111–120 of 137 posts
This is something I've noticed in myself and I'm glad there's research to back this, although this is an open secret to those who do master self-control. I've spent the last three to four years working on self-control and discipline after I hit rock bottom in my life and realized I had no self-agency. For me, having greater self-control led me to ensure I can focus on providing value where it matters in my life, and…
This article mentions a study that found almost no correlation between people who self-report having high self-control, and people who actually do well on tests measuring self-control: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/1/15/16863374/wi... The most likely explanation is that people who report high self-control are really experiencing less temptation.
Is this a distinction without a difference? In the original qualitative write-ups for the Marshmallow Test, they described the children using all sorts of distraction strategies to basically make themselves forget that there's a tasty marshmallow sitting right in front of them. Maybe this is all that self-control is - having enough self-awareness (and valuing your future self highly enough) to direct your attention e…
Enjoyed this tidbit from the bottom of the article: “To motivate their employees, organizations often want employees to set stretch goals – goals that are challenging and hard-to-reach. However, we found that setting a stretch goal and not meeting it makes someone look less powerful than setting an easy goal and surpassing it,” said Rady School PhD student Shuang Wu, the first author of the paper.
The practical benefits of a limited versus highly ambitious short-term goal from the outset include an avoidance of 'feature creep' where you're tempted to add more nice-to-have features partway through, more self-confidence that you can achieve the goal with a little effort, and a clearly-identified decision point upon achieving the goal, where you can decide whether to continue on with the project for more ambitious goals, or satisfyingly call the project complete.
In educational psychology, this is known as the "zone of proximal development" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_proximal_development), which I've also heard as called "i+1 planning."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The word "official" is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting there.
It's here used as shorthand for "not merely a social illusion constructed by the person it is acting upon" Some power derives from charisma, force of personality, or social fluency. But lots of power, from the perspective of the people it is acting on, derives from or relies on nothing of the sort, and merely requires that consequences can be enacted for failure to cooperate with the power dynamic at play This narrat…
We could call a language a social illusion. There's nothing red about the word red. And the distinction we draw between "earth" and "sky" is not one that the universe appears to use in its operation. Language does, however, require us to negotiate symbols, their meanings, and the consequences stemming from them. Like in how I rejected your definition of "official" with a rationale which you may attempt to overcome, accommodate... or just walk away from. And like in how we have structured our interactions so far as a contest of truths with bold and uncompromising assertions, when the option remains available to switch to a search for truth with tentative and attackable statements.
It's exactly with the same with governments and other organizations, all based on language as they are. We make them up. We make up rules for making them up. Occasionally someone hits someone else with a big stick. But although the stick is real, the reasons why we do things, and the reasons why we believe we can do things with these consequences or those, are things we all work together or in opposition to establish. "Official" included.
IMO simply striving to gain power or money is easier than to achieve greatness and mastery, in general. Mainly because one can lie their way into power and money, countless examples of that both at a local level and global level. Now, mastery requires the opposite of lying and pursuing easy to achieve goals. It’s the hardest path because frustration is constant, and it requires one to keep stretching the limits of th…
This helps give me words to understand my mixed feelings about an old post I found on a language learning forum recently, about a person who shared an ambitious goal that appeared unrealistic to achieve on their proposed timeline of six months. The person aimed to start studying as a complete beginner with a language and achieve a 'C1 level' certification by that time (this is an advanced exam that evaluates for fluency in a spoken debate on a scholarly topic, thorough comprehension of spoken debates on the radio, and the ability to write a timed persuasive essay with a limited number of flaws on a nuanced topic).
The responses to the post at the time were largely discouraging. On the one hand, I quietly agreed from personal experience with the other users that the goal simply wasn't feasible for most people: it would have been ambitious (but doable) to employ the same stretch of time to go from the B2 level (the level just below, which is sufficient for immigration to major countries that used the language officially) to the C1 level. But on the other hand, I did feel sympathetic toward the idea of the person setting an ambitious personal goal. The person even tried to make this concrete by including a plan of intense hours of tutoring and television watching per week. The post was a year old when I read it, so I checked the person's user profile to see if they reported the outcome. But the person never gave a written update (neither a post, nor a comment, nor an edit), though the account was active with recent unrelated comments.
My conclusion is that it's best to be supportive of people with ambitious goals to better themselves, but it's most practical to draw a distinction between goals in the short, medium, and long-term. Ambitious goals for self-betterment on any of these timelines ought to be celebrated. But there are risks with short-term goal that skirt too far outside of realism: this can cause someone to push themselves too much to the point of burnout and quitting (it's unclear, but possible, that this might have happened to that person). In my week-to-week life, I've personally seen beginner's burnout happen with overly-eager novices in martial arts.
