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Procrastination and the fear of not being good enough

swapnilchauhan.com

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Re: Procrastination and the fear of not being good enough

#191

Post by ordu »

protoman3000 wrote: post #9

From own experience I can say: Forget about trying to change this from the perspective of thoughts. Cognitively understanding that you should "just" stop worrying about what other people think about your work might not bring you far. Instead, realize that anxiety is a bodily phenomenon and as such needs to be addressed with the body. That means: Breathing techniques, exercise etc.

> Instead, realize that anxiety is a bodily phenomenon and as such needs to be addressed with the body. That means: Breathing techniques, exercise etc.

It is not a bodily thing, just there is a bodily feedback loop: you feel anxious, it leads to a bodily reaction, your senses register it, you feel more anxious. Sometimes dealing with the body and breaking the feedback loop is enough, but for me personally it works for 10 minutes or so. If I hadn't overcome the psychological reasons of my anxiety, I feel myself anxious.

> Cognitively understanding that you should "just" stop worrying about what other people think about your work might not bring you far.

May not bring or may bring. It depends... People are different, so different methods are best for them. I deal with things mostly in a psychological ways. My general method for anxiety is to make my anxiety into a fear, by finding the thing that makes me anxious (this step is standard way of psychotherapists to deal with anxiety). Then I imagine that the thing happened and how will I adapt. Mostly I find out that this thing is not as bad as I perceive it, it cannot kill me, it cannot hurt me physically, I can deal with associated social costs, or if I cannot... For example sometimes I can reframe the situation: my goal is not to send the rocket to the Moon (with 10% chance of a success), but rather to do a test launch, to find out how my rocket perform (here we get ~100% chance of a success).

I need to accept the possibility of a failure, and understand that the possible failure is not terminal, it is just possible and acceptable setback. People tend to dramatize and say that some failures are not acceptable, but if people really had a possibility of an unacceptable outcome (lets say it is a painful death for all involved and their families) then the most rational thing to do would be to stop the activity that could lead to this outcome. When I allow myself to buy the dramatization I face anxiety issues.

Re: Procrastination and the fear of not being good enough

#192

Post by hshshshshsh »

slibhb wrote: post #163
hshshshshsh wrote: post #79

I suffered from this. The issue is the ego. Ego has a lot of ideas about itself and others. Ego has such high opinion about itself it only can do great work. Which prevents it from doing anything. It's kind of a way of avoiding failures. Because failures will break the grant ideas about himself OP has created. I accidentally went through a spiritual awakening which diluted ego. I have no problem in doing any kind of…

It's hard to get more ironic than farming upvotes on the internet talking about how you transcended ego or whatever.

Never claimed I transcended ego. I said my ego was diluted. Of course I have ego. It's just much more less than I used to have.

Re: Procrastination and the fear of not being good enough

#193

Post by hshshshshsh »

vasco wrote: post #140
hshshshshsh wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you experience this or are you guessing? Because I think you are thinking this again through ego. I don't have a thought that I appreciate sunset when I see one. The sunset looks magical. There is a shift in experience. Before watching sunset was like watching in 420p. Now it's 4k. The consciousness is heightened. You only see the sunset. You don't think of old memories of sunset. Or random events from past or th…

The fact that you have this grandiose idea about yourself that you transcended ego and are beyond basic judging of others or of yourself and so on doesn't give you pause to say that maybe that's a bit naive and ego-centered? How can someone declare themselves done with this? It's like someone telling me they achieved a state of never having a bad thought again, I know they are lying.

I was just saying what I experienced. Previously I used to judge everyone. It has significantly reduced now. I used to be heavy introverted with people I don't know or don't interact with. Now I talk with pretty much anyone because there is less judgement. It also frees me up because I also don't care about whether they judge me.

Also never claimed I don't have bad thoughts. I did say I suffer from a lot of existential questions. But yes. Bad thoughts about day to day issues have significantly been reduced.

The inner monologue have been lowered on volume. Previously it was at 100 now it's at 4 or 5.

Old memories from past don't show up to affect the current movement.

All this means a higher allocation of bandwidth in consciousness for current movement. There is nothing grandiose here

I still meditate. I still listen to teachers like Adyashanti. I think there is a lot of work remaining to be done.

Re: Procrastination and the fear of not being good enough

#194

Post by DoingIsLearning »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #176
masspro wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe they just wanted to share something connected to the article

It’s a signalling problem, a 31 day old pseudonymous account is pretty always going to enjoy vastly less credibility than say a 10 year old account with hundreds of thousand of karma. If the latter wrote the above comment, nobody would question if the real intention was farming for this or that, since it would make practically no difference for the account holder or the passing reader.

Stupid/naïve question is there even a business model for karma farming in HN?

I get that twitter/reddit/YT/insta/TT is relevant for product placement, stealth marketing, political PR, propaganda etc. But is there economic value in HN accounts?

Other than the occasional YC startup pitch most of the content here is for the purpose of sharing info/tech discussion.

Am I missing something? Or are people just online 'community' jaded?

