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Piggy-backing off of this to add the things I find useful: - Mindfulness medidation, same as you. It is hard and when you first try it feels like you are faili
by afarrell 8y ago
Piggy-backing off of this to add the things I find useful:
- Mindfulness medidation, same as you. It is hard and when you first try it feels like you are failing. But Yoda is wrong: trying is very valuable and builds the mindfulness muscle.
- Website blocking software like SelfControl.app and Freedom.io —- some might ridicule these as being a crutch, but that is a silly reason not to use them. If you are trying to change your diet, don’t keep cookies on your desk.
- working with a therapist to improve my self-confidence — one reason I was distracted so much is that I didn’t have a strong belief in my right to decide how I spend my time. Combined with mindfulness meditation, I now have a much stronger internal voice that says “I had decided I wanted to relax and read this long history article so that is what I’m going to do.” Or “this bit of life-administrivia is really frustrating and scary, but I do need to do it and have set out this time for it.”
- A belief in “setting myself up for success” in tasks — when I feel like I don’t know how to do something, it is much better to trust that intuition, dig into it, and flesh it out into an explicit list of resources to acquire rather. If instead I say “I should believe in myself* and buckle down and do the work.” Then my sense of not doing the right thing will stick with me. For instance, I am someone who is much more effective at building things when I know how my tools work.
* (This is perhaps very idiosyncratic to me, but I absorbed from a young age that I could do anything I set my mind to. When you don’t know how to set your mind to things, This turns out to be a less-than-useful belief, especially in response to a not-well-articulated need for resources. Example: I once tried to write code against an api whose docs were in Chinese —as a non-Chinese speaker. )
- Sleep, Food, Exercise — I am a sack of meat. The thinking bits of me are also made of meat. Thinking meat, if you’ll believe it. In order to think well, I need to give my meat what it needs on a habitual basis.
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One interesting thing about being more mindful and less distracted is that it reveals some underlying discomforts that I was distracting myself from. For instance, I didn’t have any friends as a child and I just don’t know how to lead engaging conversations or how to keep conversations going when they fizzle out. But now that I’ve repeatedly noticed that, I can make it a goal to find ways to learn it (suggestions very welcome) and confidently pursue that goal.
- sundvor 8y agoI also find it hard to concentrate. Exercise is a big one (needs to be just the right amount though), and so is sleep. I struggle with chatter noise in my work environment being the thing that derails me, so a pair of noise cancelling headphones is an absolute must to quiet the mind; currently waiting for the new Sony one..
- teekert 8y agoWell, for starters, you seem to have learned a great deal of useful stuff about life, stuff that takes years to accumulate. So to me you already seem like someone I could have engaging conversations with. That said, I have no trouble talking to strangers but a colleague of mine once said he found "The Tao of Badass" [0] a useful book. It didn't fix the fact that he was always completely disinterested in what others did with their life. Which was funny because I always greatly enjoyed talking with him and he had a great way of speaking about his own Asperger syndrome, I always felt like the doctors had told him he was almost human, in a way he was almost super human, reminded me of Data from star trek, he sort of objectively tried to understand what he was missing and I really didn't understand that he felt he was missing something. I miss that colleague/friend. [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13457225-the-tao-of-badass https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13457225-the-tao-of-bada...
- gregknicholson 8y agoFrom [0] above: > The Tao of Badass by Joshua Pellicer > Josh Pellicer is a leading expert on female psychology, body language and the art of seduction. His seduction system, The Tao Of Badass, is the best-selling seduction system in the World. Well this is creepy as fuck.
- teekert 8y agoHaha, my colleague told me it was all about getting a conversation started and keeping it going. He didn't really mention it was targeting women. Anyway, I saw him using it on men as well, asking open questions like: "What was the nicest things you did this weekend?" People rave on about what they like...
- afarrell 8y ago> creepy as fuck This is probably true. And there is indeed a lot of attracting-people-to-you advice which fails to respect people, much less their bodily autonomy. Certainly, calling a book which calls itself "Badass" doesn't strike me as particularly conducive to building healthy relationships. The cover also doesn't do it any favors. ------------------------------------------- However, I think it is an error to equate creepiness with trying to better understand how sexual attraction works and how to be more successful at the social skills involved in sexual situations. Creepiness is fundamentally about a lack of respect for someone else's autonomy and interests. Trying to get better at social skills isn't creepy. If someone is born into circumstances where society expects them to play the active role in sexual situations, and they want to have a healthy sex life, then they shouldn't feel shame for wanting to better understand how to play that role. It is certainly better for someone like that to work toward their goal of a fulfilling sexual/romantic relationship than for them to feel trapped and lonely. I think it would be a better world if there were lots of attraction learning resources which weren't full of misogynistic rubbish and successfully taught useful mental models and mindsets.