Plans need motivational components
One of the most valuable things that I got out of the Center for Applied Rationality’s recent workshop, but which took a while to really sink in, is that a plan isn’t finished until it also includes a component for how you’ll actually get yourself to carry it out.
I think that people in planning mode have a tendency to think of themselves as magical robots, as in “once I know what I need to do to accomplish my goal, the hard work is done and all that remains is executing the plan”. But in my experience, getting yourself to actually carry out the plan is the hard part. Everyone knows how to Bungee jump, or how to get a date: just tie a elastic cord around your leg and jump, or just walk up to everyone who seems attractive and ask them out until someone says yes. It’s not figuring out what you need to do that’s hard.
Probably the thing that taught this the most viscerally was an exercise at the workshop, called Focused Grit. It’s really simple: you imagine that there’s an evil genie behind your back, who’s giving you five minutes to solve some particular problem that you have. Once the five minutes has passed, the genie will delete your ability to ever think of the problem again. So if you don’t want the problem to be with you for the rest of your life, you have five minutes to either actually solve the problem, or at least make a plan for how you’ll solve the problem that’s good enough that you can just execute it afterwards.
Then you set a timer, and solve your problem within the next five minutes.
This works surprisingly well.
A mistake that a lot of people make with this technique at first is that they only create a plan which would work if they were to carry it out. Then they stop there, feeling that they’re done.
But remember the evil genie. You won’t have a chance to develop your plan further once the five minutes are done, and that includes trying to motivate yourself to carry out the plan. When the five minutes finishes, you need to actually be in a state where you’ll carry out the plan, or you’ll be stuck with your problem for the rest of your life. And the genie will laugh at you.
I found this to be a very effective way to internalize the “a plan is only complete once it includes a component for how you’ll actually complete it” lesson. In the past, I used to do write-ups of techniques that seemed good and useful if I could get myself to use them, but which I knew I was unlikely to actually use. They seemed so good on paper!
Now I know better. A technique that you don’t think that you’ll be able to use isn’t good even on paper.
This is now the most important lens that I use to evaluate all of my plans and techniques.
Looking back at 2014
2014 was one of the best and worst years of my life.
It started with the worst: in the first three months or so, my girlfriend and I broke up, the part-time job I was doing started feeling unmotivating, and I realized I didn’t have the energy to both do the job and work on my thesis at the same time. Romance, work, studies: three major spheres of my life, all crashing down around the same time.
I mostly recovered from the breakup and put my thesis on a temporary hold, but work continued to be unmotivating. In the summer I went to see a psychiatrist, and was prescribed antidepressants. Thus started the better part of the year, as I realized that I’d been suffering from a mild depression for years without knowing it. The meds went a long way towards fixing that, and everything started looking brighter. There were still down periods, but even they were better than the down periods I was having before the meds.
Of the concrete things that happened, there are so many things I could cover.
I’ve definitely been becoming a lot more social and extroverted during the year. In April there was the first Less Wrong European Community Weekend in Berlin, which was a lot of fun by itself, and also led to me becoming close friends with several people. In November I attended the Center for Applied Rationality’s workshop in England, which led to me starting my own rationality workshops here in Finland, and also crafting a local, more tightly-knit community of people who would support each other in making each other’s lives awesome. The workshop also caused me to finally start organizing regular “come and hang out with me in a bar” evenings like I’d been intending to do for the last half a year. Also made and strengthened several other friendships in unrelated ways.
A large part of the boosts also came from the antidepressants, as well as reading several books which helped me considerably level up my social skills. The Charisma Myth was the first one, then followed by Non-Violent Communication which not only helped me resolve conflicts I’d been having with others but also make my own emotions clearer. In the last few days I’ve started reading Crucial Conversations, which has a lot of similarities with Non-Violent Communication but also covers many things which NVC didn’t.
