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One idea that changed my life is stop believing that other people have changed their lives based on ideas. The only way of change is by habit.
by mif 3y ago
One idea that changed my life is stop believing that other people have changed their lives based on ideas.
The only way of change is by habit.
- haswell 3y agoIdeas and habit change are rather intertwined. Habit change is itself just an idea until someone chooses to actually do it.
- nequo 3y ago> The only way of change is by habit. That’s a compelling idea. Maybe I’ll adopt it and get into a habit.
- aik 3y agoOne category of idea is a tool-in-a-toolbox idea. Many on this page is of that type. A lot of ideas in economics is this, for example. They become thinking tools that are easily synthesized into the brain as they are super easy conceptual ideas. So as you go about your day and come across a problem, your brain can pull from that toolbox to better solve the problem. I love sites full of wisdom like this. Sometimes there’s a tool buried deep in my toolbox that my brain forgot I had and this brings it back to the surface. And sometimes there’s a new tool I can grok/incorporate in seconds. And inevitably there will be a tool I don’t care about or agree with and simply discard it. Big win for very minimal investment of time.
- jrm4 3y agoThis is so important. Over the years as someone who's constantly trying new note-taking mind mappy things, interacting with my own thoughts in the past, it took an embarrassingly long time to realize that one of the the fundamental differences between me and the computer is that I require multiple writes. (The other is that graphy mind-mappy tools on the computer are often pointless, because this is the thing that human brains are WAY BETTER AT than the computer. What the computer is good at is "perfect recall of specifics in the form of words")
- mdp2021 3y ago> me and the computer is that I require multiple writes Remarkable in times in which we study "one shot learning" for machines. Edit: incidentally, this human detail reveals precisely what seems to be crucially missing in machine learning, current stage: ideas do propagate change through internal elaboration, in an organic process - ideas fine-tune models, through internal work.
- Mezzie 3y agoOne of my life-changing ideas was "work with yourself instead of against it when possible." I also require multiple 'writes', so anything important is written or displayed somewhere that I see it multiple times a day.
- gagege 3y agoI very much disagree. Some of the biggest changes in my life were driven by the reading or hearing of a few words which suddenly made everything click. These moments led to huge behavior changes.
- kortilla 3y agoSuch as?
- oh_sigh 3y agoWhat's the point? What one person needs at one point in their life is very unlikely to be what another person needs - it might appear banal or unintelligible to another.
- nequo 3y agoIt would be interesting to hear grandparent’s perspective. We learn from the experience of others. Otherwise, schools, best practices, or forums like HN would be completely useless.
- californical 3y agoFor me personally, I read a blog post about motivation — and a quite silly one at that. I was young and struggled a lot with ADHD and motivation in general. I had a hard time in school because I just physically couldn’t work on an assignment. I’d set it down in front of me and stare at it, unable to start. I had kinda decided that I wasn’t good at those sorts of things, which made it harder. But I found this random post online one day which has some ideas about trying to do small annoying things for no reason, to train your brain to be better at doing hard things. The blog gave an example: go on a walk, but go out of your way to take on a pointless task. Like at the beginning, set out to touch 50 flowers. Then go on your walk touching flowers. When you get to the end, you’ve gotten practice doing something that you didn’t want to and which was a bit annoying. But now you’ll have a bit more confidence to do something else in the future. I got in a habit of taking on these pointless goals a lot for a few weeks. Eventually I was sitting down and looking at my homework, thinking “I spent two hours touching flowers for no reason, I can spend a few minutes doing this” and would make some progress. Looking back it seems ridiculous, but it was the advice I needed at the time, and it actually helped me make some changes in life. That whole process made me get into a habit of thinking about the end goal & how small little steps can help you do big things. And actually practicing and seeing that, took me out of the headspace of “I can never do that” to “maybe I can”. And more interesting, I wrote about this on a forum back then, and more than a month after writing it I received a message from someone who said “hey, I just wanted to let you know that I started doing the annoying-little-task strategy after reading your post, and I feel it’s helped me a lot so thank you”
- Jimmc414 3y agoHabits have to start somewhere.
