> The confidence damage from failing is still huge compared to the confidence boost from succeeding
Not if you practice at failing, and get good at it. I can fail to get out of bed in the morning and feel fine about that. In fact, feeling OK about it was the key to getting over my depression.
I had a really nasty inner critic, that used to beat me up over every little failing I had. Hard to sleep at night when my inner critic was going over every aspect of the day and making sure I knew exactly how badly I'd done.
Accepting that I'm not a perfect human being was the key to getting over it. I will fail at things. A lot. It's OK. I'm not a perfect human being. Allowing myself to fail also allows me to experiment with things, to see what works, because it doesn't matter if I fail.
So yeah. I'd be snug in bed, reminded that I hadn't exercised, and stay there without a qualm. Life's too short to get that hung up on succeeding at every little thing.
there should be an alternative cult of patiently and kindly listening to one's needs and wants rather than overriding them with force (or little monetary incentives). i mean, there's already a bunch of those cults, but if you mention them around here you'll quickly learn that those methods are not "effective" (at forcing any kind of premeditated results)
I was going to post something like this. I would even argue that you didn't fail. You did exactly what you actually desired
This is an opportunity to introspect on why your actions didn't align with whatever goals you set. Maybe you don't actually want to reach the goal at all.
As with anything else. The value of the journey isn't an illusionary destination, but rather what you learn along the way. You'll likely find that you don't follow the path you imagined, likely because you found something more exciting along the way.
It's as if the goal is some sort of sacred object for change rather than something to be obtained.
This is an unhelpfully reductive view of needs and wants. Many of the systems humans have in place for regulating behaviour towards needs and goals are intensely focused on the short term.
The point of these incentives is not to override your actual long-term needs and wants, but rather to artificially bring their consequences up to the near term so that you work with your inherited systems rather than against them.
You shouldn't set a goal to exercise daily if doing so makes you feel bad. You should set that goal specifically when you have recognized it makes you overall feel better, even if it costs a discomfort in the moment.
Some people can easily align their behaviour with their long term needs and wants. If you are such a person, these incentive structures will not help you and you will be confused about the need for it.
> You shouldn't set a goal to exercise daily if doing so makes you feel bad.
Daily is probably excessive, but regular exercise will very likely be a bit unpleasant for most people, and that's not really a reason to avoid it.
My comment was not about avoiding unpleasure. My comment was about learning to listen to yourself, instead of tricking and forcing yourself as the default mode of behavior. Unpleasure is a very interesting and helpful thing when you're learning to understand yourself, by the way. But only if you pay attention, rather than "Use every motivation strategy you know, every trick in the book".
What scares me is that such a method might end up just overriding any kind of long-term-goal adjustment from the inside. If you force yourself to write daily (and god forbid, publish what you wrote!), do you know how to make this forced writing actually attentive to yourself? Or do you just do it because you promised yourself, and ignore any inner protest? Could it end up a daily article about, say... forcing oneself to write?
> regular exercise will very likely be a bit unpleasant for most people, and that's not really a reason to avoid it.
My point is that there is a group of people for whom that is practically reason to avoid it. The unpleasure is large enough that it doesn't happen.
Some people can force themselves by just "listening to themselves" whereas others get more mileage out of first listening to themselves, and then setting up a commitment scheme.
I'm a very long-time Beeminder user and would recommend it to anybody looking for another motivational mechanism. It's not always the best approach to motivation, but for certain types of goals like "work out frequently enough", the one-week "akrasia horizon" which kind of means you're mentally committing to work by your future self rather than your present self (and as your present self you can only un-commit with a week's notice), along with staying on a good-enough-on-average "yellow brick road" as they call it, is a game-changer.
Me too. Beeminder was part of how I quit drinking.
I just logged one dot manually every day, at the end of the day, when I had managed to shrug it off. It was very difficult at first but I knew I had to keep going. About four months in I bought a pizza to celebrate 100 days, and the habit has stuck ever since. Recently I got myself kebab for 365 days without a drop.
I just signed up. I think the way they explain in blog posts how they navigate a very tricky business model ("pay us when you fail" is the mother of perverse incentives) is highly admirable.
> Turn “study Chinese for half an hour a day” into “study Chinese for at least one second, five days a week.”
This approach is immensely valuable for tasks where the real problem is initiating rather than persisting... And at least for me, there's a lot of that.
Once I've done the context-switch, the task is often not nearly as painful/stressing/etc. as my subconscious mind likes to keep believing. Sometimes it even switches from "it's not worth it to do this now" to "it's not worth it to not finish this since I'm already here."
