I suggest Atomic Habits by James Clear. Building a habit effectively is a main topic but I believe that it’s closely related to motivation (and there’s some content about motivation as well).
I liked the book due to its simplicity, pragmatism and well articulated model of a habits and “levers” that you can use to influence it. I still haven’t implemented all of the strategies/ideas from the book but a couple of them continue to have a positive impact. For example adapting/creating your identity so that it reinforces the habit (e.g. thinking about myself as a runner increases the chance that I’ll go for a run), and being more focused on my environment and how it supports/weakens new habit (e.g. hiding my tablet in a drawer in a separate room increases the chance that I’ll read a book).
kyle
Hello, LessWrong! I’ve been a lurker here for a while but today decided to create an account. I’m not sure why but my guess is that I think it’ll cause me to visit LW more often and—hopefully—improve my thinking.
My first contact with LW happened years ago. I don’t remember how I arrived but I remember being very confused about what’s going on here. The posts were touching on strange and unfamiliar ideas (“alignment, what alignment?”) and I couldn’t follow the reasoning/conversations so I didn’t stick around. My current understanding of that experience is that I was totally unprepared to really think about ideas I was unfamiliar with and I lacked the attention span for deeper thought. I’m at the very beginning of the journey to develop these skills.
I’m interested and curious about too many things. Or rather, my curiosity tends to be mostly “on the surface”, without going deep into the subject. I believe a lot of the effect comes from the ADHD. I got diagnosed in the last 6 months and thanks to medication I’m finally experiencing that it’s actually possible to dive deep into challenging subjects/ideas. Getting diagnosed as a adult made me experience a sense of loss—all these years that I’ve been struggling and fighting with myself could be spent more productively! Of course it’s not that simple and ADHD has its pros, for sure. But after a while I can tell that medication for me is like a enabling technology, it opens up new possibilities. One of those is finally being able to engage more deeply with the ideas here on LW.
I enjoyed this post. Specifically, the storytelling at the beginning was engaging and made me curious to see where the story goes. I wonder if you could share more about what the “most important” questions were? Do you have an idea how Sam was able to jump to the main issues, what might be his mental model for that? (If I were to guess, I’d pick his reasoning about market that your startup was in and its potential for 10-100x growth)
I would like to read more about the interview itself and your conclusions afterwards. How did you apply the experience from that startup to your next project?
Thank you for the explanation and sharing more context.
The “why can’t you do it in three months” reminds me of similar strategy/challenge in Thiel’s Zero to one, where you ask yourself what you want to achieve in 10 years and then question/challenge that with “how can I do this in 6 months?” (paraphrasing). Definitely and interesting and potentially valuable perspective but also very demanding and sometimes with unacceptable tradeoffs (e.g. long term health sacrifice after working too hard for too long). The other interpretation is that it’s a good filter/test to show whether one thought deeply about strategy and constraints—if that’s the case, you’ll have a clear answer and increase the signal that you really considered the solution space.