101–110 of 139 posts
* Temperance: Restricting yourself in things. Try it: find a vice. Now stop doing it. * Integrity: Doing the right thing, when no one is looking, or "when it doesn't matter" Example: Yesterday, Amazon accidentally discounted a $3.5k guitar to $112. It was widely publicized and hundreds of them were purchased. Some people go theirs shipped. Is this right or wrong? After all, it's just "pennies" to a company like Amazo…
* Temperance: Restricting yourself in things. Try it: find a vice. Now stop doing it. * Integrity: Doing the right thing, when no one is looking, or "when it doesn't matter" Example: Yesterday, Amazon accidentally discounted a $3.5k guitar to $112. It was widely publicized and hundreds of them were purchased. Some people go theirs shipped. Is this right or wrong? After all, it's just "pennies" to a company like Amazo…
Stop consuming sugar and caffeine. Fruits are a great suppliment until your body adjusts. You cannot have an abundance of attention without the fuel to power it. - It was one of the hardest things for me to do.
I second this. Sugar does much more harm to our body than we usually realize. After stopping sugar, my health tremendously improved. But the first few weeks and months of stopping sugar, (I used to consume too much sugar earlier) I noticed the worst possible games my mind can play against me. My mind used to say that it is ridiculous and I am being impractical, childish and what not!. It was a war and I won it. And n…
From what I'm reading, I think you're looking for the ability to deeply immerse in problems when the time is right.
When you're deeply immersed or in a flow state, your conscious and unconscious are completely aligned on a common goal. In fact, your conscious mind participates less and less in the tasks - only providing high-level strategy notions to your work, letting your subconscious tactical problem solving, recall and muscle memory do the work of getting the solution out into the world.
When it's working:
- your working memory (i.e. the classic 7+/-2 figure from psychology) is filled with the task at hand, and nothing else. Not only are you not thinking about other things, but you also have no doubts or second thoughts about what you're doing or how you are doing it.
- you have short feedback loops in place, letting your brain's pattern recognition work effectively.
- you have all of the tools you need at hand to solve the problem, and don't need to switch tasks to build/acquire them.
When you're in this state, you don't need a dopamine rush from anything else - you're caught up in in the problem, and don't need something to synthesize the excitement of discovery. You're getting that from the task!
Conversely, some examples of how it can break down:
- The steps required to reproduce your test conditions overflow your working memory, especially when decisions or analysis is required. Any conscious thought put towards the steps to recreate a test case is a task switch away from the problem you're solving. You might want to invest in scripts to automate some or all of the work.
- you're not sure if your approach is the right one. Now you're spending some of your problem solving energy on the "meta-problem" of how best to solve the problem. Take a moment to prove to yourself that the approach is at least worth investing in and then move forward.
Finally, know that deep immersion has its own drawbacks! Most importantly, while deep into solving one problem, it's easy to "over-invest" by going down the wrong path. For now, you might consider that a good problem to have and a sign of success at acquiring this skill. Honing the skill of choosing between the two approaches is level 2 ;)
Sure, meditation and exercise and reading on paper are great overall lifestyle changes that will help in the long run, but that's not what I see you asking about.
Two things I think can help you immediately:
1) Timers. Set a timer if you're working on a hard problem. 10 minutes focus, 5 minutes to fuck around, rinse, repeat (work/break times are up to you, just start somewhere). Personally, I notice that the "it's only 10 minutes and then I can take a break and look at cat pictures!" is enough to temporarily short circuit the "instant gratification" I want. Before you know it, you'll find yourself annoyed when the 10 minutes is up because you broke your train of thought. Time to add another 5 minutes. Then 5 more. It's important to reward yourself for your work, even if it just means you went 10 minutes without checking Reddit.
2) If you can't shake the feeling and need to just solve the problem and move on, that's fine. Figure out a way that works for you to revisit the problem. Make a note in a journal? Give yourself a calendar reminder? Put in a ticket detailing what you still feel needs to be done so it can be added to your next agile cycle? It's up to you. It's okay to implement temporary/bad solutions and revisit later.
Don't be too hard on yourself and don't let anybody tell you that you're doing to little. Start somewhere an iterate. This is self-improvement and in this context nobody else matters but yourself. Good luck!
Stop consuming sugar and caffeine. Fruits are a great suppliment until your body adjusts. You cannot have an abundance of attention without the fuel to power it. - It was one of the hardest things for me to do.
Fruits contain fructose, which is another form of sugar, and not quite good when consumed in large quantities. https://paleoleap.com/10-reasons-why-fructose-is-bad/
It's when you refine the fruit (e.g. juice it) that you separate the fiber away and therefore loose the counterbalance. The fiber and relative inconvenience in consuming the fruit also help to regulate the intake. Contrast a tall glass of orange juice, which is about 4-5 oranges minus their fiber, with manually pealing and eating that same number of oranges. One can be gulped under a minute, or maybe a few minutes if you drink it slowly, the other will take quite a while to eat and leave you with a feeling of being full.
That's why if I'm offered juice, I try to sip it slowly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Are you a qualified medical doctor? You don't need an MD to know that stimulants increase focus.
But you should be one to tell someone to take medication.
"Oh, okay. Sorry."
?
Some things I'd recommend, off the top of my head: - Do not grab phone/computer etc. and mindlessly browse first thing in the morning. (Or before bed. Or at any time really.) But doing it first thing really starts your day on the wrong foot. - When seeking to relax, do not mindlessly browse the internet/social-media/tv. Read an enjoyable book. This is an order of magnitude more fulfilling and beneficial to you. And g…
Really good advice. I tried blocking some sites but whenever my 'bad side' comes up again, I always find a way to get around the block and visit the site anyway. Any recommendations on blocking a site indefinitely?
to my mind, an effective blocker is extremely important and far superior to using willpower to resist your bad side. the fact is that when gratification is impossible or really difficult, you don't need to spend any willpower at all, you can just count on your other bad side, i.e. your 'lazy' self, to kill off the social media impulse. when a little person inside you says "go check out facebook!", previously you yourself have to step in and say "no, f* off*!" but now you can just sit back and watch with quite amusement as another little person (your lazy self) steps up and say "nah man, it's too much trouble" —— and bam! the impulse is gone.
the ego depetion theory in psychology may have turned out to be less empirically well-founded than people think, but personally i found it to be very useful. avoid using willpower as much as possible. instead, cleverly design your environment and play the little bad people inside your against one another to your advantage.
I'm surprised no one mentioned meditation yet! A regular meditation practice helps with impulse control (sitting still for X minutes requires exercising self control) and that will help with resisting the urge to do tasks which are immediately gratifying, which will free up time and energy for activities which lead to long term growth. Two things really helped me with meditation: setting a timer, and meditating every…
I would pray a lot and it was a great way to run through things I was both thankful for and the people in my (pray for) list who I needed to reach out to and make sure they were OK. I cut it because I stopped thinking it had an affect on the external world, but should have kept it because of how it affected me internally.
I also miss the community, but you can get that elsewhere it's just harder for me personally.