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No More “Insight Porn”

jakobgreenfeld.com

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Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#141

Post by bheadmaster »

ycombinete wrote: post #2

Jonathan Haidt speaks about something similar in The Happiness Hypothesis . Epiphanies can only take you so far, before their novelty wears off and they lose the power to change your behaviour. This is why self-help book readers tend to keep reading self-help books. 4 weeks after finishing one they need another hit of epiphanies. Even the lamest examples listed in the OP article can probably give someone a boost in p…

> Epiphanies can only take you so far, before their novelty wears off and they lose the power to change your behaviour.

Funny, I've experienced the same thing with philosophy.

In my teens, I've had this existential crisis where the world just didn't make sense to me. Eventually I have discovered philosophy and started reading it, and for a while the world made sense to me. However, every epiphany I've had about the world only kept my enthusiasm up for a while - after some time I'd still know all the things I learned, but they just wouldn't seem as important as before.

The world made sense... But I just didn't like the way it made sense. That's when I realized that the problem is me, not the world, and that the problem cannot be solved by pure knowledge - there is an animal inside me which doesn't give a rat's ass about all my theories of why and how, and requires a different approach.

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#142

Post by amelius »

MOARDONGZPLZ wrote: post #28

I got super lucky. I started a company and didn’t really have any meaningful traction. I was about to shut it down. Walking out of the grocery store one night after work, I passed by my former manager when I was an intern. We got to talk for about 30 seconds, mentioned my company, she asked me to email her. I did, and that very quickly led to my first big customer which makes me about double what a FAANG swe would ma…

Question: did you get the idea for your startup while doing your internship?

Perhaps the advice is: do more internships :)

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#143

Post by Ensorceled »

bambax wrote: post #59

I'm confused, it seems insight porn is this guy's business. His article even ends with this: > If you’d like to get more honest strategies and proven frameworks for winning in life and business, then simply join my free newsletter here. Is he simply trying to trash the competition?

This article actually provides a framework for deciding if a productivity tool is useful, by running an experiment, or at least identifying experiments, on the advice provided to see if it works for you.

They clearly highlight as "insight porn" stuff that doesn't provide actionable advice.

At the end, they invite you to apply this new "is this useful, not useful or not even bad" decision process to their own services/products.

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#144

Post by Banana699 »

Swizec wrote: post #86
danaris wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can increase your "luck surface" by doing certain things ....and your chances of being able to do those things (without severe risk of poverty and homelessness) are increased dramatically by having been lucky enough to be born wealthy, or at least upper-middle-class.

> ....and your chances of being able to do those things (without severe risk of poverty and homelessness) are increased dramatically by having been lucky enough to be born wealthy, or at least upper-middle-class. While this is true, it also isn’t helpful. Play the cards you have, not the cards you wish you had. You always gotta start somewhere . Might as well start with what you’ve got and go from there.

I find remarks like GP useful, to put into perspective just how mind-boggingly unfair life is. This is a different frame of thinking ("headspace") than a self-improvement seeker is in, which explains the downvotes and the "boo"ing.

Imagine a civil engineer walks into the office and asks a colleague about the plans for the new housing project, and the colleague replies that the concept of a "house" is a rich and socially constructed idea that both reflects and influnces the social zeitgeist in subtle ways and is intimately tied to notions of community and private property. They are not wrong, and the civil engineer would probably learn new things if they let the colleague finish instead of laughing them off or firing them, it's just that there is this implicit shared context in the workplace, that "house" is not a subtle idea and our job is to plan and build them not talk about their history or philosophy, that the colleague is violating or ignoring.

This is a useful analogy to understand why a remark like GP's, very useful and very true and would drive you into despairing madness and perhaps the brink of suicide if you think about it honestly and deeply, is not welcome in a thread like this. There is an implicit context in the comment section (formed haphazardly in a distributed non-explicit way, unlike that of the analogy) that you have a bunch of latent opportunities that you can take for granted and build off them to new frontiers, and that those opportunities are more or less a "critical mass", you can make them into whatever outcome you want given a fair amount of work. This is non-trivial for a huge portion of humans, and yet the self-help context always assumes it without proof, and any pushback is interpreted as doomer nay-saying or unhelpful pedantry.

