“Buckle up bucko, this ain’t over till it’s over.”
The second in a series of bite-sized rationality prompts[1].
Often, if I’m bouncing off a problem, one issue is that I intuitively expect the problem to be easy. My brain loops through my available action space, looking for an action that’ll solve the problem. Each action that I can easily see, won’t work. I circle around and around the same set of thoughts, not making any progress.
I eventually say to myself “okay, I seem to be in a hard problem. Time to do some rationality?”
And then, I realize, there’s not going to be a single action that solves the problem. It is time to:
a) make a plan, with multiple steps
b) deal with the fact that many of those steps will be annoying
and c) notice that I’m not even sure the plan will work, so after completing the next 2-3 steps I will probably have to generate more steps (itself an annoying step), and do those ones too, over and over, until it is done.
There’s a lot of messy details inside the process of “figure out that plan, and continue to adjust it on the fly.” But, I find the specific move of “accept that I am in a prolonged, multi-step annoying process” to be very valuable.
Before I do that, every time I run into another annoying subproblem, not only is it object-level annoying, but it feels surprising, jarring. My brain reports “unfair”, even though that doesn’t really make any sense. (“What!? Again!!! ARRR! It’s not supposed to be like this!”)
It’s time buckle up, and get ready for a long, bumpy ride.
For me, “Buckling up” is basically a particular specialized kind of grieving. I had hoped I lived in the world where this problem was easy and I could get away with a short burst of effort. Alas, I do not live in that world. I need to let that hope go, and re-orient. I use the word “grieving” to acknowledge a certain weight to it. I think there is shared structure between letting go a loved one who has died, and letting go of a belief that a particular problem is easy.
It’s often kind of psychologically loadbearing to think your problems will be easy. Alas, sometimes, you have to find a different way to be psychologically load-beared.
So I shift my mental (and sometimes physical) posture to one that is ready for a prolonged marathon. I get ready to take breaks and pace myself.
I take a deep breath.
And then I get to work, thinking.
Some examples of the starting points:
Debugging a mysterious problem in a codebase. I’m flailing around making console.logs, hoping the problem will reveal itself, without making a plan.
Dealing with bureaucracy. Surely, it shouldn’t be that many steps to get a doctor’s appointment. Alas, not only is it more than one step to get the doctor’s appointment, I maybe need to get another one after that.
Navigating a social conflict. I keep trying to say the one phrase that’ll convince them, or smooth everything over. Alas, the social conflict is deep and gnarly and isn’t going away. Dealing with it requires modeling multiple steps out.
Building a complex new product. Sometimes this on a longer scale: surely my initial weekend hackathon prototype is basically working and I can just build the obvious things and ship it and sell it. Alas, my customer’s problems are more complex than I realized and I’m going to need to keep asking more questions and modeling new aspects of the situation and iterate significantly on my original idea.
What comes after the “buckle up” move depends on the situation, but often includes taking more breaks, thinking more strategically, and spending more time on “meta.”
Triggers
When is it a good time to buckle up? Sometimes structured-procrastination, or circling around a problem obliquely, is a more efficient approach to solving a problem (i.e. mull it over in the background, eventually realize the answer in the shower).
Moments I find particularly good to consider buckling up include:
When you’ve tried the same thing multiple times, especially with a “flailing” sort of feel.
When you feel surprised about something being effortful, multiple times in a row.
You just kinda of know in your heart that you’re not going to get this thing done without buckling.
You’ve tried mulling it over / taking a way / etc, and are still stuck.
It’s particularly important for it to get done quickly (even if background mulling would be more efficient)
Exercises for the Reader
The skill here is “notice when it’s time to make a difficult, prolonged effort”, and then shift into “okay, I’m ready” with as little feet-dragging as you can.
I don’t actually have experience purposefully practicing this skill. My guess is that to seriously practice it would involve remembering a situation where you dragged your feet for awhile before accepting “this is actually hard”, and then noticing all the little moments in between the first clue you could have noticed, and the final shift towards acceptance. (Essentially, the “Think It Faster” exercise for a situation that involved the “buckle up” move, which can take like 30-60 minutes)
Right now you’re probably, like, reading this blogpost on your lunch break or in the evening when you’re tired. If you want to get like 60 seconds of progress on becoming the sort of people who buckle up more smoothly/painlessly, I’d maybe try spending those 60 seconds:
Trying to remember some moment where you bounced around for awhile, before eventually switching to buckled up “okay I’m going to persist on this task” mode
Try to remember as many details about how the transition went as you can
...idk, let your brain mull it over a bit and see if anything bubbles up.