This is the premise behind a lot of those habit books. I think it was popularized by BJ Fogg's Tiny Habits.
A common example is "commit to flossing just one tooth, so you're not overwhelmed with the commitment of flossing your whole mouth. If you feel like doing more once you've started, that's fine.".
What those books often don't point out is that this approach doesn't work if you're actively avoidant of the habit you want to build. The approach solves forgetfulness or intimidation, not distaste.
I bring this up because I read several of these books without getting results and kept wondering what I was doing wrong.
Beeminder was helpful for smaller habits, but I'm too scared to pledge a truly painful amount of money, so the cost of failure was often too low to motivate me.
When possible, I've found that simply moving to a new setting is helpful. I can crank through tedious tasks if I go somewhere other people are being productive. I like the university library (I graduated long ago, but it's free and open to the public).
I work well when I have externally-exposed structure. I reliably make it to the gym when I have a standing appointment with a personal trainer. Working a job with a fixed schedule is easier for me than working a flexible schedule. Back in college, I struggled to keep up with homework but I almost never missed a class.
Sometimes I'm surprised at why I'm avoiding something. I thought I just hated doing the dishes, but when I added a clean/dirty marker to the dishwasher I magically started staying on top of it. Turns out the blocker wasn't the chore, it was needing to figure out whether the dishwasher was ready for dirty dishes each and every time I finished eating. Once I no longer had to assess & decide, I could simply act
Similarly, if there's a technical task on having trouble getting started with, it goes a lot easier if I just break it down into the most itty-bitty steps I can think of. Sometimes I'm not avoiding the task, but figuring out what the task is.
Thanks for your insights. At the end it's a very personal thing that varies a lot among people.
Your statement about the setting is also very much true for me. I do work better in public settings and enjoy the atmosphere of people working around me. Interestingly, this effect seems to wear off. A certain location does not help indefinitely. Switching it up alleviates this problem. But maybe that's just me.
Unfortunately, the university library is inconveniently far from my new apartment and the local library has opening hours that are incompatible with my full-time job. Well, I'll find a way.
> There are many tricks to becoming a fail-proof superhuman, many of which I detail in my book
Good lord is this cringey.
> The confidence damage from failing is still huge compared to the confidence boost from succeeding, so to do success spirals right, you don’t ever want to fail a goal. But how can you completely stop failing when you’re starting off as a normal human who wins some and loses some? Just trying harder isn’t going to work.
Okay, so this vulnerable phase in changing your behavior is real, though I would frame the problem and the solution differently.
The problem: deep down, your brain thinks you're paying a cost for no benefit, so it's trying to stop you.
The goal: through repeated success, you educate your brain about the benefits of the new behavior, inculcating a deep conviction that you're benefiting from it, so your subconscious mind and your conscious mind will both be on your side.
The problem is that when you fail, you're teaching your brain to associate the effort with failure instead of success, and not just failure, but a deeper failure than you feel when you don't try.
So you need to make it through this vulnerable time, repeatedly exposing your brain to the learning experience via sheer effort and a lot of tricks such as making your environment supportive, etc., copiously documented elsewhere.
28 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 67.8 ms ] threadNot if you practice at failing, and get good at it. I can fail to get out of bed in the morning and feel fine about that. In fact, feeling OK about it was the key to getting over my depression.
I had a really nasty inner critic, that used to beat me up over every little failing I had. Hard to sleep at night when my inner critic was going over every aspect of the day and making sure I knew exactly how badly I'd done.
Accepting that I'm not a perfect human being was the key to getting over it. I will fail at things. A lot. It's OK. I'm not a perfect human being. Allowing myself to fail also allows me to experiment with things, to see what works, because it doesn't matter if I fail.
So yeah. I'd be snug in bed, reminded that I hadn't exercised, and stay there without a qualm. Life's too short to get that hung up on succeeding at every little thing.
This is an opportunity to introspect on why your actions didn't align with whatever goals you set. Maybe you don't actually want to reach the goal at all.
As with anything else. The value of the journey isn't an illusionary destination, but rather what you learn along the way. You'll likely find that you don't follow the path you imagined, likely because you found something more exciting along the way.
It's as if the goal is some sort of sacred object for change rather than something to be obtained.
The point of these incentives is not to override your actual long-term needs and wants, but rather to artificially bring their consequences up to the near term so that you work with your inherited systems rather than against them.
You shouldn't set a goal to exercise daily if doing so makes you feel bad. You should set that goal specifically when you have recognized it makes you overall feel better, even if it costs a discomfort in the moment.
Some people can easily align their behaviour with their long term needs and wants. If you are such a person, these incentive structures will not help you and you will be confused about the need for it.