I continued working on some academic papers on the side, kind of as a hobby. At the beginning of the year, “The errors, insights and lessons of famous AI predictions” by Stuart Armstrong, Sean Ó hÉigeartaigh, and me was published in the Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence. Around the end of the year, I had a paper accepted to an AAAI workshop on AI and ethics, and Physica Scripta formally published my and Roman Yampolskiy’s paper from 2013 that we’d only had up as a technical report so far. Google Scholar reports that there were 15 citations to my different papers in 2014, up from the 9 citations that I got in 2013.
On the topic of hobbies, I had for a long time liked the idea of game mastering role-playing games, but in practice rarely had the time or energy to do the necessary preparation for them. Now I finally managed to get into different RPGs which were designed to only require minimal advance preparation, and turned out to be a lot more fun to run than the old-style games. (E.g. different move engine games starting from Apocalypse World, and games like J Matias Kivikangas’s Here Be Dragons, which I unfortunately still haven’t gotten a chance to run. Soon!)
On a front that’s harder to describe, I started a large-scale restructuring of how I thought about ethics and morality. In a sense, I had ended up with a kind of an externalized sense of morality, which caused me a lot of guilt and stress. I started making a transition towards a more internalized morality, which had helped a lot.
Now as we enter 2015, a lot about my future is unclear. I’m intending to finally graduate with my MSc around summer, and I’m uncertain of what I will do after that. I’ve actually been feeling sufficiently extroverted as to start pondering whether I would actually prefer some kind of a career that involved being social and interacting with lots of different people on a daily basis, as opposed to the more introverted, technical kinds of careers that I’d been mostly thinking of before.
In any case, I feel that I’m now leveling up much faster than I was before, and am becoming far better positioned to tackle different challenges in life. Hopefully things will go well.
Social media saps more than just short-term attention
The prevalent wisdom about why social media is distracting is that it provides a constant opportunity for immediate distraction. Whenever your work feels even the slightly unsatisfying, there’s the temptation to get a momentary break by looking at Facebook, and then you’ve spent fifteen minutes chatting away when you should have been working.
There’s a lot of truth to this. I’ve experienced it first-hand many times, and talked a lot about it in my essay about the addiction economy.
But I find that’s only a part of the problem. I find that in addition to sapping short-term attention, social media also damages long-term attention. (I’m focusing on social media here, because it’s the one that I’m the most hooked on myself – but any other source of quick, immediate reward would also have the same effect.)
Take a day when I don’t have access to social media, and don’t have anything else in particular to do, either. My typical behavior on such days is that I might be bored for a while, maybe take a walk, and then gradually, over some time, get ideas for projects that I could be doing, and start working on them.
In contrast, on a day when I do have access to Facebook, say, at the point when I start growing bored I’ll glance at Facebook, because hey, why not? I’m just taking a quick look to see if there are any updates or new notifications, I’ll get offline right after that.
And maybe I do. Often I do succeed in just checking the updates and notifications, maybe briefly commenting on something, then closing Facebook again. But what then happens is that sometime later, I’ll take another quick look on Facebook again. And again. And again.
And then that period of idle, slightly bored mind-wandering never gets to the point where I start gathering the motivation to work on my own project. Because at the point when I start feeling bored, my default action is to look at Facebook, filling my mind with whatever is happening there, rather than it starting to come up with new things to do. Even when I close the browser tab, the gradually forming idea of “hey, maybe I could do X” has been flushed away by whatever was in the window, meaning that it needs more time to reform.
