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.
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?
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.