19 ms·

Excellence is a habit, but so is failure

810 points by dvrp 3y ago

Slava_Propanei 3y ago
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phoe-krk 3y ago
The original title is "Excellence is a habit, but so is failure" and I think it reflects the contents of the post somewhat better. A short but insightful piece, thank you for posting.
scns 3y ago
> From these experiences, I’ve realized that avoiding bad habits is just as important as cultivating good habits. Avoidance rarely works i think. I'd say replacing negative habits with positive ones is a better long term strategy. Can recommend the App Habitica for this, free and open source. There are Android and iOS clients for it. Makes habits dailies and todos more fun. Not affiliated, only fixed an accessibility issue once. https://habitica.com https://habitica.com
- jstimpfle 3y ago
  > I'd say replacing negative habits with positive ones is a better long term strategy. If the reason for forming the bad habit was that what you're susposed to do is dreadful i.e. not positive, yes, a positive one must be found. But a positive activity doesn't feel good from the start, that's why you need avoidance. You need to get over the hump. When you're forming a new habit, the natural tendency is to cheat when you're susposed to do the new to-be habit, and do the old thing instead. Instead of working, browsing HN or youtube. Instead of going out for a run, eating cookies. Tell yourself to not do that -- avoid it -- and force yourself to do the new activity until it becomes self-sustaining.
  - horsawlarway 3y ago
    And my experience is that the idea you can just "tell yourself to avoid it" is basically baloney. Replacement on the other hand... That seems to genuinely work. You just have to pick a replacement that isn't dreadful. --- My experience: I gained ~90lbs over 12 years. I didn't over eat horribly, but I also didn't exercise much, and my job keeps me stationary. Instead of trying to not eat (dieting - which I have tried several times over those 12 years, never with long term success) this last time I took a different approach: I picked the easiest, most enjoyable, exercise I could think of and added that. That exercise turned out to be biking - but not even just biking, because biking is still pretty hard when you're 90lbs overweight and I'd had other exercise attempts fail because they were unpleasant (ex: jogging). E-biking, though... that's pretty easy and nice. So an e-bike it was. It's totally cheating with a bike: it makes biking feel relaxing, tackles the hills with ease, always gives you a cooling breeze - basically: it's just enjoyable and refreshing. 12.5 months later and I'm down 50 lbs. It turns out that I didn't need some dreadful, healthy, righteous activity to replace the bad ones. I just needed something small and enjoyable I could do as an alternative. Something that wouldn't dig the hole deeper. I set absolutely zero rules around dieting/eating. I didn't actively avoid anything at all. I just added a small enjoyable activity with very low activation cost. Essentially: It's hard to avoid a bad (but pleasurable) activity if the alternative is boredom or chores (ex: jogging). It's easy to avoid it by giving yourself a different pleasurable activity to pick.
wccrawford 3y ago
Life is about taking risk. We make daily decisions that involve big and small risk constantly. Choosing to enjoy life today instead of waiting for tomorrow for that enjoyment isn't a failure, it's a choice. It comes with risk and tradeoffs. Everyone thinks there's a magical line that everyone else should take that straddles that line between enjoyment today and tomorrow. That lines doesn't exist, and isn't even the same from day to day. Looking back and regretting a lifetime of decisions is caused that the consequences from those earlier decisions. Once that weight becomes too heavy, the regret sets in. IMO, the way to combat that is two-fold. First, in the moment, be conscious of what the risks are, and if they are worth it. If they aren't, take pride in settling for less at the moment so you can safeguard your future. You're doing something hard and good, and it should feel good in itself to do it. Second, when you look back, remember the joy you had at the time. It was judged, to the best of your ability, to be worth it at the time, and you should continue to feel warm and fuzzy from that joy today, even if bad things have come about as consequence for it. For instance, like the author, I gained rather a lot of weight. Then I lost most of the excess. Then I gained half of it back. Every day is now a struggle to try to get my weight back down, and my blood pressure is back up so high I couldn't have dental surgery safely the other day, and I'm back on medication. According to the author that's a failure, but I had a lot of really, really enjoyable meals. I ate the vast majority of them with friends and family. Many of them were either cooked by family, or were special occasions. Calling those meals "failures" now would be saying that it was a mistake to enjoy that time with my family and friends, and it absolutely wasn't.
- vimsee 3y ago
  > Calling those meals "failures" now would be saying that it was a mistake to enjoy that time with my family and friends, and it absolutely wasn't. If gaining weight is the failure in this context, the mistake would likely be the excessive intake of food. Time spent with friends and family would not be the mistake. This might have come off a bit harsh.
  - thelastparadise 3y ago
    Temperance, as you suggest, is a beautiful thing. It's hard (for me, especially), but sometimes we just have to put down the fork and politely decline that second, third, or fourth pancake.
vrnvu 3y ago
Avoidance of something deprives us of the experience we might gain from it. I don't believe that avoiding everything we might consider "bad" is generally a good practice. However, I am not suggesting that we should try everything we consider as "bad" either. When people talk about excellence, productivity, and performance, they often draw conclusions based on the final outcomes. However, these conclusions cannot be reached without encountering mistakes along the way. As the Greeks said, the golden mean is the desirable point.
lionkor 3y ago
I've been watching Andreas' YouTube channel since very early on, and had some short interactions with him in his comment section, and I really believe that every one of the videos where he sits in his car and talks made a difference for me. They taught me a lot - and of course, after tens or hundreds of hours of watching him write code, my C++ looks quite similar to his.
- smcin 3y ago
  Andreas Kling's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/andreaskling https://www.youtube.com/andreaskling
- jpeeler 3y ago
  I've never found the motivation or the desire to watch livestream coding. I had assumed that the value gained versus time investment wouldn't pay off. But then it was in Andreas' Igalia chat[1] that he said that showing the failures and getting stuck was important to portray. And now you're saying that you've (presumably) improved and can even identify similar coding patterns due to your investment. I guess I'm now finally convinced it's a good investment. [1] https://www.igalia.com/chats/ladybird https://www.igalia.com/chats/ladybird
positive_loop 3y ago
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totetsu 3y ago
The discussion on a similar article last month was interesting https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36195105 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36195105
alexmolas 3y ago
This is the classical 1.01**365=37 but 0.99**365=0.02. I guess the difficult part is to detect where is this missing 1%.
- anon35 3y ago
  Great observation. I found myself thinking it reflected the famous quote: "“Watch your thoughts, they become words; watch your words, they become actions; watch your actions, they become habits; watch your habits, they become character; watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.” The post author is traversing the actions-habit-character territory.
- myth_drannon 3y ago
  Yes, when the change is small it is hard to realize is it really 1.01 or 0.99? That demands a lot of constant reflection which causes self-doubt and the easiest path out of this tension is too let it go and just don't care.
Arisaka1 3y ago
Ever since I quit my first job I've been tinkering with languages and frameworks. And every time I would complete a book or course I'd face the decision of building something on my own. That building never happens. 1 month later my portfolio is nonexistent, there are no projects, and my blog is a figment of my imagination. And right now I'm in the process of learning yet another framework. So I've been thinking: This must be something worse than what I imagine. I read about perfectionism, fear of shame and judgment... bingo. I can tell that the root of the problem isn't that I can't work on a personal project, because I do have them. But the moment it's a portfolio project the question isn't "what would help me learn?" but "what would help me demonstrate to my future employer that I deserve a chance?" This is a behavioral habit, a disastrous one and potentially career-ending or at least progression-ending. And it may have started with me trying my best not meet external expectations or minimize my footprint to avoid being exposed to bullying, trolling, nickname calling, ever since I was a little kid. And that seed didn't happen overnight, it took a lot of daily conditioning to turn a child from risk-taker to risk-avoider. That's why I'm wary of giving the advice to beginners "just start building projects". It's not that the advice is bad, but there's just too many factors at play and failure to do so is not always about one's intelligence.