- wenc 3y agoI actually changed my mind based on some simple ideas. Carol Dweck wrote a book called Mindset, which talks about two mindsets: a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. The idea is super simple, and you don't even need to read the book to know what it is. But just knowing that idea changed my entire motivation to do things, and now I believe that even if I'm not talented at something, I can get surprisingly far. (for instance, I'm a deep introvert, but I'm able to socialize for long periods of time and talk to strangers easily now, but only after I kept practicing for a period of 2 years -- I discovered it's possible to "bend" your introversion if you don't put yourself in a box and are willing to make an effort) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindset#Fixed_and_growth_mindsets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindset#Fixed_and_growth_minds... Arguably the science around fixed vs growth mindsets is fuzzy, but here's the other insight: sometimes you can blunder into the right by holding some vague ideas loosely (the rationalist crowd think that avoiding biases leads you to correct actions -- in real life I have found this to be false). There are two kinds of rationality: epistemic rationality (believing the right things) and instrumental rationality (believing in ideas that work to get you the ends desired, even if the ideas themselves are not 100% rational). In business and life, instrumental rationality is much more useful and works more of the time (this is why the LessWrong crowd isn’t good at stochastic domains like business because their models, though logical, are insufficient -- this is a realm where instrumental rationality leads to success). That's another idea that changed my life.
- metisto 3y agoGreat insight about different kinds of rationality! Any recommendations to dive deeper into instrumental rationality topic?
- wenc 3y agoI came across the idea on this website (https://commoncog.com/start-here/ https://commoncog.com/start-here/), which I feel is far more "applied" than the Farnam Street blog (https://fs.blog/ https://fs.blog/). The latter is a distillation of essentially rationalist type mental models that sound good but often don't work in real life without a specific context (context really matters in real life). The specific part about rationality is here: https://commoncog.com/putting-mental-models-to-practice-part-2-introduction-to-rationality/ https://commoncog.com/putting-mental-models-to-practice-part... The author of Commoncog actually puts stuff into practice and allows reality be the teacher. He also talks about "concept instantiation" in ill-structured domains. Most of our learning in school is geared toward structured domains where things behave in known ways. Our education system is based around abstract and principles based thinking, where a + b = c. And to be fair, this kind of thinking works very well.... in structured domains. However, when you get into unstructured domains with lots of higher order effects like say, business or the battlefield or love, those ideas no longer work. First principles reasoning no longer gets you success -- instead you actually have to do the opposite, which is to reason analogically and "instantiate concepts" by assembling context fragments, not principles (e.g. "this has been done before under this context, which is similar to my context in these ways but different in these ways"). That's another insight that changed how I reasoned about ill-structured domains (note: only ill-structured domains! First-principles reasoning still works really well in structured domains so don't make the mistake of abandoning it... only know when to switch to analogical reasoning when you're in the realm of the ill-structured) https://commoncog.com/cognitive-flexibility-theory-the-rules/ https://commoncog.com/cognitive-flexibility-theory-the-rules...
- ggm 3y agoIt takes about 6 weeks of repetition to establish a habit. With 9 such intervals a year, and 90 in a decade, I think given how few people apply they could be forgiven for referring to the few which stick as ideas rather than habituation? The idea is the trigger. Doing it, to achieve lasting change requires habit forming.
- maccard 3y agoThere's actually 52 intervals, they can overlap.
- ggm 3y agoI can't rub my tummy in a circle and put my head precisely because I can't acquire two skills at once. Chewing gum followed walking. But perhaps I could learn to overlap these brief attempts at habit forming. It might take six weeks or so...
- maccard 3y agotheres a difference between doing 2 things at once, and doing two things 3 days apart. You can take up running,_and_ walk to work at the same time.
- asdfman123 3y agoPeople do change their lives based on ideas. Just usually not the ideas that you’re trying to feed to them.
- janalsncm 3y agoChanging one’s life is hyperbole, sure, but I really like lists of ideas like this. I’ve been compiling a list of my own, and there’s some overlap.
- taneq 3y agoFor some things yes. For others, nope. The realisation that, when you pour a full long-life milk tetrapak, the opening goes at the top not the bottom of the top face? That changed my life instantly. I mean, it’s not earth shattering but it’s had a permanent and measurable impact on me, and I’ve passed it on to a few people with similar results. Likewise a friend once pointed out that swinging a closed sauce bottle to get the sauce to the top is way more effective than shaking it linearly. That was 15 years ago and I still think of him every time I use this trick.
- Broken_Hippo 3y agoThinking is often a habit as well, and this is where habits start.
- truthwhisperer 3y ago[dead]