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#146

Post by MilnerRoute »

danaris wrote: post #64
bombcar wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Get lucky" is always the key - however, you can increase your "luck surface" by doing certain things (for example, you couldn't have gotten lucky if you hadn't started the company, nor if you hadn't bothered to talk to people).

> you can increase your "luck surface" by doing certain things ....and your chances of being able to do those things (without severe risk of poverty and homelessness) are increased dramatically by having been lucky enough to be born wealthy, or at least upper-middle-class.

Someone once seriously proposed making the final determining decision for who gets into Harvard be based on...a random drawing. (From an oversized pool of qualified applicants.)

The idea was students wouldn't go through the rest of their life thinking they'd prevailed in a meritocracy, and had earned and deserved every bit of their future success. They'd always have to acknowledge: some of it was pure luck.

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#147

Post by danaris »

bombcar wrote: post #114
Sebb767 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why this is getting downvoted. Yes, inequality exists and it sucks, but you still need to make the best out of what you have. Also, a lot of people seem to far overestimate the work and risk involved. This doesn't help really poor people, obviously, but the amount of people with sufficient money, backing and time that complained they'd start a company if they "only also had $20 million backing from their…

People don't want to admit it involves hard work and luck - they'd rather think that Bill Gates got to where he is because of his parents (even though there are thousands/millions with similar parents and backgrounds who didn't get even close). Because one line of thought leads to: "I couldn't do anything, the game was rigged from the start" and the other leads to "I didn't do as much as I could have done."

But the true answer lies between the two.

The game is rigged. But that merely makes it less likely that someone who's on the wrong side can succeed, not impossible. You do have to do as much as you can, with what you're given, regardless of what it is.

The real key, though, is that this tells us what we, as a society, need to change. If we genuinely value entrepreneurship and innovation, we need to create a universal safety net that lets people take risks, try things, and fail, again and again, without ending up destitute, because we know that is what leads to eventually creating a successful business.

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#148

Post by recyclelater »

layer8 wrote: post #136
anotheruser092 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "How do you build discipline if you’re undisciplined?" Willink's answer is "Just do it." Very charitably, he suggests you should do things you ought to, even if they are painful and you don't want to do it. This actually has some backing in cognitive-behavioral therapy by starting with action first before motivation. Uncharitably, it's not nuanced if there are deeper reasons why you should actually consider to not…

You need to have discipline in the first place to “just do it” consistently. For those who lack enough motivation, which is the situation the advice is supposed to address, I don’t see how it helps. If they were able to “do it” consistently despite lacking consistent motivation, they wouldn’t have a problem in the first place. I guess that for some people, being told “there’s no way around just doing the things even…

Plenty of actionable advice. Start small, build habits, work your way up. Jordan Peterson (love him or hate him) talks about making your bed and cleaning your room. Then build off this and tackle something a little bigger. Small personal goal that takes a year or more of regular practice (language, physical fitness, writing, anything you highly value). If you can’t manage to build a habit of this, then maybe being disciplined and getting the benefits of it won’t work for you. Nothing wrong with that.

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#149

Post by pbalau »

startupdiscuss wrote: post #60
MOARDONGZPLZ wrote: post #28

I got super lucky. I started a company and didn’t really have any meaningful traction. I was about to shut it down. Walking out of the grocery store one night after work, I passed by my former manager when I was an intern. We got to talk for about 30 seconds, mentioned my company, she asked me to email her. I did, and that very quickly led to my first big customer which makes me about double what a FAANG swe would ma…

Note: you had to be kind and nice enough for the former boss to care enough to: - ask you to email - read it and understand what you do - follow up and spend the company's money edit: simplicity

And the "get lucky" transforms in "build a network"
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