- dehugger 3y ago
  My advice is not to focus on a portfolio or a "project". Find things that annoy you in life that code can fix, write that code. Some of these things will become more complex then others. I would advise against anything larger than 3 days of work (as in distinct days spent working on the project ,not total hours) in scale, as you'll just feel bad when you don't finish the latest grandiose dream. Don't worry about how pretty or impressive the code is. The point is the function. Save everything in a projects folder, no matter how shit. At some point you'll hit a point where a project hits the right intersection of elegance/function/polish, and then you can throw that on a portfolio page. Then another one, and another one. The important thing is the end goal. As long as that goal is to impress other people you will be paralyzed by fear of rejection. If the goal is to fix a problem for yourself that's much more achievable, as the only bar you need to meet is "did it fix my problem?". Random sampling of my own "frustration" projects: - automatic version control in SQL Server for object/table definitions - cron script that scrapes + downloads the latest driver from Nvidia from their website, installs it, then deletes the file - command line tool that formats text in the clipboard various ways (mostly I use this for transforming csv/excel files into SQL lists or table inserts) - a small utility for printing notes on a receipt thermal printer - a Lemmy scraper that combines different communities into a single coherent image board (I hated their default media presentation)
sph 3y ago
Timely post. I was planning on spending the day researching gamification applied to healthy habits and/or abandoning unhealthy ones. Anyone has any pointer? Bonus if it's RuneScape-style gamification (exponential XP curve, rewarding yourself every level up, build on the assumption that growth in life is a very long grind like maxing a RS character, made of small steps)
- Wurlitzer 3y ago
  Habitica
florg 3y ago
The article also reminded me of this Charlie Munger quote: “It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.” Sometimes not doing something stupid is at once easier and harder than trying to get into a good habit.
vkolencik 3y ago
The same point expressed beautifully by Jocko Willink: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyMEQMt6yAw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyMEQMt6yAw
PaulHoule 3y ago
I think it’s going to come out eventually that obesity is not a failure of willpower but a derangement of your metabolism caused by some environmental chemical such as PFAS, glyphosate, etc.
- CyberDildonics 3y ago
  What evidence makes you think that instead of the idea that sugar and sugar addiction is a major cause of obesity? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    Obesity rates rise sharply circa 1980, when the deregulatory climate became entrenched in the US and UK and there is a proliferation of new chemicals. You might say corn syrup became popular then but cane sugar was around long before obesity became epidemic. Dietary and lifestyle interventions notoriously don’t work, or rather they work temporarily. There seems to be a set-point for weight and you just won’t eat enough to go over it and have a very hard time to go under it. That set point seems to have gone up. Here are some reviews https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-pharmtox-010818-021304 https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-pharmtox-0... https://academic.oup.com/endo/article/161/3/bqaa024/5739626 https://academic.oup.com/endo/article/161/3/bqaa024/5739626 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3076189/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3076189/
    - CyberDildonics 3y ago
      Obesity rates rise sharply circa 1980 This is explained directly in the video I linked. Cane sugar is more expensive and less consistent commodity while corn syrup is cheap and consistent. Fat became demonized from bad science and sugar was added to almost everything. Dietary and lifestyle interventions notoriously don’t work They absolutely work individually. If someone changes their diet to cut out sugar they lose weight very consistently. Expecting that of people is not a systemic solution however. Watch the video I linked instead of trying to explain everything with looser correlations.
musebox35 3y ago
This seems like a specific application of the "inverted thinking/inversion" mentality. I once came across a post on this but can not find it now. I think it was about this article: https://fs.blog/inversion/ https://fs.blog/inversion/ Edit - Or this one: https://jamesclear.com/inversion https://jamesclear.com/inversion
lo_zamoyski 3y ago
Indeed. And I think a good term here is "moral failure", which is exactly what the traditional meaning of "sin" is, i.e., doing something you shouldn't, that you know, to some degree, that you shouldn't (culpability is determined by the degree to which you understand you are doing something wrong, since understanding is a prerequisite for consent). And small sins are gateways to still greater sins. Indulge them enough, rationalize your indulgence, and you will slowly habituate indulgence and corrupt yourself and shift your moral Overton window. You become what you repeatedly do. Sinning, in fact, corrupts the intellect and so it quite literally dulls your mind to reality over time. Why? Because in order to choose against what you know is the good decision, you have to turn your mind away from reality, from the truth. Do this often enough and it becomes a habit of blinding the mind to enable doing what you shouldn't. A blinded mind is degraded, worse at grasping reality, and this makes it even easier to commit still greater evil as it has become worse at determining what is objectively good. A downward spiral. This is why a habit of self-discipline is important. What we call "self-denial" is really the practice of depriving yourself of what you desire that you know you should not desire inappropriately. The obvious example here is food, but it applies generally. Food, as such, is good. However, if I know that I've eaten enough, but an unruly desire for food surfaces, perhaps for food I know is bad for me, denying or repressing that desire is good. One of the purposes of fasting is actually the disciplining of the appetite for food. Consistent practice of self-denial has the effect of regulating the appetite and strengthening the dominion of reason over it, which develops one's integrity. Over time, that unruly desire, ruled over and purified by reasoned discipline, will better conform to the rational order, i.e., what is objectively good. Note how people who indulge their hunger against their own good only become more voracious eaters. They may even become disordered eaters (e.g., bulimia). Rewarding an inordinate (or disordered) desire only reinforces it. Now consider how vicious, destructive, and irrational our consumerist culture is. It thrives on mindless and degrading indulgence of any and all desires. This is not the way.
ergonaught 3y ago
The habit to form is “making wise choices”. We dramatize and complicate this mostly because it is stimulating to do so, which gets reinforced via confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, etc. We also seem to enjoy moralizing what is “wise” for other people more than keeping our attention where it belongs. It can be as basic as forming the habit of asking whether you’ll be thankful you did XYZ when you’re at the end of your life. Sometimes that’s going to be a “yes”, even for “unwise” choices, but most people who actually engage with this will find that most of the honest answers are “no”. It’s not new or revolutionary or particularly insightful or easily productized so it keeps having to be rediscovered.
germandiago 3y ago
100% agree.
tgv 3y ago
That title: how is excellence a habit? You can't excel without consistent practice (unless it's a completely new field, possibly), but that doesn't make it a habit. The reverse doesn't hold. While failure may also be lack of habit. Clickbait is a habit, I suppose.
deleted 3y ago
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jschveibinz 3y ago
Potentially interesting to some readers: “The Handbook of Self-Regulation”, Baumeister and Vohs http://ndl.ethernet.edu.et/bitstream/123456789/28342/1/162.pdf.pdf http://ndl.ethernet.edu.et/bitstream/123456789/28342/1/162.p...
- goatkey 3y ago
  This looks really great. Thank you for sharing
