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Follow boring advice

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Re: Follow boring advice

#51

Post by alexslobodnik »

borroka wrote: post #40
kiba wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not really advice, so much as goals? Also, CICO seems to be actually incorrect from what I read on it. Body's more like a thermostat than a steam engine and will work against you such as burning calories slower as you eat less. If you really want to save money, then you need to think in terms of emotions and how to combat that rather than attempting to brute force it with willpower.

In fact one of the very common risks is to mix up goals and boring advice. Say, you wanna score in a soccer match: just receive the ball, get rid of defenders in case, and kick the ball in the net——which is both true and useless. Eating fewer calories is not happening in a vacuum. It means giving up food, which is, broadly speaking, the joy of life for many people. Exercising means committing to spend time in an envi…

There's the white knuckle approach to life. Grinding through the pain. Alternatively, you can search for things you actually like.

In business, finding work that you like.

In fitness, finding workouts that you enjoy.

In health, finding foods you like that are good for you.

Lastly, you can't make people want to change. You can only guide them once they show that they want to change. This is different from wanting a result. Someone who wants to be more successful is very different from someone who wants to learn how to work more effectively. Focus on process over end goal.

Re: Follow boring advice

#52

Post by alexslobodnik »

derbOac wrote: post #41
smoyer wrote: post #22

Nope ... there are a ton of 30-somethings writing "easy" advice like this and bemoaning the ignorance of their twenties. I'm a few decades older yet and can tell you that I'm still learning and integrating new ideas into my framework of how business (and the world in general) work. Creating a simple idea is easy but think about how many counter-examples there are to just this one rule (and you can find 100k more simp…

My problem I run into with these sorts of things, and to some extent normative ethics, is that they frequently contradict one another in reality. So you might be in a situation, and one piece of the advice would suggest one course of action, and another would suggest the opposite, and there wasn't any way to reconcile them. I think they're well intended and can be useful to think about but beyond something like "thes…

Applying other people's rules (advice) to situations tends not to work out well. Using other people's advice to create your own framework and using that to live seems to work better.

Re: Follow boring advice

#53

Post by sgtnoodle »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #25
PebblesRox wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything is a feelings problem. This is a exaggeration of course, but I've been struck by just how many sticky problems have an emotional component. I have a tendency to ignore emotions in favor of (what seems to me like) the main content, but I limit myself when I do this. Enthusiasm, despair, excitement, fear - these are too powerful to ignore. But naming them and uncovering the deeper values they reveal helps me…

> To get rid of that I never use involves confronting the fact that I'm not a person. It's painful to realize that I'm not who I wish I was. My solution to these feelings is to remind myself that my hobbies don't define me, whether I do them a little or a lot. And it's OK to save some unused stuff until a season when I can use them. (Assuming that's not too far off.,)

I recently dusted off an ambitious hobby project I shelved years ago and "finished" it. In the three years that the project sat, my relevant skill set and the available open source software improved to the point that the project took days rather than months, and ended up better than I originally expected. It was very satisfying to pick up again.

Re: Follow boring advice

#54

Post by knuthsat »

throw1234651234 wrote: post #24
darkerside wrote: post #23

My favorite example of this is how to get stronger and healthier. There's no secret, and you actually don't have to do anything too extreme. Exercise regularly, drink water, don't eat too much, mostly plants, get lots of asleep, avoid drugs and alcohol. Now that I do so well with all that advice, I can't quite remember why that all sounded so hard or "boring" before.

1. Because you actually need protein to gain muscle mass, so there goes your "mostly plants" without a caveat about "vegetarian protein", which has its own set of problems. 2. Exercise regularly - what is regularly? What kind of exercise? You never had over-work injuries? Injuries from muscle / postural imbalances? Etc. I concede that most of this advice is available for free, but unless you have a GOOD coach, you wi…

I gained 25kg on a vegan diet through a span of 5 years. You just have to eat a bit more than comfortable but protein digestibility is a non-issue. Stuff that I ate - tofu, seitan, tempeh are very low processed soy/wheat products and can very quickly give you more than 200g of protein a day.

For me, the biggest problem was meeting caloric needs. It's very hard to get to 3000kcal+ eating non-processed plants.

PDCAAS, DIAAS or similar "bioavailability" measurements are standardized on pigs bowels and are targeted towards malnutritioned individuals that border on starvation or suffer from kwashiorkor.

As for weightlifting, you can do rounded back (inefficient form) deadlifts smartly (not overdoing the load) and get strong enough.

Re: Follow boring advice

#55

Post by andrei_says_ »

_zamorano_ wrote: post #5
amelius wrote: post #2

Author should explain this: everyone can follow boring advice, so why aren't far more people successful?

