Example of “hard”: Not eating chocolate, when you have chocolate at home.
Example of “easy”: Not eating chocolate, when you have no chocolate at home.
Switching from “hard” to “easy” is much easier than using your willpower to win at the “hard” mode. For some reasons many people don’t realize that, and instead spend a lot of time talking about it, motivating themselves, inventing various punishment schemes, attending motivation seminars, etc.
I suspect that something similar can be used in many situations. The first aspect is: don’t work harder, work smarter. The second aspect is: if it involves some kind of brain power (willpower, memory, creativity), feeling stressed (because you really try to do it the hard way) only makes it more difficult… but for some reason a lot of popular advice recommends increasing the stress (by using rewards and punishments of many kinds). -- I suspect this is the corrupted hardware in action (rewarding and punishing people brings higher status to one who does it).
Some people are afraid that doing things the “easy” way is somehow inferior, probably because it is not mysterious enough. That somehow if you stop eating chocolate by not buying it, you will be unable to resist it when someone brings you a piece of chocolate to your home. I suspect the experiments would show the other way round, because even resisting eating chocolate by not buying it creates a success spiral and changes your habits.
The difficult part is that sometimes you just can’t find the “easy” way. For example, sometimes you are not sufficiently in control of your environment. But many people don’t even try.
I think the problem is at least as much bad software as bad hardware, though. I believe the reason people don’t try to figure out easy ways to do things is that they’ve absorbed an idea that it’s more important to prove their virtue by doing hard things than to succeed, and I suspect that idea gets taught by people in authority who’d rather that subordinates not have initiative.
One possible approach is: If you don’t need something, throw it away; then you have an “easy” solution for given thing not cluttering your home anymore.
A similar but less extreme approach could be to buy a lot of stackable boxes and put everything there, and only take out things that you really need at some moment. After some time the things you didn’t need would naturally stay in the boxes.
This could solve some of my problems; I don’t know if your problems are of this type. Now that I think about it, I would have to do some research about a good system of boxes (big boxes for large items, small boxes for smaller items, and a system to put them all in one place), but the impact on my home could be great. I had a suspicion for a long time that the storage system has a strong impact on how the rest of the house looks, but I didn’t spend time researching a good storage system.
Could you expand on what you’ve found out about making what is usually considered hard to be not hard?
Example of “hard”: Not eating chocolate, when you have chocolate at home.
Example of “easy”: Not eating chocolate, when you have no chocolate at home.
Switching from “hard” to “easy” is much easier than using your willpower to win at the “hard” mode. For some reasons many people don’t realize that, and instead spend a lot of time talking about it, motivating themselves, inventing various punishment schemes, attending motivation seminars, etc.
I suspect that something similar can be used in many situations. The first aspect is: don’t work harder, work smarter. The second aspect is: if it involves some kind of brain power (willpower, memory, creativity), feeling stressed (because you really try to do it the hard way) only makes it more difficult… but for some reason a lot of popular advice recommends increasing the stress (by using rewards and punishments of many kinds). -- I suspect this is the corrupted hardware in action (rewarding and punishing people brings higher status to one who does it).
Some people are afraid that doing things the “easy” way is somehow inferior, probably because it is not mysterious enough. That somehow if you stop eating chocolate by not buying it, you will be unable to resist it when someone brings you a piece of chocolate to your home. I suspect the experiments would show the other way round, because even resisting eating chocolate by not buying it creates a success spiral and changes your habits.
The difficult part is that sometimes you just can’t find the “easy” way. For example, sometimes you are not sufficiently in control of your environment. But many people don’t even try.
Excellent advice. Cheating is just another way of winning.
Not cheating is often a lost purpose.
If I were reading that somewhere else, I would be going to post it in the latest Rationality Quotes thread.
Thanks.
I think the problem is at least as much bad software as bad hardware, though. I believe the reason people don’t try to figure out easy ways to do things is that they’ve absorbed an idea that it’s more important to prove their virtue by doing hard things than to succeed, and I suspect that idea gets taught by people in authority who’d rather that subordinates not have initiative.
Do you have an easy way to ensure housework is maintained to an acceptable level?
One possible approach is: If you don’t need something, throw it away; then you have an “easy” solution for given thing not cluttering your home anymore.
A similar but less extreme approach could be to buy a lot of stackable boxes and put everything there, and only take out things that you really need at some moment. After some time the things you didn’t need would naturally stay in the boxes.
This could solve some of my problems; I don’t know if your problems are of this type. Now that I think about it, I would have to do some research about a good system of boxes (big boxes for large items, small boxes for smaller items, and a system to put them all in one place), but the impact on my home could be great. I had a suspicion for a long time that the storage system has a strong impact on how the rest of the house looks, but I didn’t spend time researching a good storage system.