To clarify, I want these things for each specified self:
What you want is suboptimal. You should want different things.
Work’s results compound over time. This is most obviously true for money, but it’s also true for other things—your position in the workplace, and (most importantly) your acquired knowledge and skills.
You should want for your past selves to have worked very hard—achieving things that will compound over a great deal of time. Assuming you’re relatively young, you should want for your current self to still work pretty hard—compounding still matters—but you can spend a little more time having fun. In comparison to your past, you can enjoy an unprecedented level of goofing off, while spending only a little more time in absolute terms (and time is the ultimate currency). And so on, into the future.
What you want is going to be stamped out over and over into the future, so it should produce a desirable result. “I want immediate gratification now, and maybe I’ll work hard later” is going to result in endless goofing off, since you’re always trying to get your future self to do the work, then when you become that future self, you punt it further along. “I want to have worked hard in the past, pretty hard now, and slightly less hard in the future” is stable, with the right attitude—if you start slacking off or wasting time, you’re not sticking to the curve.
Using myself as an example: when I was younger, I worked super hard to learn C++ (it is not the easiest language in the world to learn, that’s for sure). Now I am way more powerful than before, and acquiring further power gets easier and easier (in C++ and related areas like OpenGL—it’s easier to learn new things with a solid foundation). If I had goofed off in college more than I did (and I spent a lot of time posting on forums and playing video games) instead of teaching myself the language, I wouldn’t have gotten my current job, and I’d be bored out of my skull in grad school somewhere, doing who knows what and living like a monk on an income to match. Ugh. Now, this wasn’t an explicit plan of mine (I did it because I thought it was awesome, and it was more interesting than my classes), but it’s become The Plan and I’m going to stick with it.
I agree—as long as awesome is understood as shorthand for a more precisely defined concept.
Here’s an even better way to put it: Do interesting awesome things now, especially those that will increase my ability to do interesting awesome things in the future. When I was in elementary through high school, I thought science was awesome, so I learned a lot of it, but it never really went anywhere. (If I had intrinsic aptitude for physics/chemistry/etc. it probably would have.) I also thought programming was awesome, but I was never really effective at it (QBASIC is a monkey-man language). When I graduated from high school, I made a serious conscious attempt to learn a real language—and I found that (a) I really liked being effective at creating imaginary machines, and (b) the more I learned the more effective I was. So I’ve been riding this feedback loop ever since.
Monetary payoff is nice, but for me, the ultimate motivator is increasing my ability to precisely imagine something, write it down, and have it work perfectly on the first try.
The issue with that line of thinking, while I think it is the optimal result, is that you have some degree of control over your future self, in setting up binding or non-binding systems for you to follow in the future. But you have no control over your past self, only your present and some control over your future. So now, you have to think of yourself as the soon to be past self, and your future self as your present self. That then goes against the authors original goal, because then you will be working forever, as the gratification is always in the future.
What you want is suboptimal. You should want different things.
Work’s results compound over time. This is most obviously true for money, but it’s also true for other things—your position in the workplace, and (most importantly) your acquired knowledge and skills.
You should want for your past selves to have worked very hard—achieving things that will compound over a great deal of time. Assuming you’re relatively young, you should want for your current self to still work pretty hard—compounding still matters—but you can spend a little more time having fun. In comparison to your past, you can enjoy an unprecedented level of goofing off, while spending only a little more time in absolute terms (and time is the ultimate currency). And so on, into the future.
What you want is going to be stamped out over and over into the future, so it should produce a desirable result. “I want immediate gratification now, and maybe I’ll work hard later” is going to result in endless goofing off, since you’re always trying to get your future self to do the work, then when you become that future self, you punt it further along. “I want to have worked hard in the past, pretty hard now, and slightly less hard in the future” is stable, with the right attitude—if you start slacking off or wasting time, you’re not sticking to the curve.
Using myself as an example: when I was younger, I worked super hard to learn C++ (it is not the easiest language in the world to learn, that’s for sure). Now I am way more powerful than before, and acquiring further power gets easier and easier (in C++ and related areas like OpenGL—it’s easier to learn new things with a solid foundation). If I had goofed off in college more than I did (and I spent a lot of time posting on forums and playing video games) instead of teaching myself the language, I wouldn’t have gotten my current job, and I’d be bored out of my skull in grad school somewhere, doing who knows what and living like a monk on an income to match. Ugh. Now, this wasn’t an explicit plan of mine (I did it because I thought it was awesome, and it was more interesting than my classes), but it’s become The Plan and I’m going to stick with it.
Here is a similar old comment of mine.
It sounds like the rule you’re following is “Do interesting awesome things now”, and all this other stuff about payoff is tacked on post facto.
Mind you, I’m not saying this is a bad thing.
I agree—as long as awesome is understood as shorthand for a more precisely defined concept.
Here’s an even better way to put it: Do interesting awesome things now, especially those that will increase my ability to do interesting awesome things in the future. When I was in elementary through high school, I thought science was awesome, so I learned a lot of it, but it never really went anywhere. (If I had intrinsic aptitude for physics/chemistry/etc. it probably would have.) I also thought programming was awesome, but I was never really effective at it (QBASIC is a monkey-man language). When I graduated from high school, I made a serious conscious attempt to learn a real language—and I found that (a) I really liked being effective at creating imaginary machines, and (b) the more I learned the more effective I was. So I’ve been riding this feedback loop ever since.
Monetary payoff is nice, but for me, the ultimate motivator is increasing my ability to precisely imagine something, write it down, and have it work perfectly on the first try.
If were to be one qualia which wasn’t a shorthand and was actually a fundamental ontological entity then I would certainly hope it was the ‘awesome’.
The issue with that line of thinking, while I think it is the optimal result, is that you have some degree of control over your future self, in setting up binding or non-binding systems for you to follow in the future. But you have no control over your past self, only your present and some control over your future. So now, you have to think of yourself as the soon to be past self, and your future self as your present self. That then goes against the authors original goal, because then you will be working forever, as the gratification is always in the future.