Writing it up
If you’re comfortable with it, I’d appreciate people who share their experience of attempting this exercise. (Both so I can see how many people actually attempted it, and what range of things came up when they did?).
Also, for bonus points: make a public Fatebook Prediction for whether this will turn out to have been a helpful blogpost for you in a year (maybe using the browser extension so you can paste the result directly into the comments here. See Fluent, Cruxy Predictions for some background conceptgs here)
- ^
This wasn’t my original “step 2”, but it kept coming up and seemed like it was worth making it’s own post.
Yup. This was something I probably didn’t figure out until my late 20s, probably because a lot of things came easy for me, and because if I was really interested in something, I would obsess about it naturally. Natural obsession has a lot of the same benefits as “buckling down”, but it’s harder to trigger voluntarily.
The thing that really drove the lesson home was advanced math. I realized that sometimes, making it through even a single page on a day could be a cause for major celebration. I might need to work through complicated exercises, invent my own exercises, learn fundamentals in a related branch of math, etc.
So I propose there are several valuable skills here:
Knowing when to buckle down.
Learning to enjoy being bad at a new skill and experiencing gradual improvement.
For certain goals, learning how to build consistent habits and accepting that real progress might mean at least 6-12 months of consistent work.
You don’t really mention <a thing that I think is extremely crucial> in this domain, which is that you do not have to (metaphorically) be an earthbender about everything. Other types of bending also exist. If you are not a native earthbender, you might be able to learn to do it (the real world does not have only one Chosen One who can bend all the elements), but as a meta-waterbender I personally recommend first looking around carefully, and trying to figure out how the most successful benders of your native element are doing it.
You do seem to see earthbending as maybe a “last resort” rather than the only way to do things, but it’s not obvious to me that it’s the correct last resort for everyone. The last resort of a successful airbender is probably more like “take even more steps back to see if there are any easier but more oblique approaches to this summit, or even other summits you’d actually rather climb”;
got more exposition on what you mean with the different elements in this context?
Sure; if it’s not obvious they’re from the universe of Avatar: The Last Airbender.
Earthbending is substantially about: facing things head-on, “just getting it done”, “buckling down” (though I suppose this can be different than “buckling up”), being unyielding, orienting around “grit”.
Waterbending is substantially about: Being flexible, responsive to the environment, and careful.
Airbending is substantially about: Freedom of movement and action, using an opponent’s strength against them (which in PvE looks more like “doing what’s easy and/or fun”), speed.
The other one is firebending, but I didn’t reference it and I don’t really understand it well enough to put it in the same terms; still, my best gloss attempt is that it’s about focused and kinda bursty / lower-endurance intensity.
In the universe there are (usually) only these four elements, and most benders are pure specialists / only physically capable of learning their particular kind of bending; the main character (the avatar) is the only person who can / has to learn all four. In my analogy these elements don’t really cover the space of motivational structures that well, and anyway people don’t have to be specialists.
Thanks! (I knew enough about Avatar to know what you wrote in your last paragraph, but the rest is new to me)
For reference, here’s Claude Opus 4′s summary of the styles:
EARTHBENDING Neutral jing—waiting and listening before acting. Direct confrontation when the time comes—problems don’t go away by ignoring them. Being immovable and unmoved, enduring through standing firm rather than through continuous output. Drawing strength from solid foundations and deep roots. Meet challenges head-on, but only after patient observation and understanding what you’re facing.
WATERBENDING The path of least resistance is often the most powerful. Push and pull, give and take—everything flows in cycles. Flexibility can overcome rigidity. Draw strength from external sources and community. Change is the only constant.
AIRBENDING Freedom through detachment. The leaf doesn’t resist the wind. Conflict is an illusion that can be sidestepped. Joy and play are valid approaches to serious matters. New perspectives emerge when you release fixed positions.
FIREBENDING Power comes from within—your drive, your breath, your life force. Act decisively from internal conviction and passion, maintaining intensity by continuously generating energy from within rather than standing firm. The sun gives life as well as destruction. Inner fire must be tended and controlled, not suppressed or allowed to rage wild.
I intended this disclaimer to at least touch on (what I think you) mean.
