Mind-Manual

Bring a Bigger Hammer

Making money is a goal that cannot be successfully approached directly. There’s other such goals (such as grades) but I’ll stick to money. I’ll be bringing together the distinction between production capacity and production, incentive/extrinsic motivation and the importance of big hammers.

Let’s say you have a goal to make more money. Now, since you’re a hardworking productive person you start thinking of ways to get more money. After a bit you start to feel disconnected from the goal and from yourself because you don’t like the greedy person you feel yourself becoming. Perhaps you’ll also find that you haven’t made much money at all or improved your financial situation. Perhaps it’s gotten worse. Pretty common experience, it seems like.

Now, let’s say you decide that instead of trying to get money (the production), you try to improve the thing that gets you money (production capacity)–the value you deliver. Getting money is a consequence of value given/created for another person.

Here’s why you don’t wanna focus on getting money: 1. In the experience of a number of people (Steve Pavlina and myself included), it doesn’t work. 2. Extrinsic motivation reduces intrinsic motivation. Like playing guitar? If I start paying you for it, you’ll start liking it less and will likely play it on your own time less. It’s gotten bound up with the money, and if there’s no money, there’s no incentive to play for yourself.

Focusing on value creation and delivery, on the other hand, feels a helluva lot better. And here’s the thing: it works better by miles, too. My theory is that it works better because as you improve your production capacity, you get a bigger hammer to drive in this small nail. You can keep developing until a small tap crushes the nail right into the wood.

Grades are the same thing: you can try to focus on getting grades, or you can focus on becoming a better student. The second will work a lot better and you’ll have a lot less anxiety. And as you improve your ability to be a student, your grades will improve as a natural consequence. This is related to the idea that you don’t just get a certain goal (ie a certain amount of money or grades), you become the kind of person that gets that goal (ie a productive value-creating person, or a conscientious and effective strategy-using student).

BTW, if you’ve noticed the lack of posting lately, it’s because I’ve had the worst month of my life. Worse than the time I failed all my courses and worse than the time our house burned down…so it was bad. Good news though is that things are better but I’ll be very busy going forward, so posting will be spotty. Sorry.

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Why College is Supposed to be Hard

Cal Newport over at Study Hacks just wrote a good entry on what to do if your dream major turns out to be a nightmare. One of his helpful observations was:

“Observation #2: I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but college is hard.

A new major is like a new boyfriend. At first, it’s all excitement and possibility. Then you find out his feet stink. For a major, this metaphorical foot odor comes in the form of decreasing novelty and increasing amounts of hard work. It’s like a one-two punch to your motivation: at the same time that subject loses its freshness (because you’ve been studying it for a while) it ramps up the intensity of the work it demands (because upper level courses are harder than intro courses). This shift is unavoidable. Don’t mistake it for a shift in your fundamental feelings toward the subject.

The key thing to remember is that nobody loves a subject during the process of mastering it. Have you ever seen Rocky 4, where Stallone has to retreat to the mountains of Russia to prepare to fight Drago? He drags carts, and rolls boulders up a hill, and, in one of the most subtlety-crafted moments in cinematic history, he does inverted sit-ups in a barn while Pauly hits him in the stomach with a stick.

This sucked for Rocky. But it doesn’t mean that he didn’t respect the art of boxing or the dedication required for mastery. It’s just that the process of mastery itself is not consistently pleasant. This is probably the first time anyone in the history of education has ever said this, but your junior and senior year of college are a little bit like Rocky 4.

That’s partially why doing something you are actually interested in or enjoy is so important: you’re actually driven to master it. You may not consciously set that goal, but your actions such as reading about your subject matter on your own time are the actions of someone mastering a goal.

I added my observations to that post here:

“I wanted to add onto your comment about majors being hard. Though I doubt many of your readers feel this way, there are some people who believe majors should be easy. (Some people life should just be easy…but then it’d be so boring!)

To them I say, The sooner you let go of the expectation that it SHOULD be easy, the sooner you’ll do a lot better and stop procrastinating. If you’re always holding the expectation that there has to be an easy way, then you won’t wanna get started and your work will seem as it is being inflicted on you. If not by your parents, then perhaps by your prof or even by yourself. You will suffer from deep procrastination and the difference between what your belief of how the world is and how the world actually is will crush you.

I like to think of it a bit like this: your major and college SHOULD be hard. I’d rather live in a society where the rewards of higher pay, greater prestige, etc go to the hard working, rather than some arbitrary thing such as who your parents were or your body. I mean, those things have value, but I’d rather live in our society which has about a 0.6 correlation between intelligent (IQ), hardworking (trait conscientiousness) and creative (trait openness to new experiences) and success. I definitely don’t want to live in a society that arbitrarily and randomly hands out success.”

So, my advice? If you believe life should be easy or some aspect of it should be easy and you’re just not getting anywhere in that life area, give up that belief. Some aspects of life can become easy and you can make life much easier, sure, but making something easier isn’t necessarily an easy process. My experience is that most things that are worthwhile aren’t easy, but they’re often worth it! In fact, I try to strive to find things that aren’t easy (but not too difficult) because that’s where the most personal growth is. Of course, you may have just picked something that’s too difficult for you right now, so perhaps you can scale things back so you’re still improving and learning something without getting crushed.

Ironically, despite the initial discomfort of hard work, it’s a lot of fun! You can learn to love working hard, as long as you know that YOU chose it, that you WANT it and it’s for a greater purpose.

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