I wonder if this effect is restricted to younger people who are supposedly more malleable
MarcelloV
Karma: 65
I read about a study in Thinkertoys, a handbook for creative thinking, about how employees who thought they weren’t creative but were told to tell themselves that they’re creative had more ideas compared to those who continued thinking they were not creative. (I could be paraphrasing incorrectly since it was a while ago). Writing your ideas down could be a way to reinforce to yourself the idea that you are creative, in case you have doubts about that.
For your first question, Cold Turkey is my favorite for Windows! Freedom is also a popular one, but I prefer Cold Turkey since it has more robust settings and doesn’t allow you to uninstall it during an active session.
If you want something lighter you could use browser extensions like LeechBlock but it’s far too easy just to switch browsers with those.
I recently read this Psyche article related to your question. While not an academic paper, they do cite them throughout the article. Here’s the text most relevant to the preserve vs. develop willpower debate:
According to a 2017 meta-analysis of many relevant studies, self-control training seems to be effective at improving ‘self-control stamina’ – the ability to exert inhibitory self-control for longer periods.
So, is that the solution to greater self-discipline? Exercise your self-control muscle and get better at inhibitory self-control?
Unfortunately, it’s not so simple. You might have noticed how I switched back and forth between ‘inhibitory self-control’ and the broader concept of ‘self-control’, but the two are not synonymous. Though boosting your inhibitory self-control or ‘willpower’ might sound appealing – perhaps you imagined yourself using inhibitory self-control to force yourself not to eat the cookies, just like you would if you forced yourself to brush with the opposite hand – it’s not clear that inhibitory self-control actually works this way in everyday life.
Take the findings from a 2017 study that involved volunteers recording their daily experiences of temptation for a week. The individuals who experienced more temptation were less likely to achieve their long-term goals, even if they also reported using more inhibitory self-control. This suggests that using inhibitory self-control to resist those cookies might help you in the moment, but not in the long run. So even if you use inhibitory training (eg, the teeth-brushing challenge) to build a brawny self-control muscle, your heroic efforts are likely to leave you looking more like Sisyphus than Hercules.
There is this HBS article I found which talks about it from a management lens and offers some okay recommendations at the end
Do you have any further reading on “the opposite advice would be useful” besides the SSC article? I’ve found it difficult to navigate the tension between two sides of some pieces of advice.
And the solution that worked for me, is to make it part of your identity to be an agent. Make it a point of principle to do things, not because the thing is necessarily the perfect action, but because I choose the life where I do things, over the life where I always wait for the perfect opportunity.
This seems like shifting from act utilitarianism to rule utilitarianism, where you don’t try to calculate the value from each option in relation to all other options but instead act upon a principle (or core values in business speak).
Notice the small problems, and fix them. Notice when everyone isn’t enjoying what they’re doing, and be the first person to voice this. Notice when the jug of water is empty, and be the one to fill it. Notice when you say “oh, I can do this tomorrow” and do it today. Notice when you think “I should get round to this some time” or “I’ve always wanted to learn juggling” and actually do it. Notice when something is inefficient, notice the thing nobody is doing, and be the person who does it!
Maybe I’m overthinking, but with this logic I imagine this happening:
0. Imagine someone who thinks “I can do this tomorrow” or “this is not a priority”
1. Read this article and start to take action on all the things they view as wrong in their life, following their newly developed principle of action
2. Find that they don’t have enough time to take care of all these things
3. Become disillusioned and conclude that they have to adjust their principle to only tackle problems that are worth it
4. Start shrugging off most problems as not being worth it
5. Frequently shrug off problems thinking “I can do this tomorrow” or “this is not a priority”
And the person has now ended in the same place they started… How would one avoid this?
Seems similar to Murphyjitsu
I tried a parade of experiments and tracked all the factors that I thought might influence my energy levels – including sleep times, sleep duration, hydration, exercise, medications, melatonin, doing a sleep study, temperature, naps, and nutrition.
I’d love to see a separate post to learn more about the details and results of this so that I could try it myself.
I’ve tried doing this but for focus instead of fatigue, but it became too tedious to track all these factors every day. This was especially true since I felt that a) there were so many confounding factors in my day to day life that I couldn’t control (e.g. the type of work I’m doing that day or the # of conversations) and b) with so many variables, I’d need a very large sample size to create an accurate enough model. Now I just track 2-3 variables at a time that I believe are likely to have the biggest impact on my focus.
Interesting; it’s similar to if you make a calculated bet in poker when the odds are in your favor but still lose. In that case, your decision was still correct as well as the means you used to arrive at your decision. So there wouldn’t be much to write about. Perhaps in this case the loser could write about why they think the winner actually made the wrong decision to continue playing the hand.
I agree that you can’t distinguish between those things. But I wonder if it could be argued that as long as someone is putting in effort and deliberately reflecting and improving after each outcome, then you can’t fault them since they are doing everything in their power; even if they are modeling incorrectly or behaving badly, if they did not have opportunities to learn to do otherwise beforehand then is it still reasonable to fault them if they act that way? The pragmatic part of me says that everyone has “opportunities to learn to do otherwise” with the knowledge on the internet, so we can in fact fault people for modeling poorly. But I’m not sure if this line of reasoning is correct.
That’s interesting, do you have a link so I can read more about that?