- trollerator23 3y ago
  Baumeister has a lot of great research.
blueyes 3y ago
I find Andreas's short non-technical posts to be fairly unenlightening, and am consistently surprised to see them attract so much attention on HN. The information value here is low.
- jrvarela56 3y ago
  This is good writing. Highlights a very important concept in very few words. I am thankful for the reminder.
- markusstrasser 3y ago
  +1
- m3kw9 3y ago
  I find the opposite, I find myself saying “I like this format”, because he boiled it down and I can extrapolate and understand just by reflecting on the simple ideas he put out.
- strikelaserclaw 3y ago
  maybe its good to have a reminder of obvious information which is vital once in a while
- passion__desire 3y ago
  Sometimes it's just that you need to be reminded of what you already know. Taking your own advice and all that.
- OldManRyan 3y ago
  I enjoy them. It's a paragraph or so of easily digestible information. Not everyone has read something like Atomic Habits so the value is relative. Worst case scenario it acts as an excuse to kick off discussion.
- fsociety 3y ago
  Perhaps it’s not meant for you. Does not mean it’s not meant for others.
- 3y ago
adamsmith143 3y ago
Didn't Edison fail like >2000 times when creating the lightbulb? Seems like a "habit" of failure... /s
- pxeger1 3y ago
  I wouldn't say those are 2000 failures, because the point is that you learn from them each time. Also building a light bulb that doesn't work is really not an error, that's the whole idea of iteration.
bsuvc 3y ago
Pertaining to habits, this stuck with me from James Clear's Atomic Habits [1]: > Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your identity. This is why habits are crucial. [1] https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits
- stanislavb 3y ago
  Such a good quote. Worth remembering.
- sebmellen 3y ago
  I wrote something similar a while back before reading Atomic Habits. Not as eloquent, but the gist is the same :) https://www.sebastianmellen.com/post/2020/how-are-you-really-voting/ https://www.sebastianmellen.com/post/2020/how-are-you-really...
- croes 3y ago
  The problem is you don't know the result of your actions. Many bad things happened because of good intentions and vice versa I remember a story about a neo nazi who travelled to Africa to buy weapons and felt in live with a black woman.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - vorpalhex 3y ago
    But usually you do. Like obviously there are edge cases, but for the most part consequences aren't a surprise. Eat too much, you get fat. Fail to work out, your body goes to hell. Fail to sleep and your mind goes.
    - croes 3y ago
      It not that simple. Eat healthy and you become obsessed with it and get a eating disorder. Work out, get injured, need pain killers, get addicted. In hindsight it's easy to spot your mistakes. Should have turned left instead of right.
23B1 3y ago
'Failure' is when the whole system crashes. Andreas is really talking about small setbacks that lead to failure. And I think its better to embrace Samuel Beckett's mantra: "Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better.” It's arguably the core tenet of agile/lean anyway. Measure, learn, improve. If you're taking those single steps backwards and using them to make two steps forward, that's the opposite of failure.
m3kw9 3y ago
This is the basis of ignorance or no self awareness, you go on autopilot on what feels great at the moment
xorvoid 3y ago
I’m continually struck by how brave Andreas is for talking about his addiction problems out in public. In most every interview he leads with it when he could just easily say a vague: “I found myself with a lot of free time”. Addiction can come with a LOT of shame baggage. To embrace vulnerability over it is quite substantial. Thank you Andreas for being a positive example for the world! Keep up the great work!
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
  I think if more people were vulnerable, the world would be a kinder place. I also wish more CEOs were vulnerable. They are forced to "show strength" and "not complain" especially if they are a billionaire. But it would really show how much their lives are a mixed bag and we all face challenges and try to figure it out.
  - MicropenisMike 3y ago
    Unfortunately vulnerability is among the first things to be exploited, just take a look at any advertisement.
    - blastro 3y ago
      human CVE
  - erikpukinskis 3y ago
    > They are forced to "show strength" and "not complain" I wonder about this. Sometimes I think that is the job of a CEO: to put on a good face and keep and maintain “The Plan Is Gonna Work” vibes. Every CEO I’ve worked under—no matter how compassionate they were on a personal level—has had a policy of absolutely crushing voices of dissent. Maybe not immediately, but within a couple quarters. At least when the dissent was regarding things that the CEO felt were not something they could address on the current roadmap. I’ve come to appreciate that this attitude may be necessary… that companies (with headcounts in the 50-500 range at least) cannot afford to have some of their people pulling in a different direction than their roadmap. And that people who will do that must be excised. But your comment makes me wonder… is that the only way? I think maybe a company like Valve lets their employees pull in different directions, and also then just allows them to be starved of resources. Which maybe is effectively the same? Or maybe is an innovation on the standard CEO model?
robinduckett 3y ago
Positive habit forming is incredibly hard to do. Negative habit forming is easy. Being “aware” of this fact is not enough to prevent bad habit forming.
skapadia 3y ago
I love listening to Guy Raz's "How I Built This" podcast - a common element in almost every success story is the number of failures it took to reach success. Failure, the ability to keep working / pivot through failures, and being okay with failure seem to be requirements to succeeding. Failure is literally a key ingredient to success.
euix 3y ago
It's very honest of him to breakdown how he makes his living on SerenityOS - really enjoyed that blog post, helps give people an idea of how a very technically saavy person can make it in today's world as a "nomad".
tristor 3y ago
Agreed, I have a history of being a bit of a shopaholic (and being overweight). I've vacillated between periods of being debt-free and periods of indebtedness, I've vacillated between periods of being in relatively good shape and periods of weight gain. None of these circumstances, good or bad, happened overnight, they were the accumulation of many small daily decisions, often over years. When I was in the peak shape of my life (178 and stacked), it was following being in the worst condition in my life (315), after more than 7 years of constant careful attention to my calorie intake, every other day exercise, and meticulously recording it all so I could keep myself honest. It didn't evaporate overnight either, I was able to maintain a good state of health without being so controlled while I was traveling, but once the pandemic happened and I became sedentary my loss of control over my eating caught up to me over the next 14 months and I gained nearly 40 pounds back prior to getting myself back under control. Now I'm on that journey again back to a healthier weight. The things we do every day, the small choices we consistently make, these form the habits of our lives. I have good habits and I have bad habits, and it's a consistent struggle for me (and likely everyone) to overcome our bad habits and turn them into good habits. Some of these habits, including my relationship with food, came from my environment as a child, so the work of a lifetime forming them is often difficult to overcome, but it's never impossible.
- basq 3y ago
  I am similar wrt to bodyfat fluctuations, but interestingly enough, it did happen to me overnight. During the pandemic I reached my lowest bf% ever, single digits, despite gyms being closed. It was after things began to open back up in summer/fall '21 that, as I started to get back into the gym, I allowed myself to "eat instinctively" and went from 160-190 in a month. The weight managed to stabilize but still slowly go up, eventually reaching in the 200's. I was hitting the weight racks but struggling to keep my weekly caloric intake in a deficit. There's a lot more to the story in terms of what I did and learned, but in short, calorie estimates online were often over-prescribing my TDI which was a lot closer to my BMR. I now eat 600 less than my BMR every week and that's about 1.5 lbs/week lost. I'm still hitting the gym and getting 1g protein /lb of lean body mass so I am still managing to put on muscle despite being in a deficit. But ultimately, it will have taken me 2 years of meticulous, dedicated calorie and macro tracking and diet modulation to undo that single month of damage, and return to my previous bf%. Although I have dealt with the frustration of impatience, I am finally on track and expect to hit my goals in October/November.
SanderNL 3y ago
