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.
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.