I'm gonna go ahead and call bullshit. Enjoying something usually comes after hating it. Did you love beer the first time you tried it? Coffee? Sushi? Programming? etc...
Forget self improvement
41–50 of 61 posts
Re: Forget self improvement
#42"Maybe you aren’t supposed to bother with the tedious stuff. Perhaps the reason you haven’t done it yet, is that you weren’t meant to. " I don't like being meant to do anything, I choose what I work on and falling back to "well maybe I wasn't meant to" is using magical thinking and silly escapism to avoid a simple truth: You. Are. Lazy. And. Procrastinating. Here's what I suggest to everyone who gets discouraged by s…
I think this author's point was more of a person that would find working on a business more interesting but instead is painting right now and hating every single day that they have to put brush to canvas. Some people find certain sets of activities more interesting than others. If I were a professional farmer, I would not enjoy it very much; but there are many people that would. Similarly, there are people that would find developing or testing software to be the most boring job they'd ever seen ... and yet I enjoy it.
Re: Forget self improvement
#43I mostly agree with the author's message that we spend far too much time trying to "improve" ourselves through knowledge-seeking, rather than simply doing . However, simply "doing what you love" ignores the reality that our level of interest and passion waxes and wanes, and sometimes willpower is needed to pull us through those times where we're waiting for our feelings to "catch up" with what our mind knows to be tr…
"man's want for eternal significance - that desire to be known long after he is dead" That's something I've never understood. What does it matter whether you're known after you're dead? You'd never know anyway since you're dead, and you couldn't derive any benefit from it since you're dead!
People fear being forgotten. That their life had no significance or impact on the world at large. Some people even believe that you live on through the collective memories of those that knew you and those that you influenced.
Re: Forget self improvement
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that's really the author's point. I think his point is that when you find something you love, you will forgive the little aggravations and just power through them, because they are part of this activity that you love. You find yourself loving the aggravations as much as the achievement, so that it's the process that pulls you along. I'm debugging a double-free in a C library right now. I have basically…
> Yet many runners (not I) get a high from the process I think it's within the grasp of anybody. You just have to learn to enjoy the pain running (or any other workout) brings. It sounds perverted but it does help to approach exercise with such mindset. Now, how to convince yourself to enjoy it, is an interesting question. For me, the realization that we (as animals) were meant to run much (if not most) of our waking…
Even games consist of work. If they don't they tend to be rather boring.
I think it's not good for humanity to be forced to things, because it prevents them from learning to love them. As an example everyone loves to read books unless they are for school. Everyone loves to read stuff on Wikipedia unless it's for university and everyone loves to solve puzzles unless it's to make money. Well, or you learn to carry over that love.
Seriously, I think all these "get people interested into math/science/engineering" things wouldn't be necessary if one of the first experiences wouldn't be to be forced to do it, forced to do lots of boring homework, to sit still in class listening to the teacher, preventing you from being outside.
I think the only reason I am into computer science is because I never really had it in school.
(And now I am studying CS and suddenly history and languages are interesting as hell)
Re: Forget self improvement
#45I remember my Aikido club in Uni. At the beginning of every year, we held welcome tea with flashy demonstration to attract freshmen. The demo always looked so good that we often got ~40, 50 new members easily. By the end of the third months, can you guess how many new members stay? On average, 3, fking 3 out forty something new members. Why is that so? Because the first 3 months are boring. You stretch and learn to roll. That's it. And it sucks, you look like a fish out of water, awkwardly trying not to hurt yourself. But the three who endured all that and stayed, they became permanent members and almost all went on to become black belts few years later.
What I want to say is that loving something is hard work and usually the initial period is the hardest. If you don't grind your teeth to overcome this, you will never find what you love.
Re: Forget self improvement
#46This is fucking bullshit. In the words of Jake, sucking at something is just the first step to being kinda good at something. Often when you are bad at something, you don't enjoy it, often when you are good at something you still don't enjoy it, but the ability to self-discipline, to get good at something despite not enjoying it, translates to power over oneself. If we all just gave up because we didn't enjoy shit in…
+ 1, complete BS article, the author seems to have a very naive understanding of what self-improvement is and what it's benefits are. We can also use self improvement proven techniques to get at the next level that we aspire. PS. I'm obsessed with Self Improvement and I've grown a lot using those techniques.
Agreed, the author attacks a strawman and then prescribes the most trite cliche in all of self-help: "do you what you love and the rest will take care of itself". Its anti-advice.
I've had essentially the same goals and dreams for over a decade, and still grow more deeply fascinated by the month. But I'm not getting any younger, old enough that I can no longer expect that things will naturally fall into place. That I too often find myself compulsively reading HN at 3pm and ahem navel-gazing at 3am, instead of "moving my feet" down the path of progress, is not due to a lack of love or inherent drive. Rather, its the steep learning curve against a background of distraction which disrupts "flow". Has for years.
I wish I hadn't thought so cynically of self-help when I was younger. But its only recently that I've found insightful any particular resources. "The Willpower Instinct" audiobook is readily available and highly recommended, and BJ Fogg's free program at tinyhabits.com complements it well. The lift.do app complements both (daily dont's can track your will-not-power). Also, the Pomodoro Technique is a good no-nonsense alternative to GTD and other complex productivity systems.
One last thing I read somewhere and keep in mind, was a study which showed that focusing on the positive outcomes of not doing [bad habit/thing] is more effective at changing behavior than fearing the anxiety and guilt felt after doing [bad habit/thing] (which was actually found to be counter-productive as a preventive technique).
Re: Forget self improvement
#47I kind of read it as this: in light of all the self-help "do the work" type discourse that's been flying around the internet/HN, maybe think about how much time you're spending reading that sort of stuff. What does that tell you?
Re: Forget self improvement
#48"I play tennis for a living even though I hate tennis, hate it with a dark and secret passion and always have."- Andre Agassi What if the things you are good at are not the things you love? What about the opposite? It is too complex to boil down to 'do what you love'.
Your quote reminds me of some Go trivia:
"... [Cho Chikun] was asked by a Dutch reporter why he loved Go so much. Cho replied 'I hate Go'. He continued saying that it was too tiring and tense for him. This led to his habit of ruffling his hair or constantly moving about." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cho_Chikun
There's a glimpse of this in "The Master of Go". The author indicates there are different kinds of Go players—one kind, like Go Seigen, a light, bold, self-assured type that play every move as if they have perfect knowledge that it's the best one possible; the other being a dark type that always seem ill at ease, uncomfortable, questioning every move they make and pouring over their decisions for hours afterwards, like Minoru Kitani and current prodigy Cho Chikun. Strangely, the book brings up this dichotomy and never really classifies the main character, Honinbo Shusai, into one or the other category, mainly implying that he is somehow glacially slow, relentless and insatiable at the same time. Good book.
Re: Forget self improvement
#49"On the other hand, you might consider simply finding what you love, and letting the rest take care of itself."
damned if this isn't the mantra of pretty much every self-help/self-improvement guru out there. And in writing this, the article basically goes back on its own premise.
Re: Forget self improvement
#50The process is the purpose