I found it interesting to learn about the etymology of the word "character". It comes to us from Latin which took it from the Greek (χᾰρᾰκτήρ) which comes from kharasso (χαράσσω) - I scratch or engrave. Our character can be thought of as the result of a long process of engraving or scratching. I tend to see it as a solid metal shield full of scratches from long battles. The resulting grooves tend towards virtue or vice. A sustained habit of wise choices makes it easier to do the right thing - even when it is hard - when the time comes and it will come. A marriage, a deathbed, a career. Life has its fair share of hard choices and having grooves in your soul that guide your choices towards the virtuous helps immensely. That's also useful to know for when you have unimportant tasks to complete. For some people this may comprise the majority of their career and/or life. However, those "unimportant" tasks still scratch your soul and those scratches ultimately matter. Even seemingly mundane things like taking out the garbage can be done with virtue in mind. I'm fun at parties by the way.
- squarepizza 3y ago
  > Even seemingly mundane things like taking out the garbage can be done with virtue in mind. Poet Jane Hirshfield, reflecting on her time at a monastery that ritualized waking up at ~0300 by splashing freezing water on one's face, said that her training was reducible to being more mindful when doing the dishes.
- akprasad 3y ago
  For a similar idea from another culture, see the ancient definitions of karma: Now as a man is like this or like that, according as he acts and according as he behaves, so will he be; a man of good acts will become good, a man of bad acts, bad; he becomes pure by pure deeds, bad by bad deeds; And here they say that a person consists of desires, and as is his desire, so is his will; and as is his will, so is his deed; and whatever deed he does, that he will reap. — Brihadaranyaka Upanishad
  - EugeneOZ 3y ago
    oligarchs who were killing, stealing, raping and betraying their whole lives, now are laughing on this joke so hard, on their super-yachts.
999900000999 3y ago
The biggest source of drama in my life has been other people. Particularly other people who aren't living right. Past 25 and doesn't have or trying to get a stable job. Carefully evaluate if you want that person in your life. Misery loves company, the wrong type of people will bring you down and laugh when they do so. Likewise, people with stable lives can and often will lift you up.
fyuhuji 3y ago
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slashdev 3y ago
Jocko Willink has a great quote on this subject: Rome wasn't built in a day. Everyone knows that. It took hundreds of years for Rome to reach its peak. But Rome also didn't fall in a day. It also took time, hundreds of years, for Rome to decay and fall apart. He goes on to say that each day we're either improving or decaying, either getting a little better or getting a little worse. Those little things add up over time to make a big difference in our lives.
mylons 3y ago
the author is describing self medication as incremental failure. i think this is a mindset that can lead to more. in those moments you’re seeking relief, and viewing it as failure can just perpetuate shame and creates a vicious cycle.
croes 3y ago
hindsight is 20/20
arnejenssen 3y ago
Excellent! Via negativa is a useful tool. Instead of thinking about what to add, via negativa is about what to remove.
zackmorris 3y ago
IMHO there's a level of understanding beyond this, which might be called grace. I identify as a lifelong failure, but I no longer place blame on specifics like addiction or body weight or relationship issues. The truth of my existence is that the world is really messed up, but also beautiful despite the dysfunction. And I'm grateful for the adversity which woke me out of the fantasies which distracted me throughout so much of my life and added to the suffering of others. Loosely that means that every time I took a drink, there was a reason, like maybe I was lonely because I was rejected by someone. Maybe I was fat because I was too broke to take care of myself. Maybe I was mean to my partners because I was projecting my own frustrations. Now I look at life more like a game. I'm drawn to fringe ideas and projects with an overwhelming likelihood of failure. I've been through the ringer so many times that I'm more of a loosely held together hodgepodge of components than a coherent identity. But I keep showing up. I'm hardened from adversity but I've alchemized that into softness and an infinite well of empathy for others struggling with the human condition. I cheer inside when the meekest among us speak truth to power. I live in service to others now, who are an aspect of myself.
- norir 3y ago
  You may be interested in Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil which takes a more mystical approach to these ideas.
- Zetice 3y ago
  This ideology takes a good idea and pushes it too far. There isn’t a lot of value in seriously considering oneself as a “failure”, and rarely is it actually true. Perspective to recognize the lack of any such way to measure outcomes so booleanly is probably more valuable than choosing to adopt failure as your default state.
pseudostem 3y ago
Since a lot of people are talking about themselves so openly, I feel a compulsion too. I hide behind perfection. Learning maths, programming, sports, health. Of course I need a perfect OS, perfect programming paradigm, perfect book, the best music learning method, greatest body improvement program. Perfect is the enemy of good. It's something I grapple with on a daily basis.
nwienert 3y ago
I think the new generation of weight-loss drugs are going to be a revolution because they give you power over bad habits, wholesale. ICYMI: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2023/05/ozempic-addictive-behavior-drinking-smoking/674098/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2023/05/ozempic-a... Anecdotally, they really work. It’s not just your food cravings that are mostly stopped in their tracks. But in some miraculous fashion it seems all your “bad” cravings are squashed, while your good ones (side projects, chores, work) stay intact. The only good one I can see slightly down is sex, but as well with that it does also feel like you have a lot more control in that area. I think we’ll eventually see them as first line prescriptions for all types of addicts. It’s part of the reason I sort of want to throw some money into their stock, but then again it’s hard to know how that all turns out as multiple manufacturers have these drugs and there are many more analogues in the pipelines. But I find it so interesting, as it really upsets my notion of morality. Yes, resisting your temptations without drugs seems like the obvious better world. But our modern world is simply overflowing with temptation. Fast food, advertisements, sugar in everything, caffeine in everything, drugs everywhere. It was far easier to be ascetic when there just wasn’t that much around. But suddenly on one of these drugs you feel… powerful, in a way. Like you’ve gained a superpower. It’s a really weird experience, and I don’t hate it.
- vorpalhex 3y ago
  unpaywalled link: https://archive.is/7mxOi https://archive.is/7mxOi
- abnercoimbre 3y ago
  This is fascinating. Do you know if these anti-addiction effects have only been studied with the weight-loss drugs? I'm too skinny (133 lbs) to take them, but am interested in the rest of it.
  - nwienert 3y ago
    I think at the lowest dose you could still maintain weight while getting the effects.
hotdogscout 3y ago
I think failure is a better groomer for success than success. Every truly great achievement of my life came from prior humiliation from failure.
nektro 3y ago
"The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried."
zh3 3y ago
> We often hear that making small incremental improvements every day can lead to great things. This popular piece of advice rings true... A journey of 10,000 miles starts with a single step. You can only cross a chasm with a mighty leap. YMMV.
wonderwonder 3y ago
Andrew Tate (I am in no way condoning his character) has an interesting video where he talks about discipline vs motivation. If you need to be motivated to do something then its probably not going to last, discipline is what makes things last. Combined with patience is how we see real change and results. If we wake up at 5am to go to the gym, many of us are motivated when we set the alarm but that motivation is gone when the alarm rings, only discipline can make you get up day after day instead of hitting the snooze button. This applies to all aspects of life. Its the reason so many new years resolutions die after a few weeks. Why diets fail. Why the gym is packed in January and back to normal in March. If you need to be motivated to succeed, you will likely fail, only discipline will get you through both the good and bad times. Discipline is what separates the great from the average or even good.
stillbourne 3y ago
Can't have excellence without a shit ton of failure
desireco42 3y ago
This went dark quickly... I hope author is in good shape and drug free now.