Re: Procrastination and the fear of not being good enough

#195

Post by hshshshshsh »

Gud wrote: post #179
MichaelZuo wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a signalling problem, a 31 day old pseudonymous account is pretty always going to enjoy vastly less credibility than say a 10 year old account with hundreds of thousand of karma. If the latter wrote the above comment, nobody would question if the real intention was farming for this or that, since it would make practically no difference for the account holder or the passing reader.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to suspect the account with hundreds of thousands of karma points to be the karma farmer?

You should always be suspicious of anything that you have not experienced yourself.

I used to care about HN karma a lot before spiritual awakening. Had 2 accounts with 2000+ karma before. It was one of those things that helped in building a grand ego for myself.

Now I just prefer to post from randomly created HN accounts.

You can probably come back a few months later and see this account to be no longer active.

Re: Procrastination and the fear of not being good enough

#196

Post by hshshshshsh »

uoaei wrote: post #168
slibhb wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to get more ironic than farming upvotes on the internet talking about how you transcended ego or whatever.

Moreso than riding a moral high horse while violating etiquette and explicit guidelines?

Spiritual awakening ego is a real thing :)

I don't think anyone go fully egoless. Maybe with exceptions of people like Ramana Maharishi.

It's just the ego is diluted. There are varying levels of ego one can experience. I think a reduction in ego makes you more present and do things with less judgments. And be more open to new ideas.

Re: Procrastination and the fear of not being good enough

#197

Post by globular-toast »

irjustin wrote: post #130

Something that's not really answered in this post but maybe in another one is - why are they writing? I used to have the exact same ambitions, blocks and difficulties writing (you can see on my blog). Turns out, I just don't like writing. It's something that many smart minds extol as a great practice, which I 100% agreed, but once I gave it a serious go for myself, just didn't really enjoy the journey, product nor th…

Yeah, I'm with you. Whatever you do, you need to like it. So many people try to start new habits like writing, reading, exercise etc, but if they don't like it, they will invariably stop before too long.

I think the first thing people need to do if they want to start a habit is find a way to like it. If you want to exercise most, then cycle to work. As you'll enjoy it more than being stuck in a metal box you've now made exercise a habit. If you want to read more, you need to find books you like and ways of reading them that you like (paper, ereader etc).

If you want to write more you need to first find a way to write that you like. You might like writing with pencil and paper. Seriously, try this. But you might prefer a WYSIWYG word processor. You need to try it. Then find something you enjoy writing. Fiction? Blogs? A private journal or memoir?

Bottom line is if you don't like something you won't keep it up.

Re: Procrastination and the fear of not being good enough

#198

Post by Etheryte »

hshshshshsh wrote: post #99
Etheryte wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Happy to hear that worked out for you, that sounds like a great place to be. What facilitated the change though, or how did that happen? Was there a catalyst?

Sorry. I can't write it down because I think what I did was reckless and stupid and I don't want to give any ideas in a high visible thread like this. For a lot of people this is triggered by something unexpected happening in life which breaks the narrative one has been building their entire life. You can search for Spiritual Awakening and find a lot of examples. Buddha at the Gas Pump is a great podcast to listen to…

That's completely understandable and entirely fair. Given enough time and context, no one is private on the internet, even under a pseudonym, so it's good privacy hygiene to not spill too many sensitive details about your life. Whatever it was, glad it worked for you!

Re: Procrastination and the fear of not being good enough

#199

Post by hshshshshsh »

jcul wrote: post #120
rsktaker wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now I don't have a story in which I live on. Lately, I've had this intuition that we change by sort of tricking ourselves. The mechanism for that change is by settling on like this one kind of character, like someone out of a movie that’s playing in your head, and acting like that person. Then, as time passes, we simply forget who we were before we started acting and the only way we know how to act is as this one c…

In my humble opinion, the experience is more one of realizing you've been acting and not having to identify so much with the character you are playing. It's hard to describe, because you're still doing the act, just some part of you realizes the unimportance of it. And some of that realization shines through in the act itself, in your character.

Yes. That is well put!

Re: Procrastination and the fear of not being good enough

#200

Post by snozolli »

throwmesomewher wrote: post #189
snozolli wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry. I can't write it down because I think what I did was reckless and stupid and I don't want to give any ideas in a high visible thread like this. It's infuriating that you write all that about how enlightened you supposedly are, then conceal the manner by which you got there. This just feels like trolling or a creative writing exercise.

It's pretty sad you can't respect this person's privacy. Instead of demanding answers it's possible to curiously examine where your experiences might be lacking, because then you might figure out where to look. Many can experience significant stress or trauma naturally leading to heightened physiological and psychological awareness, it's not a stretch to imagine that could give them a better understanding how the sel…

It's pretty sad you can't respect this person's privacy.

There's nothing sad about it and, judging by GP's writing, the concern isn't privacy.

I didn't ask for your opinions on how GP supposedly got this experience, I asked GP. His post comes off as outright fiction or condescending virtue signaling. So does yours, and nobody even asked for your input.

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