(I’m not really sure what you mean by “meta-waterbender” vs “airbender”. I guess to be fair I was also sort of confused by the distinction between water and airbenders in the show. I could see the distinction if I squint but they seemed least-different of all the elements)
I considered adding more extensive disclaimers. I didn’t do that for… uh, the maybe aggravating, maybe slightly-bad (but IMO not strictly bad) reason of “people don’t really comment on posts that get everything right and are super careful to disclaim everything appropriately”, and, uh, I selfishly/motivationally wanted more comments on my posts in this series so decided to lean in the direction of rushing it out the door less carefully.
But, I did just update the Triggers Section to make it a bit more explicit, and if you think there’s a better way of phrasing The Thing You Mean To Be Pointing At I’m interested.
I think I maybe mean to say a slightly different thing than came across, which makes sense because I was leaning heavily into the metaphor rather than trying to be very clear.
I think the triggers are definitely hints in the direction that buckling up might be the right move. Yet I also observe that, when I imagine the median or even 80th percentile person-explicitly-buckling-up-for-something-big, a big part of me wants to shake my head and be like “ah well, it was nice while it lasted” about their chances of doing a hard thing, especially an unusual hard thing.
This part of me is clearly wrong sometimes: My head would have shaken well off my shoulders if someone had told me-transported-to-1986, “Andrew Wiles is going to spend the next 6 years trying in secret solitude to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem”.
But also I think it’s clearly not entirely mistaken about such a person’s odds. If a person is a native “airbender”, i.e. they are deeply familiar with the “taking their situation lightly” stance, I don’t think I want to recommend that they take a sense of “welp, I guess I have to finally buckle up for this one” at face value, especially in the context of it being a last-resort for one of their most challenging projects or goals. It feels to me like such a person is more likely to succeed by (a) deciding to stop flailing, (b) retreating to a safe distance, and (c) reevaluating whether this is the path they really want to follow, while in connection with their sense of fun.
I’d be interested in some of the mental moves your thinking of as alternatives, and what triggers distinguish when it’s a more buckling-down-time than the-other-thing-benwr-is-imagining time.
(I realize a full version of this is asking to write your own sequence of rationality-TAPs, but, interested in a quick table of contents if you got it)
Also: the particular “buckle up” move I’m imagining is for things that are more like “1 to 16 hours of concentrated work”. For things that are like months or years of work, there’s some equivalent of “buckle up” but it’s enough of a different move I’d probably write a pretty different post about it.
@benwr oh I guess I did very specifically include a longer timescale example, so, uh, whoops. I do think there are fairly different flavors to the shorter term and longer term ones.
Yeah I can try to say some of them, though my sense of the crucialness here does shift on learning that you mean for this to be about hour-to-week levels of effort. I guess I may as well try to come up with element-bending-flavored ones since I’m in pretty deep on that metaphor here.
The biggest differences in which one I’d recommend as a “default last resort” depend on the person and their strengths rather than the situation.
The thing recommended for the airbender above, i.e. “retreat to a safe distance and consider if there’s anything that seems like a fun challenge instead of a grind”.
For a firebender: “Commit to doing it really hard for about [30 minutes]. See where you get. Wait [2 * 30 minutes] after that, and check if you feel energized or drained. If energized, repeat; if drained, [I don’t know; this is the one I have the least familiarity with]”
For a waterbender: Something like “Do naturalism to it”. “When you make good enough observations, you can’t help but make high-quality inferences” is one of my favorite quotes, and I think it applies especially well in this kind of last-resort setting.
Nod, those all seem like good moves.
I’m sort of torn between two more directions:
On one hand, I actually didn’t really mean “buckle up” to be very specific in terms of what move comes next. The most important thing is recognizing “this is a hard problem, your easy-mode cognitive tools probably won’t work.”
(I think all the moves you list there are totally valid tools to bring to bear in that context, which are all more strategic than “just try the next intuitive thing”)
On the other hand… the OP does sure have a vibe about particular flavors of problem/solution, and it’s not an accident that I wrote a thing that resonates with me with that you feel wary of.
But, leaning into that… I’m a bit confused why the options you list here are “last resorts” as opposed to “the first thing you try once noticing the problem is hard”. Like the airbender should be looking for a way for it to feel fun pretty early in the process. The “last resort” is whatever comes after all the tools that came more naturally to the airbender turn out not to work. (Which is in fact how Aang learned Earthbending).
