvoted thusly
The claim was “work != letting your attention drift to wherever it wants to go”.
Once you have disciplined yourself to direct your attention, it can be fun to execute a task, sure. But I am very skeptical that very many jobs consist of letting your attention drift to whatever is most shiny, with no effort to direct it. Even in those jobs, I suspect the workers would be more effective were they occasionally to direct their attention to what is most useful rather than most shiny.