Intrapersonal comparisons: you might be doing it wrong.
Nothing weighty or profound today, but I noticed a failure mode in myself which other people might plausibly suffer from so I thought I’d share it.
Basically, I noticed that sometimes when I discovered a more effective way of doing something—say, going from conventional flashcards to Anki—I found myself getting discouraged.
I realized that it was because each time I found such a technique, I automatically compared my current self to a version of me that had had access to the technique the whole time. Realizing that I wasn’t as far along as I could’ve been resulted in a net loss of motivation.
Now, I deliberately compare two future versions of myself, one armed with the technique I just discovered and one without. Seeing how much farther along I will be results in a net gain of motivation.
A variant of this exercise is taking any handicap you might have and wildly exaggerating it. I suffer from mild Carpal Tunnel (or something masquerading as CT) which makes progress in programming slow. When I feel down about this fact I imagine how hard programming would be without hands.
Sometimes I go as far as to plan out what I might do if I woke up tomorrow with a burning desire to program and nothing past my wrists. Well, I’d probably figure out a way to code by voice and then practice mnemonics because I wouldn’t be able to write anything down. Since these solutions exist I can implement one or both of them the moment my carpal tunnel gets bad enough.
With this realization comes a boost in motivation knowing I can go a different direction if required.
You have recreated the ancient Stoic mind-hack called negative visualization. The phrase is googleable, if you want to find out more.
I just tried it and feel worse than ever, because I started to fear these things actually happening, instead of what I usually do, and suppressing these fears. I imagined my wife and daughter dead, me suffering from a debilitating illness etc. and got scared because I always fear these things but usually manage to suppress the fears or numb them with alcohol. Instead of appreciating what I have today, it made me less able to suppress the fears of losing them tomorrow. I am never able to enjoy anything unless I can convince myself it lasts forever, and a combination of compartmentalization, willful cognitive dissonance, wishful thinking, positive visualization and some numbing alcohol helps usually half-convince myself, so I am usually halfway happy. Good enough. I don’t know if other people work that way… if I am eating a brownie, I have to convince myself it is an infinitely large brownie and I will never have to stop eating it, or else I could not bring myself to bite into it, because I would feel too guilty for every bite making it smaller and thus robbing my future self from enjoying that brownie.
My experience is almost entirely the opposite of yours. Counter-examples are valuable. Thanks.
On an tangential note—my and my mother’s wrist pain dramatically reduced after replacing the regular mouse with a ball mouse. I felt additional benefits when I got a touch screen laptop which largely eliminated mousing. My mother’s wrist pain additionally reduced after regularly doing negative-pull-ups. (I did the pull ups too, but didn’t notice any pain reduction—although my grip strength seemed to returned to what it was pre-pain and possibly higher.)
Also, they sell funny keyboards now that radically alter typing ergonomics (some even divide the keyboard into two parts so you can put hands far apart) which I’ve never used, but want to try to get rid of the last little vestigial twinges of pain I sometimes get.
Maybe you’ve tried everything, but if you have not my experience leads me to believe that wrist pain (especially due to excessive programming) is one of those things where if you really try multiple workarounds, you can eventually eliminate or mitigate it, and it’s very much worth doing considering how much wrist pain disincentives work.
(Counterpoint—my wrist pain flared up when I was in college and doing a lot of assignments at once on a little laptop, and was so acute that the ulnar styloid was red and warm to touch when I started frantically trying ways to fix it, so this might just be regression to the mean and/or minor reductions in computer use since then)
I knew someone in college without hands. He was still able to type and use a mouse with his wrists. He even had a cellphone. Practice can fix a lot of shortcomings.
“Now, I deliberately compare two future versions of myself, one armed with the technique I just discovered and one without. Seeing how much farther along I will be results in a net gain of motivation.”
Isaac Levi one of the founders of formal epistemology does something similar called “Mild Contractions”. From the title of one of his books
“Mild Contraction: Evaluating Loss of Information Due to Loss of Belief”. His epistemology constructed from decision theory is very advanced if not the most advanced.
http://www.amazon.com/Mild-Contraction-Evaluating-Information-Belief-ebook/dp/B00DZO8P4G/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1424401748&sr=1-1&keywords=mild+contraction
Interesting tie-in, thanks.
Incidentally, how cool would it be to be able to say “my epistemology is the most advanced”? If nothing else it’d probably be a great pickup line at LW meetups.
I noticed a similar tendency in myself a while back—whenever I saw somebody who was both succesful and young, I’d do a mental calculus in my head to see if I could “catch up”, and I’d get bummed if I couldn’t (similar to you comparing yourself to a you that had more advantages).
I adopted a similar mindset of “wow, if they can do it that fast, look how much time I have to become successful”—essentially seeing that yes, I could get much further faster if I used their techniques.
This book solved my crippling carpal tunnel syndrome, FWIW.
It’s worth a lot, I’ll look into it.