810 points by dvrp 3y ago

[dead]

The original title is "Excellence is a habit, but so is failure" and I think it reflects the contents of the post somewhat better. A short but insightful piece, thank you for posting.

scns 3y ago

> From these experiences, I’ve realized that avoiding bad habits is just as important as cultivating good habits. Avoidance rarely works i think. I'd say replacing negative habits with positive ones is a better long term strategy. Can recommend the App Habitica for this, free and open source. There are Android and iOS clients for it. Makes habits dailies and todos more fun. Not affiliated, only fixed an accessibility issue once. https://habitica.com https://habitica.com

jstimpfle 3y ago
> I'd say replacing negative habits with positive ones is a better long term strategy. If the reason for forming the bad habit was that what you're susposed to do is dreadful i.e. not positive, yes, a positive one must be found. But a positive activity doesn't feel good from the start, that's why you need avoidance. You need to get over the hump. When you're forming a new habit, the natural tendency is to cheat when you're susposed to do the new to-be habit, and do the old thing instead. Instead of working, browsing HN or youtube. Instead of going out for a run, eating cookies. Tell yourself to not do that -- avoid it -- and force yourself to do the new activity until it becomes self-sustaining.
- horsawlarway 3y ago
  And my experience is that the idea you can just "tell yourself to avoid it" is basically baloney. Replacement on the other hand... That seems to genuinely work. You just have to pick a replacement that isn't dreadful. --- My experience: I gained ~90lbs over 12 years. I didn't over eat horribly, but I also didn't exercise much, and my job keeps me stationary. Instead of trying to not eat (dieting - which I have tried several times over those 12 years, never with long term success) this last time I took a different approach: I picked the easiest, most enjoyable, exercise I could think of and added that. That exercise turned out to be biking - but not even just biking, because biking is still pretty hard when you're 90lbs overweight and I'd had other exercise attempts fail because they were unpleasant (ex: jogging). E-biking, though... that's pretty easy and nice. So an e-bike it was. It's totally cheating with a bike: it makes biking feel relaxing, tackles the hills with ease, always gives you a cooling breeze - basically: it's just enjoyable and refreshing. 12.5 months later and I'm down 50 lbs. It turns out that I didn't need some dreadful, healthy, righteous activity to replace the bad ones. I just needed something small and enjoyable I could do as an alternative. Something that wouldn't dig the hole deeper. I set absolutely zero rules around dieting/eating. I didn't actively avoid anything at all. I just added a small enjoyable activity with very low activation cost. Essentially: It's hard to avoid a bad (but pleasurable) activity if the alternative is boredom or chores (ex: jogging). It's easy to avoid it by giving yourself a different pleasurable activity to pick.

wccrawford 3y ago

Life is about taking risk. We make daily decisions that involve big and small risk constantly. Choosing to enjoy life today instead of waiting for tomorrow for that enjoyment isn't a failure, it's a choice. It comes with risk and tradeoffs. Everyone thinks there's a magical line that everyone else should take that straddles that line between enjoyment today and tomorrow. That lines doesn't exist, and isn't even the same from day to day. Looking back and regretting a lifetime of decisions is caused that the consequences from those earlier decisions. Once that weight becomes too heavy, the regret sets in. IMO, the way to combat that is two-fold. First, in the moment, be conscious of what the risks are, and if they are worth it. If they aren't, take pride in settling for less at the moment so you can safeguard your future. You're doing something hard and good, and it should feel good in itself to do it. Second, when you look back, remember the joy you had at the time. It was judged, to the best of your ability, to be worth it at the time, and you should continue to feel warm and fuzzy from that joy today, even if bad things have come about as consequence for it. For instance, like the author, I gained rather a lot of weight. Then I lost most of the excess. Then I gained half of it back. Every day is now a struggle to try to get my weight back down, and my blood pressure is back up so high I couldn't have dental surgery safely the other day, and I'm back on medication. According to the author that's a failure, but I had a lot of really, really enjoyable meals. I ate the vast majority of them with friends and family. Many of them were either cooked by family, or were special occasions. Calling those meals "failures" now would be saying that it was a mistake to enjoy that time with my family and friends, and it absolutely wasn't.

vimsee 3y ago
> Calling those meals "failures" now would be saying that it was a mistake to enjoy that time with my family and friends, and it absolutely wasn't. If gaining weight is the failure in this context, the mistake would likely be the excessive intake of food. Time spent with friends and family would not be the mistake. This might have come off a bit harsh.
- thelastparadise 3y ago
  Temperance, as you suggest, is a beautiful thing. It's hard (for me, especially), but sometimes we just have to put down the fork and politely decline that second, third, or fourth pancake.

vrnvu 3y ago

Avoidance of something deprives us of the experience we might gain from it. I don't believe that avoiding everything we might consider "bad" is generally a good practice. However, I am not suggesting that we should try everything we consider as "bad" either. When people talk about excellence, productivity, and performance, they often draw conclusions based on the final outcomes. However, these conclusions cannot be reached without encountering mistakes along the way. As the Greeks said, the golden mean is the desirable point.

lionkor 3y ago

I've been watching Andreas' YouTube channel since very early on, and had some short interactions with him in his comment section, and I really believe that every one of the videos where he sits in his car and talks made a difference for me. They taught me a lot - and of course, after tens or hundreds of hours of watching him write code, my C++ looks quite similar to his.

