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<h1 id="post-title">Barriers to Entry</h1>
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<hr />
<p><strong>Note</strong>: This is my 50th essay here. F*ck, it’s been fun! Lots more where all that (crap) came from.</p>
<hr />
<h1 id="ways-we-fail">Ways we fail</h1>
<p>Unincorporated ideas are basically worthless. A great memory for all the ideas you’ve come across is not nearly enough to help you implement the ideas in real life.</p>
<p>So, what is gonna help us get the Impact we want? How do we incorporate most (if not all) of our awesome ideas into our lives?</p>
<p>Or, to turn the problem on its head, why do we fail so miserably? Why can’t we just charge in and implement all the wonderful ideas we know of?</p>
<h1 id="will-power-failures">Will Power failures</h1>
<p>Let’s look at the problem in more detail (long time since I’ve said that, right?).</p>
<p>Say, we have 15 ideas for improving our life. Needless to say, we haven’t incorporated any of them. How do we best go about it?</p>
<p>The Will Power Depletion problem means that we can’t incorporate too many ideas at the same time. We will crash and burn. So, we want to take up only a few ideas at a time. So, a plan that takes on 8 different ideas at the same time fails before it even starts.</p>
<p>Not just that, we can’t ask too much of ourselves. Even if it is only one or two ideas, if we expect ourselves to do lots of anti-impulse actions, we will still fail. The aim seems to be to reduce the overall amount of anti-impulse actions we take. This means that pretty much all attempts at dieting and exercising will fail. It is a huge commitment with a lot of anti-impulse actions.</p>
<h1 id="the-hidden-gang-leader">The Hidden Gang-Leader</h1>
<p>If we want to reduce the total number of anti-impulse actions we take, couldn’t we just take out ultra-small actions from each of the 15 ideas and then execute them? That shouldn’t drain our Will Power too much, right? Surely, we’ll have improved in all those areas after some amount of time, right?</p>
<p>Nope. And that brings us to the second major player on the Akrasia scene - <strong>Motivation</strong>.</p>
<p>Why would you want to do all those small actions? You’ll take ultra-small actions and you’ll get ultra-small results. Is that gonna set your ass on fire? Will you wake up the next morning looking forward to doing more of these ultra-small actions?</p>
<p>Humans need to see the results of their actions. They need to get feedback so that they feel a sense of progress. Else, to your mind, it feels like you’re just frittering away your precious energy. It won’t see any big results from those ultra-small actions. You bet it’s gonna stop giving you any more energy in that area. You will no longer be motivated to take action. You will procrastinate.</p>
<p>So, these seem to be the biggest factors so far: Will Power and Motivation. And Will Power seems to be a major factor when we are going <em>against</em> our impulses.</p>
<h1 id="case-studies">Case studies</h1>
<p>As a first approximation, let’s try out different values for these two variables. “Strong Impulse” means that there is a powerful impulse which opposes your goal.</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Strong Opposing Impulse + High Motivation</p>
<p>Eating healthy and exercising a lot (for sports people and bodybuilding enthusiasts). First of all, it’s not like they <em>don’t</em> feel the urge to eat crap. A chocolate chip cookie by any other name would be just as tempting.</p>
<p>They just care <em>so much</em> about their physical fitness that they are able to overcome the challenge. They may make sure that their house is clear of crap food so that they aren’t tempted. And note that even the most advanced of bodybuilders, etc. seem to allow themselves “cheat days” or “cheat meals” where they can eat any crap they want. This seems like some sort of pressure release mechanism, suggesting that they too feel the urges of eating unhealthy food.</p></li>
<li><p>Strong Opposing Impulse + Not Quite High Motivation</p>
<p>Not taking drugs, not eating unhealthy food (for most people), not surfing the web / checking your mail / doing stuff on Facebook. These constitute some of our biggest failures of all time.</p>
<p>Compared to the impulse (surfing more posts/videos online, taking the drug), the alternative is just plain boring. NOT surfing the web?! Go to hell. Boring. Facing life without having drugs to take the edge off? Anxiety-inducing. Where are my cigarettes?</p></li>
<li><p>No Direct Opposing Impulse + High Motivation</p>
<p>Programming (for me), or studying - It is no trouble at all.</p></li>
<li><p>No Direct Opposing Impulse + Not Quite High Motivation</p>
<p>Sleeping on time (for me) - It doesn’t seem to be too much of a problem for most of the world’s population (suggesting there isn’t a strong impulse against it) but I don’t feel like going to bed early!</p></li>
</ul>
<p>The categories aren’t cast in stone, of course. A beginner Bodybuilder might struggle with his diet as he keeps giving in to impulses. A beginner programmer may just lose hope in view of the f*cking complexity and obtuseness of most programming languages, and just do anything else but work on some program. Conversely, SPK may get motivated to go to bed early one day and wake up at 7 f*cking am. (Yay! 7 am today! I rock!)</p>