Daily is probably excessive, but regular exercise will very likely be a bit unpleasant for most people, and that's not really a reason to avoid it.
My comment was not about avoiding unpleasure. My comment was about learning to listen to yourself, instead of tricking and forcing yourself as the default mode of behavior. Unpleasure is a very interesting and helpful thing when you're learning to understand yourself, by the way. But only if you pay attention, rather than "Use every motivation strategy you know, every trick in the book".
What scares me is that such a method might end up just overriding any kind of long-term-goal adjustment from the inside. If you force yourself to write daily (and god forbid, publish what you wrote!), do you know how to make this forced writing actually attentive to yourself? Or do you just do it because you promised yourself, and ignore any inner protest? Could it end up a daily article about, say... forcing oneself to write?
My point is that there is a group of people for whom that is practically reason to avoid it. The unpleasure is large enough that it doesn't happen.
Some people can force themselves by just "listening to themselves" whereas others get more mileage out of first listening to themselves, and then setting up a commitment scheme.
In the book it specifically teaches how to "patiently and kindly listening to one's needs"
https://www.amazon.com/Self-Parenting-Complete-Guide-Convers...
I just logged one dot manually every day, at the end of the day, when I had managed to shrug it off. It was very difficult at first but I knew I had to keep going. About four months in I bought a pizza to celebrate 100 days, and the habit has stuck ever since. Recently I got myself kebab for 365 days without a drop.
https://www.beeminder.com/resonant_pyre/days-since-drinking
This approach is immensely valuable for tasks where the real problem is initiating rather than persisting... And at least for me, there's a lot of that.
Once I've done the context-switch, the task is often not nearly as painful/stressing/etc. as my subconscious mind likes to keep believing. Sometimes it even switches from "it's not worth it to do this now" to "it's not worth it to not finish this since I'm already here."
A common example is "commit to flossing just one tooth, so you're not overwhelmed with the commitment of flossing your whole mouth. If you feel like doing more once you've started, that's fine.".
What those books often don't point out is that this approach doesn't work if you're actively avoidant of the habit you want to build. The approach solves forgetfulness or intimidation, not distaste.
I bring this up because I read several of these books without getting results and kept wondering what I was doing wrong.
Beeminder was helpful for smaller habits, but I'm too scared to pledge a truly painful amount of money, so the cost of failure was often too low to motivate me.
When possible, I've found that simply moving to a new setting is helpful. I can crank through tedious tasks if I go somewhere other people are being productive. I like the university library (I graduated long ago, but it's free and open to the public).
I work well when I have externally-exposed structure. I reliably make it to the gym when I have a standing appointment with a personal trainer. Working a job with a fixed schedule is easier for me than working a flexible schedule. Back in college, I struggled to keep up with homework but I almost never missed a class.
Sometimes I'm surprised at why I'm avoiding something. I thought I just hated doing the dishes, but when I added a clean/dirty marker to the dishwasher I magically started staying on top of it. Turns out the blocker wasn't the chore, it was needing to figure out whether the dishwasher was ready for dirty dishes each and every time I finished eating. Once I no longer had to assess & decide, I could simply act
Similarly, if there's a technical task on having trouble getting started with, it goes a lot easier if I just break it down into the most itty-bitty steps I can think of. Sometimes I'm not avoiding the task, but figuring out what the task is.
Unfortunately, the university library is inconveniently far from my new apartment and the local library has opening hours that are incompatible with my full-time job. Well, I'll find a way.
The Beeminder thing is such a pressure cooker of motivation, when you can achieve so much by finding the right context and trigger for a small action.
Good lord is this cringey.
> The confidence damage from failing is still huge compared to the confidence boost from succeeding, so to do success spirals right, you don’t ever want to fail a goal. But how can you completely stop failing when you’re starting off as a normal human who wins some and loses some? Just trying harder isn’t going to work.
Okay, so this vulnerable phase in changing your behavior is real, though I would frame the problem and the solution differently.
The problem: deep down, your brain thinks you're paying a cost for no benefit, so it's trying to stop you.
The goal: through repeated success, you educate your brain about the benefits of the new behavior, inculcating a deep conviction that you're benefiting from it, so your subconscious mind and your conscious mind will both be on your side.
The problem is that when you fail, you're teaching your brain to associate the effort with failure instead of success, and not just failure, but a deeper failure than you feel when you don't try.
So you need to make it through this vulnerable time, repeatedly exposing your brain to the learning experience via sheer effort and a lot of tricks such as making your environment supportive, etc., copiously documented elsewhere.