Becoming the person who does the thing
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Becoming the person who does the thing
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Re: Becoming the person who does the thing
#2I had a similar experience as a teen, where somehow I had never considered a sport or the gym because “that was not what people like me did, I was the nerdy one”.
I didn’t really ever think that explicitly, or say it aloud, it was just an obvious implication on my mind.
Turns out the only thing separating me from someone who is good at sports, or being buff, was doing it frequently and not half assed. Applies to most of life when it clicks.
Btw, if anyone’s reading this and feeling motivated:
>It began slowly, but I began. Knee press-ups to start, later adding assisted pull-ups.
>If anyone was watching, it would have looked stupid. A grown man barely able to push himself off the floor. But I showed up and put in my reps, day by day, week by week, in the privacy of my bedroom.
That works, but if you haven’t done any work before you’re better off joining a gym. Precisely the advantage is regulating weight more discreetly, and equipment helps for that.
Re: Becoming the person who does the thing
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Re: Becoming the person who does the thing
#4[deleted]
Re: Becoming the person who does the thing
#5I had a similar experience as a teen, where somehow I had never considered a sport or the gym because “that was not what people like me did, I was the nerdy one”. I didn’t really ever think that explicitly, or say it aloud, it was just an obvious implication on my mind. Turns out the only thing separating me from someone who is good at sports, or being buff, was doing it frequently and not half assed. Applies to most…
"that was not what people like me do"
Is this kind of thinking normal? Kinda like looking into the world and going like "i must be like that specific thing over there"?
Re: Becoming the person who does the thing
#6Some years ago I bought a little pamphlet with a few mental exercises by Rudolf Steiner, known for the Waldorf school system.
One of them was about building a habit. You find a small meaningless thing to do, it must have no purpose at all, and then you do it once every day for as long as it takes to become a habit, probably a month or two. E.g. you could fill a glass with water and throw it out.
I did the exercise (I would kneel for a few seconds when taking a bath) for a couple of months, and I think it worked for me. I've recently used the same tactic to build a useful habit.
Now building a new habit is not necessarily the same as changing an old habit.
I also found out that kneeling changed my perspective. I could think about a situation with some level of tension, kneel, and then my perspective on the same situation would be more humble and appreciative. YMMV.
Re: Becoming the person who does the thing
#7Beliefs do not exist, like the words we use. What we have are neat, retrofitted explanations that foot the bill. Sportscasting about those actions that never used words to get there, they just seem to.
Pretty fascinating the retro marriage of words and tech gets us here, to a kind of Gutenberg stage of restriction.
Words and narratives are low-bandwidth compression for meaning. It's simple. How did we get stuck here? We were lazy Pleistocene kids, and lazy Pleistocene kids we remain.
Think hard now, the words are being used to extinct us. How did we get stuck here? Math? Status? Money? a combination of all these.
Look at the status drive that pretends we have beliefs in this post. Read it carefully. Do we have beliefs, or do we simply have actions (neural syntax)?
Debate me, don't just downvote me, that's proving my point.
Time to rethink all communication.
Re: Becoming the person who does the thing
#8You can summarise the whole post by the meme video of Shia LaBeouf with his "Do it!" talk.
Re: Becoming the person who does the thing
#9In 1948 Ashby wired four control units together and made a device he called the "Homeostat." What made it special is that it was "ultrastable" - if you changed the dynamics of the system, or plugged it into a completely new system then after a period of adaption it would relearn how to keep its outputs between tolerances.
Ashby gave the example of an autopilot - if you flipped the yoke controls so that up was down and down was up, a traditional autopilot would go into a positive feedback loop and crash, but the Homeostat would adapt to the new dynamics.
He postulated that this was a model for some systems in the brain and perhaps all learning (he wrote an entire book about it) and there's some evidence he was right. If you put goggles on someone that flips their vision upsidedown, they adjust after a few days... and have to readjust again when you take them off! (This was a real experiment.) YouTuber SmarterEveryDay found he could learn to ride a "backwards bike," but it destroyed his ability to ride a normal bike. You may have experienced this first hand if you've ever played a video game where the controls were flipped temporarily: it's disorienting, sure, but you quickly adjust.
Because of these phenomena, I think Ashby was right about the Homeostat being a useful model of the brain. It explains why so many apparently contradictory diets "work" - simply making a major changes resets the homeostat in your brain where it may settle into a better calibrated equilibrium eventually.
It implies a simple strategy: are you happy? If yes, we're done. If no, change something, and return to the question. (I've seen this as a flowchart online somewhere but can't find it now.)
Re: Becoming the person who does the thing
#10> Like all childish thinking, it contained some truth. Physical fitness is less important than spiritual, emotional, and mental fitness.
One kind of growth I love to see is when someone becomes less confident in their opinions over time. A lot of people “grow up” by just being super confident and stubborn about new ideas.