((notably, I think I spent most of my life more airbendery. And the past ~2 years of me focusing on techniques that involve annoying effort is that the non-annoying-brute-force-y techniques weren’t solving the problems I wanted to solve.))
But I think the first-hand is more the point – this is less about “the next steps will involve something annoying/powerthrough-y” and more “I should probably emotionally prepare for the possibility that the next steps will involve something annoying/power-through-y”
Right, I think it just seems like doing emotional preparation that matches this description is a kind of earthbender-friendly / earthbender-assuming move, while an airbender-friendly move would be more like “notice and accept that you’d have more fun doing it a different way or doing a different thing; that flailing isn’t actually fun”. The effect is kind of similar, i.e. both earthbenders and airbenders should come away less-clinging-to-something, but the earthbender comes away less-clinging-to “the locally easy and straightforward things will work if I do them enough” while the airbender is less-clinging-to something more like “This is what I’d choose”.
Re the last-resort framing, I’m not sure why I said that exactly; I think it’s related to the vibe I got from the OP: Like, “if you notice that you’re not making progress, what do you do? Well, you could keep flailing or avoidantly doomscrolling, or you could [do the thing I’m suggesting], or you could give up in despair”; I think it feels like a “last resort” because the other realistic options presented are kind of like different kinds of death?
mm, okay yeah the distinction of different-ways-to-cling-less seems pretty reasonable.
What are earth and water benders? Is someone able and willing to paraphrase this with a different analogy?
He wrote a followup comment explaining here.
The link doesn’t work but think I know the comment you’re referring to but I found those explanations too vague to be useful. I’d really like just another analogy.
Are they saying that once one has realized that they need to buckle up that one can either face it head on (what does that mean? “just get it done”—it’s not getting done, hence the resignation to buckling up for a protracted process, how does this attitude change the completion or resolution of the problem?).
I’m really struggling to think of a real world situation where I can use this analogy to solve a protracted problem. It seems like you either have “freedom of movement” or you don’t—you can’t opt in. For example, if you’re in a hostile corporate take over the party with the most liquid capital likely has the most freedom of movement since they can outlast the other side… man I wish I had corporate takeover level cash...)
Reminds me of the post “Software Engineers Solve Problems”, which similarly is about buckling down as an attitude in software engineering, and how about everything in the problem domain is in one’s sphere of influence and responsibility.
I’ve been thinking about this mental shift recently using toy example - a puzzle game I enjoy. The puzzle game is similar to soduku, but involves a bit of simple mental math. The goal is to find all the numbers in the shortest time. Sometimes (rarely) I’m able to use just my quickest 2-3 methods for finding numbers and not have to use my slower, more mentally intensive methods. There’s usually a moment in every game when I’ve probably found the low hanging fruit but I’m tempted to re-check to see if any of my quick methods can score me any more numbers, and I have to tell myself “Ok, I have to try something harder and slower now”. It’s been interesting to notice when the optimal time to do this is. Certainly there have been games where I’ve spent far too long procrastinating the harder methods by checking and re-checking if any of the easier methods will work in a particular situation, and I end up with a poor time because it took me too long to switch.
I’ve also noticed this is a pattern when I’m looking for a lost item—it’s easy to get stuck in a loop of checking and re-checking the same few locations where you initially guessed it might be. At some point, you need to start tidying up and thoroughly checking each location, and then the surrounding locations, even places where you think it’s very unlikely to be. I see a lot of people (maybe even most people) follow this pattern, contining to check the same 3 locations far beyond the point where it would be sensible to begin checking other locations, getting frustrated that it’s not in one of the places it “should” be.
One thing I’d like to say is that it’s not just that for some tasks “buckling down” is the correct approach, it’s more about noticing when the correct time is switch from the low-effort quick approach to a high-effort slow approach. Most of the time it IS in one of the 3 locations you initially thought of. If you briefly checked them, it may genuinely be worth checking them again. But it’s also important to calibrate the point at which you switch to a slower approach. For finding lost items, this point is probably the point where you find yourself considering checking the same location for the third time.
I’m legit unsure if the title of this post should be the current one, or a more clear-at-first-glance one like “Buckling up for a lot of cognitive steps”. I notice when I imagine linking to this post in future posts I’d maybe rather it have a self-explanatory name. But the current one is so fun.