smcin 3y ago
Andreas Kling's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/andreaskling https://www.youtube.com/andreaskling
jpeeler 3y ago
I've never found the motivation or the desire to watch livestream coding. I had assumed that the value gained versus time investment wouldn't pay off. But then it was in Andreas' Igalia chat[1] that he said that showing the failures and getting stuck was important to portray. And now you're saying that you've (presumably) improved and can even identify similar coding patterns due to your investment. I guess I'm now finally convinced it's a good investment. [1] https://www.igalia.com/chats/ladybird https://www.igalia.com/chats/ladybird

positive_loop 3y ago

[dead]

totetsu 3y ago

The discussion on a similar article last month was interesting https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36195105 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36195105

alexmolas 3y ago

This is the classical 1.01**365=37 but 0.99**365=0.02. I guess the difficult part is to detect where is this missing 1%.

anon35 3y ago
Great observation. I found myself thinking it reflected the famous quote: "“Watch your thoughts, they become words; watch your words, they become actions; watch your actions, they become habits; watch your habits, they become character; watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.” The post author is traversing the actions-habit-character territory.
myth_drannon 3y ago
Yes, when the change is small it is hard to realize is it really 1.01 or 0.99? That demands a lot of constant reflection which causes self-doubt and the easiest path out of this tension is too let it go and just don't care.

Arisaka1 3y ago

Ever since I quit my first job I've been tinkering with languages and frameworks. And every time I would complete a book or course I'd face the decision of building something on my own. That building never happens. 1 month later my portfolio is nonexistent, there are no projects, and my blog is a figment of my imagination. And right now I'm in the process of learning yet another framework. So I've been thinking: This must be something worse than what I imagine. I read about perfectionism, fear of shame and judgment... bingo. I can tell that the root of the problem isn't that I can't work on a personal project, because I do have them. But the moment it's a portfolio project the question isn't "what would help me learn?" but "what would help me demonstrate to my future employer that I deserve a chance?" This is a behavioral habit, a disastrous one and potentially career-ending or at least progression-ending. And it may have started with me trying my best not meet external expectations or minimize my footprint to avoid being exposed to bullying, trolling, nickname calling, ever since I was a little kid. And that seed didn't happen overnight, it took a lot of daily conditioning to turn a child from risk-taker to risk-avoider. That's why I'm wary of giving the advice to beginners "just start building projects". It's not that the advice is bad, but there's just too many factors at play and failure to do so is not always about one's intelligence.

dehugger 3y ago
My advice is not to focus on a portfolio or a "project". Find things that annoy you in life that code can fix, write that code. Some of these things will become more complex then others. I would advise against anything larger than 3 days of work (as in distinct days spent working on the project ,not total hours) in scale, as you'll just feel bad when you don't finish the latest grandiose dream. Don't worry about how pretty or impressive the code is. The point is the function. Save everything in a projects folder, no matter how shit. At some point you'll hit a point where a project hits the right intersection of elegance/function/polish, and then you can throw that on a portfolio page. Then another one, and another one. The important thing is the end goal. As long as that goal is to impress other people you will be paralyzed by fear of rejection. If the goal is to fix a problem for yourself that's much more achievable, as the only bar you need to meet is "did it fix my problem?". Random sampling of my own "frustration" projects: - automatic version control in SQL Server for object/table definitions - cron script that scrapes + downloads the latest driver from Nvidia from their website, installs it, then deletes the file - command line tool that formats text in the clipboard various ways (mostly I use this for transforming csv/excel files into SQL lists or table inserts) - a small utility for printing notes on a receipt thermal printer - a Lemmy scraper that combines different communities into a single coherent image board (I hated their default media presentation)

sph 3y ago

Timely post. I was planning on spending the day researching gamification applied to healthy habits and/or abandoning unhealthy ones. Anyone has any pointer? Bonus if it's RuneScape-style gamification (exponential XP curve, rewarding yourself every level up, build on the assumption that growth in life is a very long grind like maxing a RS character, made of small steps)

Wurlitzer 3y ago
Habitica

florg 3y ago

The article also reminded me of this Charlie Munger quote: “It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.” Sometimes not doing something stupid is at once easier and harder than trying to get into a good habit.

vkolencik 3y ago

The same point expressed beautifully by Jocko Willink: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyMEQMt6yAw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyMEQMt6yAw

PaulHoule 3y ago

I think it’s going to come out eventually that obesity is not a failure of willpower but a derangement of your metabolism caused by some environmental chemical such as PFAS, glyphosate, etc.

CyberDildonics 3y ago
What evidence makes you think that instead of the idea that sugar and sugar addiction is a major cause of obesity? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  Obesity rates rise sharply circa 1980, when the deregulatory climate became entrenched in the US and UK and there is a proliferation of new chemicals. You might say corn syrup became popular then but cane sugar was around long before obesity became epidemic. Dietary and lifestyle interventions notoriously don’t work, or rather they work temporarily. There seems to be a set-point for weight and you just won’t eat enough to go over it and have a very hard time to go under it. That set point seems to have gone up. Here are some reviews https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-pharmtox-010818-021304 https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-pharmtox-0... https://academic.oup.com/endo/article/161/3/bqaa024/5739626 https://academic.oup.com/endo/article/161/3/bqaa024/5739626 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3076189/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3076189/
  - CyberDildonics 3y ago
    Obesity rates rise sharply circa 1980 This is explained directly in the video I linked. Cane sugar is more expensive and less consistent commodity while corn syrup is cheap and consistent. Fat became demonized from bad science and sugar was added to almost everything. Dietary and lifestyle interventions notoriously don’t work They absolutely work individually. If someone changes their diet to cut out sugar they lose weight very consistently. Expecting that of people is not a systemic solution however. Watch the video I linked instead of trying to explain everything with looser correlations.

musebox35 3y ago

This seems like a specific application of the "inverted thinking/inversion" mentality. I once came across a post on this but can not find it now. I think it was about this article: https://fs.blog/inversion/ https://fs.blog/inversion/ Edit - Or this one: https://jamesclear.com/inversion https://jamesclear.com/inversion

lo_zamoyski 3y ago

Indeed. And I think a good term here is "moral failure", which is exactly what the traditional meaning of "sin" is, i.e., doing something you shouldn't, that you know, to some degree, that you shouldn't (culpability is determined by the degree to which you understand you are doing something wrong, since understanding is a prerequisite for consent). And small sins are gateways to still greater sins. Indulge them enough, rationalize your indulgence, and you will slowly habituate indulgence and corrupt yourself and shift your moral Overton window. You become what you repeatedly do. Sinning, in fact, corrupts the intellect and so it quite literally dulls your mind to reality over time. Why? Because in order to choose against what you know is the good decision, you have to turn your mind away from reality, from the truth. Do this often enough and it becomes a habit of blinding the mind to enable doing what you shouldn't. A blinded mind is degraded, worse at grasping reality, and this makes it even easier to commit still greater evil as it has become worse at determining what is objectively good. A downward spiral. This is why a habit of self-discipline is important. What we call "self-denial" is really the practice of depriving yourself of what you desire that you know you should not desire inappropriately. The obvious example here is food, but it applies generally. Food, as such, is good. However, if I know that I've eaten enough, but an unruly desire for food surfaces, perhaps for food I know is bad for me, denying or repressing that desire is good. One of the purposes of fasting is actually the disciplining of the appetite for food. Consistent practice of self-denial has the effect of regulating the appetite and strengthening the dominion of reason over it, which develops one's integrity. Over time, that unruly desire, ruled over and purified by reasoned discipline, will better conform to the rational order, i.e., what is objectively good. Note how people who indulge their hunger against their own good only become more voracious eaters. They may even become disordered eaters (e.g., bulimia). Rewarding an inordinate (or disordered) desire only reinforces it. Now consider how vicious, destructive, and irrational our consumerist culture is. It thrives on mindless and degrading indulgence of any and all desires. This is not the way.