A set of attainable short-term goals in service of ambitious goals over a longer timeline would be more sustainable. But if one wishes to pursue an ambitious goal in the short-term, that ought to be okay too—as long as the individual understands the burnout risks upfront, to lower the odds of abandoning their goal if they fall short.
This article mentions a study that found almost no correlation between people who self-report having high self-control, and people who actually do well on tests measuring self-control: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/1/15/16863374/wi... The most likely explanation is that people who report high self-control are really experiencing less temptation.
Is this a distinction without a difference? In the original qualitative write-ups for the Marshmallow Test, they described the children using all sorts of distraction strategies to basically make themselves forget that there's a tasty marshmallow sitting right in front of them. Maybe this is all that self-control is - having enough self-awareness (and valuing your future self highly enough) to direct your attention e…
Funny you mention this, because I have the personal experience to answer your question, yes there is a distinction. I've told the story here before, but I'll tell it again. As a teen / young adult, could eat as much food as a wanted and burn it all away. A daily food intake might be a sandwich and chips for lunch, 2-3 full bowls of cereal and milk for an afternoon "snack". Dinner, with seconds. And then depending on the evening, cookies, chips, cracker and cheese or icecream for an evening snack. I left high school on the "needs a few more pounds" side of the weight scale. And that ability to eat that much food (and the appetite to back it up) never left. But the burning of the calories did. As I got older, weight kept climbing. Oh sure, I did the "put less food on the plate" thing. I did calorie counting. Even managed to lose some weight doing it. A whole 30 pounds at my best over an agonizing year. Every day was a constant battle with myself to look at the goals of where I wanted to be and fight every fiber of my being to not eat more food. I was hungry all the time. And it never stuck. No matter what I did I couldn't keep up with it.
And I assumed it was a lack of self control. A lack of will power. I assumed I just needed to try harder. And try harder I did. Time and time and time again. Nothing. Then recently I started a medication, with a side effect of reducing your appetite. Suddenly, I'm losing weight with ease. And I learned something interesting. The first week, I was convinced I was having anxiety attacks. Like clockwork every day, around 6 hours after taking the meds, my stomach would start knotting up. I'd start feeling this weird feeling like something was wrong and I needed to do something about it. And then it hit me, ~6 hours after taking the medications was also lunch time, or dinner time. I was getting hungry. And what was novel was realizing I'd never NOT been hungry my entire life since I was a teenager. I thought I was having anxiety attacks because I had never once felt the feeling of not being hungry turning into hunger. I stopped eating when I physically couldn't eat any more food, or the food ran out, never because I was satiated by the food. "Getting hungry" again was just the feeling of being stuffed going away. But I was always hungry.
Since starting the medication, I've lost close to 50 pounds. And it's SOOO much easier than it's ever been in the past. I can eat a normal meal, and just be satisfied with that. I can think to myself "I'm hungry, I should get a snack", and then follow that thought up with "I'm about to have lunch/dinner in an hour, I can wait" and actually follow through on that. I can stop thinking about that snack. I can count my calories for the day, see that I'm at my limit and just make the decision to stop eating any more food. Heck there are days where I have to make the conscious decision to make and eat more food because I'm too far under my limit for the day, but I've just not been hungry that day.
So yes, I'm putting less food on my plate, just like I could and did before the medication. But let me assure you that doing the things to "avoid temptation" is a hell of a lot easier when your body and mind aren't actively working against you.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's here used as shorthand for "not merely a social illusion constructed by the person it is acting upon" Some power derives from charisma, force of personality, or social fluency. But lots of power, from the perspective of the people it is acting on, derives from or relies on nothing of the sort, and merely requires that consequences can be enacted for failure to cooperate with the power dynamic at play This narrat…
A single person, by definition, can't construct a social illusion. "Social" requires a society, which means at the very least two people. "A social illusion constructed by the person it is acting upon" is nonsense. We could call a language a social illusion. There's nothing red about the word red. And the distinction we draw between "earth" and "sky" is not one that the universe appears to use in its operation. Langu…
This has a kind of silly sleight of hand I've unfortunately come to expect in psych research. This seems to try to study power while controlling for... power? It can definitely be interesting to see how the personality one projects can influence the social dynamics of a peer group (with the usual caveats that studying people in laboratory conditions for something iterated and evolving like social relationships is fam…
The word "official" is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting there.
having self-control could be a result of having higher IQ: being better able to figure out the future results of current behavior. And "higher IQ leads to power" (on average, population statistic) is not counterintuitive.