<h1 id="reptile-dysfunction">Reptile Dysfunction</h1>
<p>I’m gonna assume that your impulses are not gonna change anytime soon. It could even be biological. Oily food and sugary food are not gonna go out of style. Drugs are not gonna be less addictive (in fact, they’re only gonna become <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html">more and more addictive</a>). Members of your preferred sex are not gonna become less attractive to you soon.</p>
<p>It seems that these desires are mostly driven by the <em>reptile part</em> of our brain. These serve some ancient purposes for us and are pretty f*cking strong. The more “human” parts of the brain were only developed later and don’t have quite as much say.</p>
<p>There are general techniques which we can use to increase our Will Power - aka overcome our impulses at less cost. They work by strengthening the modern parts of our brain, mainly the pre-frontal cortex and stuff. Cool. That shit will be indispensable. More on that later.</p>
<p>Also, I’m guessing that there are only a finite amount of direct impulses, for our purposes. There’s the obesity and healthy living problem. There’s the drug thing. And, with modern technology, there’s the addiction to constant stimulation. So, if you’re fighting against any of these, it’s an uphill battle for sure. Not impossible, but sure as hell not a walk in the park.</p>
<p>Fortunately, most of our ideas probably don’t have a strong impulse against them. If you want to get better at math or programming or <a href="./The-Great-300-Word-Experiment.html">essay-writing</a> or “thinking more rationally” (whatever that means) or shortening your To-Do List or testing yourself rigorously or most of the ideas I’ve written about so far… there isn’t really a <em>direct</em> anti-force. Yes, there are distractions and other more shiny, tempting stuff you could be doing, but there is no specific demon you’re fighting, unlike the obesity and drug problems.</p>
<p>So, if we regard our impulses to be more or less stable, and our ability to directly overcome them to be more or less fixed, then the only thing we can affect is motivation.</p>
<h1 id="all-you-need-is-motivation">All you need is… Motivation</h1>
<p>Cool. So, now we focus our attention only on ideas that aren’t strongly opposed by our impulses.</p>
<p>Which means that we fail by not having enough motivation for working on those ideas. Remember our examples - people who love programming get themselves to code for long periods without any trouble, whereas most beginners stutter. It is about the differing motivation levels. Ditto for studying. Ditto for going to bed early.</p>
<p>To really test whether motivation is the key, let’s see what difference it makes. Person A has a lot of “motivation” for doing X. Person B doesn’t. Assume that they are at the same skill level. For example, they’re both in their first year of Computer Science at college. Who do you think will end up doing more programming over the year? Most likely A. What could be the cause? Remember, there is no difference between them except for their motivation level.</p>
<hr />
<p>Or, to give an even more stark example, take somebody who doesn’t have any motivation for doing something, say, practicing playing the keyboard everyday. Hence, he procrastinates like a bitch on the task. He never does it. Then, one day, he hears about this awesome music director who is kicking ass and who is just as young as he is. F*ck! If that guy can do it, so can I, he thinks. And he starts practicing for more than an hour everyday.</p>
<p>What happened there? Nothing else changed. His Will Power level didn’t go up or down. It can’t have been his upbringing or whatever, cos that shit was doing nothing for him a week ago. We have to conclude it was the new-found motivation that made the difference.</p>
<hr />
<p>Therefore, we need some reliable, impactful way to jack up our motivation levels.</p>
<p>Note, though, that it isn’t about motivation in isolation. It is about motivation in comparison to the indirect impulses and distractions you face. Even the best programmers I know can procrastinate by playing games or surfing the web or whatever. It happens. Distractions can destroy any motivation, if they are powerful enough. There aren’t direct impulses stopping you from programming or playing the keyboard, but they are inviting you to waste your time elsewhere.</p>
<p>So, we need ways to reduce the force of these indirect impulses as well.</p>
<p>Increasing our motivation levels sustainably for the ideas we care about, reducing the force of the indirect impulses that can distract us, and increasing our Will Power in general - we need techniques for these if we want to avoid failure.</p>
<p>Can we solve these individual problems? And then, can we put them all together so that we implement great ideas in our life and reap the benefits?</p>
<p>(<em>to be continued</em>)</p>
<div class="info">Created: June 6, 2014</div>
<div class="info">Last modified: August 6, 2015</div>
<div class="info">Status: finished</div>
<div class="info"><b>Tags</b>: hard problems, Will Power, motivation</div>
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