Sometimes I take longer breaks from social media, after having used it quite heavily on previous days. On such occasions, it’s often been my experience that it takes a day for my mind to recalibrate its expectations – on the first day I’m constantly anxious to go on Facebook, but after that I’m starting to have more creativity. It is written:
Complex systems learn by adjusting to feedback, and feedback that is sufficiently loud and frequent will oversaturate the system’s inputs, leading it to reduce its overall sensitivity in order to register changes. When instant and immediate gratification becomes the norm, more subtle forms of feedback become harder to register. Getting engrossed in a book becomes increasingly difficult. The same goes for different kinds of stories: it’s easier to sit through an action movie than a drama because the story is simple and the movie is mostly comprised of satisfying bits of conflict resolution in the simple form of karate chops and shootouts. We might force ourselves to sit through a few chapters of Tolstoy, but the real issue is that we ultimately have to re-calibrate our receptivity to feedback in order to gain interest in more subtle flavors of experience.
Subtle flavors of experience, like the barely noticeable sensation in your mind that’s the stirring of a new idea, which you could allow to grow and develop.
Studies suggest that the mental effort involved in a task may be proportional to the opportunity cost of not doing something else. In other words, things aren’t so much intrinsically appealing or unappealing, but more appealing or unappealing relative to the appealingness of the best thing that you could be doing instead. If you have constant access to video games, going outside for a walk may seem like something pretty boring, but if you don’t have anything better to do, you may notice that going for a walk actually feels like a pretty nice idea.
Presumably this works for unconscious task-selection, too. If the social media is always available as an option, then momentarily checking that may be treated by your unconscious brain as something that has a higher reward than starting to think about something with a more long-term payoff, such as a creative project.
The insidious thing here is that you may not notice the effect this has on you. From your perspective, yeah, you’re looking at social media every now and then, but it’s always just short moments, and you’re spending the vast majority of your time not on social media. So why are you still feeling listless and easily distracted?
Because it isn’t enough to spend the majority of your time away from distractions, if that time isn’t also spent continuously away from them.
As it happens, I had been thinking about this topic for a while, but only wrote up this essay on an occasion when I’d decided to spend the rest of the day off social media. Then this essay started formulating itself in my mind, and I wrote it up in pretty much one go, to be posted at a later time.
Help and you’ll be helped is the law
I like reading self-help books of the “how to become rich and famous and successful at everything you want to do” genre. They don’t necessarily always provide much in the way of actually useful tips, but they do provide nice motivational boosts as well as helping foster a growth mindset.
Recently, I’ve been glad to find that there seems to be a common theme in the advice given by many such books. This theme can found in different forms in books like Ikigai by Sebastian Marshall, Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi, and Your First 1000 Copies by Tim Grahl. Probably many others too, but these are the ones that I’ve happened to come across.
The specifics vary, but the general theme can be summed up as “help and you’ll be helped”. Your First 1000 Copies tells aspiring authors to provide regular updates of free but valuable content to anyone who wants it, as well as to error on the side of giving too much content away. Never Eat Alone says that the key to success in generosity, and that real networking is about finding ways to make other people more successful. Ikigai says that one of the reasons why success is heritable is that high born people learn that they can afford to make people favors without an expectation of getting paid back right away, which benefits them in the long run.
All of them say to be generous about helping people, give as many people as much value as you can, and to not keep score or think about who owes you what. They say that this is something that will make you successful, for there will be enough people who’ll return the favor to you, one day.
Maybe these are just feel-good stories. But the advice rings true to my ear and fits my experience, and the same advice is coming from a bunch of different authors. This makes me happy, to know that to some extent at least, those who help others to have better lives are those who are also more likely to succeed.
Although the “help and you will be helped” advice has doubtless been valid even before, I feel that its even more true in the Internet Age. Someone can write an article that shares a piece of good advice and be read by millions of people. Finding people who you might be useful to, or reaching out to ask for help from someone, is now possible even if the people in question are separated by thousands of kilometers.
There has been a lot of talk about the Internet having dynamics that contribute to antisocial behavior and outright harassment campaigns. This is true, and worrying. But it is also good to see that the Internet also reinforces dynamics that are a power for good, and help makes us all better off.
Let’s make the world a better place, both to ourselves and to others.
This work by Kaj Sotala is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
In addition to making a public comment, you may also send me anonymous feedback.