ergonaught 3y ago

The habit to form is “making wise choices”. We dramatize and complicate this mostly because it is stimulating to do so, which gets reinforced via confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, etc. We also seem to enjoy moralizing what is “wise” for other people more than keeping our attention where it belongs. It can be as basic as forming the habit of asking whether you’ll be thankful you did XYZ when you’re at the end of your life. Sometimes that’s going to be a “yes”, even for “unwise” choices, but most people who actually engage with this will find that most of the honest answers are “no”. It’s not new or revolutionary or particularly insightful or easily productized so it keeps having to be rediscovered.

germandiago 3y ago

100% agree.

tgv 3y ago

That title: how is excellence a habit? You can't excel without consistent practice (unless it's a completely new field, possibly), but that doesn't make it a habit. The reverse doesn't hold. While failure may also be lack of habit. Clickbait is a habit, I suppose.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

jschveibinz 3y ago

Potentially interesting to some readers: “The Handbook of Self-Regulation”, Baumeister and Vohs http://ndl.ethernet.edu.et/bitstream/123456789/28342/1/162.pdf.pdf http://ndl.ethernet.edu.et/bitstream/123456789/28342/1/162.p...

goatkey 3y ago
This looks really great. Thank you for sharing
trollerator23 3y ago
Baumeister has a lot of great research.

blueyes 3y ago

I find Andreas's short non-technical posts to be fairly unenlightening, and am consistently surprised to see them attract so much attention on HN. The information value here is low.

jrvarela56 3y ago
This is good writing. Highlights a very important concept in very few words. I am thankful for the reminder.
markusstrasser 3y ago
+1
m3kw9 3y ago
I find the opposite, I find myself saying “I like this format”, because he boiled it down and I can extrapolate and understand just by reflecting on the simple ideas he put out.
strikelaserclaw 3y ago
maybe its good to have a reminder of obvious information which is vital once in a while
passion__desire 3y ago
Sometimes it's just that you need to be reminded of what you already know. Taking your own advice and all that.
OldManRyan 3y ago
I enjoy them. It's a paragraph or so of easily digestible information. Not everyone has read something like Atomic Habits so the value is relative. Worst case scenario it acts as an excuse to kick off discussion.
fsociety 3y ago
Perhaps it’s not meant for you. Does not mean it’s not meant for others.
3y ago

adamsmith143 3y ago

Didn't Edison fail like >2000 times when creating the lightbulb? Seems like a "habit" of failure... /s

pxeger1 3y ago
I wouldn't say those are 2000 failures, because the point is that you learn from them each time. Also building a light bulb that doesn't work is really not an error, that's the whole idea of iteration.

bsuvc 3y ago

Pertaining to habits, this stuck with me from James Clear's Atomic Habits [1]: > Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your identity. This is why habits are crucial. [1] https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits

stanislavb 3y ago
Such a good quote. Worth remembering.
sebmellen 3y ago
I wrote something similar a while back before reading Atomic Habits. Not as eloquent, but the gist is the same :) https://www.sebastianmellen.com/post/2020/how-are-you-really-voting/ https://www.sebastianmellen.com/post/2020/how-are-you-really...
croes 3y ago
The problem is you don't know the result of your actions. Many bad things happened because of good intentions and vice versa I remember a story about a neo nazi who travelled to Africa to buy weapons and felt in live with a black woman.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- vorpalhex 3y ago
  But usually you do. Like obviously there are edge cases, but for the most part consequences aren't a surprise. Eat too much, you get fat. Fail to work out, your body goes to hell. Fail to sleep and your mind goes.
  - croes 3y ago
    It not that simple. Eat healthy and you become obsessed with it and get a eating disorder. Work out, get injured, need pain killers, get addicted. In hindsight it's easy to spot your mistakes. Should have turned left instead of right.

23B1 3y ago

'Failure' is when the whole system crashes. Andreas is really talking about small setbacks that lead to failure. And I think its better to embrace Samuel Beckett's mantra: "Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better.” It's arguably the core tenet of agile/lean anyway. Measure, learn, improve. If you're taking those single steps backwards and using them to make two steps forward, that's the opposite of failure.

m3kw9 3y ago

This is the basis of ignorance or no self awareness, you go on autopilot on what feels great at the moment

xorvoid 3y ago

I’m continually struck by how brave Andreas is for talking about his addiction problems out in public. In most every interview he leads with it when he could just easily say a vague: “I found myself with a lot of free time”. Addiction can come with a LOT of shame baggage. To embrace vulnerability over it is quite substantial. Thank you Andreas for being a positive example for the world! Keep up the great work!

ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
I think if more people were vulnerable, the world would be a kinder place. I also wish more CEOs were vulnerable. They are forced to "show strength" and "not complain" especially if they are a billionaire. But it would really show how much their lives are a mixed bag and we all face challenges and try to figure it out.
- MicropenisMike 3y ago
  Unfortunately vulnerability is among the first things to be exploited, just take a look at any advertisement.
  - blastro 3y ago
    human CVE
- erikpukinskis 3y ago
  > They are forced to "show strength" and "not complain" I wonder about this. Sometimes I think that is the job of a CEO: to put on a good face and keep and maintain “The Plan Is Gonna Work” vibes. Every CEO I’ve worked under—no matter how compassionate they were on a personal level—has had a policy of absolutely crushing voices of dissent. Maybe not immediately, but within a couple quarters. At least when the dissent was regarding things that the CEO felt were not something they could address on the current roadmap. I’ve come to appreciate that this attitude may be necessary… that companies (with headcounts in the 50-500 range at least) cannot afford to have some of their people pulling in a different direction than their roadmap. And that people who will do that must be excised. But your comment makes me wonder… is that the only way? I think maybe a company like Valve lets their employees pull in different directions, and also then just allows them to be starved of resources. Which maybe is effectively the same? Or maybe is an innovation on the standard CEO model?

robinduckett 3y ago

Positive habit forming is incredibly hard to do. Negative habit forming is easy. Being “aware” of this fact is not enough to prevent bad habit forming.

skapadia 3y ago

I love listening to Guy Raz's "How I Built This" podcast - a common element in almost every success story is the number of failures it took to reach success. Failure, the ability to keep working / pivot through failures, and being okay with failure seem to be requirements to succeeding. Failure is literally a key ingredient to success.