Because emotions rules. It doesn't matter that you know what you have to do, eat well, do exercise, how to prioritize, what's good for you and what's not. Unless you steer your emotions in the right direction, you won't be able to achieve anything, because resistance and stregth of will won't get you very far. And changing your emotions is really hard, because they're mostly formed in your youth, and doing so need a…

We think we make our choices rationally but in fact we don’t - they’re based on emotion and are mostly unconscious.

See George Lakoff’s work on cognition and decision making.

Re: Follow boring advice

#56

Post by pvaldes »

ceilingcorner wrote: post #12
amelius wrote: post #2

Author should explain this: everyone can follow boring advice, so why aren't far more people successful?

Eat less calories than you burn. Spend less money than you make. Boring advice, yet the majority of people are overweight and in debt.

People don't live in a vacuum. The first advice is simple but in the real life easily will spiral into "fight all the time against the partner that insists into overfeeding you" or "move to a less contaminated area free of substances mimicking hormones" or "drive more time to reach a better restaurant near the workplace and now you have five minutes left to eat".

"Spend less money than you make" can translate sometimes into "don't search for medical advice that you need right now and fall for scammers that offer cheaper fake solutions"

I'm not saying that those were not good advice but, well, sometimes things get complicated.

Re: Follow boring advice

#57

Post by afarrell »

tux3 wrote: post #9
amelius wrote: post #2

Author should explain this: everyone can follow boring advice, so why aren't far more people successful?

I like this question. Currently, it's rendered in gray font, and it has five answers. I think it's the sort of question that's annoying to think about. It's not a complex technical question with a clearly defined answer you can look up on Wikipedia. It's not even obvious where you should start if you wanted to answer. There is plenty of boring advice out there, but dispensing advice doesn't reliably help people. And…

It might not be the sort of thing amenable to measurement.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

Re: Follow boring advice

#58

Post by jodrellblank »

amelius wrote: post #2

Author should explain this: everyone can follow boring advice, so why aren't far more people successful?

Those things have other sides to them; "make something people want" means that you probably can't make the thing you want. If you want to make a text editor and people don't want that, you can either please yourself (fun) or do something you don't really want to do (useful to others). It's much rarer that the two things overlap, but I guess more powerful when they do.

"talk to your users" brings "you can't make the decisions" with it. Tech people love to talk about "lusers" and deride anyone who thinks differently as dumb sheep. If your users want the Office Ribbon and you hate it, are you going to build it? If your users hate the command line options are you going to change it or sneer at them to go back to babyworld and stop wasting your time?

"keep typing and don't die" means keep working when it gets hard, boring, goes wrong, feels unrewarding, competitors show up, people quit, your market dissipates, people are jeering at you and telling you it won't work, when your money is running low or your debtors are banging on the door, or you need to do a pile of admin paperwork, when you doubt yourself. "keep going" might be boring, that doesn't mean it's easy.

(cough) selection bias, lots of people want things for free, lots of people don't know what they want and just want a chat, lots of people grind for a long time and still get nowhere - consider how many other investors there have been over the past 70 years who tried as hard as Buffet and didn't become him because they didn't read the same things, come to the same conclusions, think the same way, have the same patience, or hit the same companies to invest in at good times, or were forced out for other reasons.

Re: Follow boring advice

#59

Post by RealityVoid »

_zamorano_ wrote: post #5
amelius wrote: post #2

Author should explain this: everyone can follow boring advice, so why aren't far more people successful?

Because emotions rules. It doesn't matter that you know what you have to do, eat well, do exercise, how to prioritize, what's good for you and what's not. Unless you steer your emotions in the right direction, you won't be able to achieve anything, because resistance and stregth of will won't get you very far. And changing your emotions is really hard, because they're mostly formed in your youth, and doing so need a…

I think there is also a difference between knowing and _knowing_ - as in internalizing the information and relieing on it. There are many things that have been taught in school, for example, but made little sense untill I got the tools to truely understand them and be able to play with them.

So rather than just facts, you have networks of facts and experiences that need to connect for things to make sense and you to truely know something.

Re: Follow boring advice

#60

Post by xupybd »

Speaking of ancient advice, I found this recently.

"13The lazy person [who is self-indulgent and relies on lame excuses] says, “There is a lion in the road!

A lion is in the open square [and if I go outside to work I will be killed]!”

14As the door turns on its hinges,

So does the lazy person on his bed [never getting out of it].

15The lazy person buries his hand in the dish [losing opportunity after opportunity];

It wearies him to bring it back to his mouth."

The link between fear and laziness is something I'd not realized until I read this. I thought my low tolerance for risk was wisdom but it was simply fear that lead to laziness. It seems that humans had similar struggles thousands of years ago.

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