euix 3y ago

It's very honest of him to breakdown how he makes his living on SerenityOS - really enjoyed that blog post, helps give people an idea of how a very technically saavy person can make it in today's world as a "nomad".

tristor 3y ago

Agreed, I have a history of being a bit of a shopaholic (and being overweight). I've vacillated between periods of being debt-free and periods of indebtedness, I've vacillated between periods of being in relatively good shape and periods of weight gain. None of these circumstances, good or bad, happened overnight, they were the accumulation of many small daily decisions, often over years. When I was in the peak shape of my life (178 and stacked), it was following being in the worst condition in my life (315), after more than 7 years of constant careful attention to my calorie intake, every other day exercise, and meticulously recording it all so I could keep myself honest. It didn't evaporate overnight either, I was able to maintain a good state of health without being so controlled while I was traveling, but once the pandemic happened and I became sedentary my loss of control over my eating caught up to me over the next 14 months and I gained nearly 40 pounds back prior to getting myself back under control. Now I'm on that journey again back to a healthier weight. The things we do every day, the small choices we consistently make, these form the habits of our lives. I have good habits and I have bad habits, and it's a consistent struggle for me (and likely everyone) to overcome our bad habits and turn them into good habits. Some of these habits, including my relationship with food, came from my environment as a child, so the work of a lifetime forming them is often difficult to overcome, but it's never impossible.

basq 3y ago
I am similar wrt to bodyfat fluctuations, but interestingly enough, it did happen to me overnight. During the pandemic I reached my lowest bf% ever, single digits, despite gyms being closed. It was after things began to open back up in summer/fall '21 that, as I started to get back into the gym, I allowed myself to "eat instinctively" and went from 160-190 in a month. The weight managed to stabilize but still slowly go up, eventually reaching in the 200's. I was hitting the weight racks but struggling to keep my weekly caloric intake in a deficit. There's a lot more to the story in terms of what I did and learned, but in short, calorie estimates online were often over-prescribing my TDI which was a lot closer to my BMR. I now eat 600 less than my BMR every week and that's about 1.5 lbs/week lost. I'm still hitting the gym and getting 1g protein /lb of lean body mass so I am still managing to put on muscle despite being in a deficit. But ultimately, it will have taken me 2 years of meticulous, dedicated calorie and macro tracking and diet modulation to undo that single month of damage, and return to my previous bf%. Although I have dealt with the frustration of impatience, I am finally on track and expect to hit my goals in October/November.

SanderNL 3y ago

I found it interesting to learn about the etymology of the word "character". It comes to us from Latin which took it from the Greek (χᾰρᾰκτήρ) which comes from kharasso (χαράσσω) - I scratch or engrave. Our character can be thought of as the result of a long process of engraving or scratching. I tend to see it as a solid metal shield full of scratches from long battles. The resulting grooves tend towards virtue or vice. A sustained habit of wise choices makes it easier to do the right thing - even when it is hard - when the time comes and it will come. A marriage, a deathbed, a career. Life has its fair share of hard choices and having grooves in your soul that guide your choices towards the virtuous helps immensely. That's also useful to know for when you have unimportant tasks to complete. For some people this may comprise the majority of their career and/or life. However, those "unimportant" tasks still scratch your soul and those scratches ultimately matter. Even seemingly mundane things like taking out the garbage can be done with virtue in mind. I'm fun at parties by the way.

squarepizza 3y ago
> Even seemingly mundane things like taking out the garbage can be done with virtue in mind. Poet Jane Hirshfield, reflecting on her time at a monastery that ritualized waking up at ~0300 by splashing freezing water on one's face, said that her training was reducible to being more mindful when doing the dishes.
akprasad 3y ago
For a similar idea from another culture, see the ancient definitions of karma: Now as a man is like this or like that, according as he acts and according as he behaves, so will he be; a man of good acts will become good, a man of bad acts, bad; he becomes pure by pure deeds, bad by bad deeds; And here they say that a person consists of desires, and as is his desire, so is his will; and as is his will, so is his deed; and whatever deed he does, that he will reap. — Brihadaranyaka Upanishad
- EugeneOZ 3y ago
  oligarchs who were killing, stealing, raping and betraying their whole lives, now are laughing on this joke so hard, on their super-yachts.

999900000999 3y ago

The biggest source of drama in my life has been other people. Particularly other people who aren't living right. Past 25 and doesn't have or trying to get a stable job. Carefully evaluate if you want that person in your life. Misery loves company, the wrong type of people will bring you down and laugh when they do so. Likewise, people with stable lives can and often will lift you up.

fyuhuji 3y ago

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767664386 3y ago

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767664386 3y ago

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slashdev 3y ago

Jocko Willink has a great quote on this subject: Rome wasn't built in a day. Everyone knows that. It took hundreds of years for Rome to reach its peak. But Rome also didn't fall in a day. It also took time, hundreds of years, for Rome to decay and fall apart. He goes on to say that each day we're either improving or decaying, either getting a little better or getting a little worse. Those little things add up over time to make a big difference in our lives.

mylons 3y ago

the author is describing self medication as incremental failure. i think this is a mindset that can lead to more. in those moments you’re seeking relief, and viewing it as failure can just perpetuate shame and creates a vicious cycle.

croes 3y ago

hindsight is 20/20

arnejenssen 3y ago

Excellent! Via negativa is a useful tool. Instead of thinking about what to add, via negativa is about what to remove.

zackmorris 3y ago

IMHO there's a level of understanding beyond this, which might be called grace. I identify as a lifelong failure, but I no longer place blame on specifics like addiction or body weight or relationship issues. The truth of my existence is that the world is really messed up, but also beautiful despite the dysfunction. And I'm grateful for the adversity which woke me out of the fantasies which distracted me throughout so much of my life and added to the suffering of others. Loosely that means that every time I took a drink, there was a reason, like maybe I was lonely because I was rejected by someone. Maybe I was fat because I was too broke to take care of myself. Maybe I was mean to my partners because I was projecting my own frustrations. Now I look at life more like a game. I'm drawn to fringe ideas and projects with an overwhelming likelihood of failure. I've been through the ringer so many times that I'm more of a loosely held together hodgepodge of components than a coherent identity. But I keep showing up. I'm hardened from adversity but I've alchemized that into softness and an infinite well of empathy for others struggling with the human condition. I cheer inside when the meekest among us speak truth to power. I live in service to others now, who are an aspect of myself.

norir 3y ago
You may be interested in Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil which takes a more mystical approach to these ideas.
Zetice 3y ago
This ideology takes a good idea and pushes it too far. There isn’t a lot of value in seriously considering oneself as a “failure”, and rarely is it actually true. Perspective to recognize the lack of any such way to measure outcomes so booleanly is probably more valuable than choosing to adopt failure as your default state.

pseudostem 3y ago

Since a lot of people are talking about themselves so openly, I feel a compulsion too. I hide behind perfection. Learning maths, programming, sports, health. Of course I need a perfect OS, perfect programming paradigm, perfect book, the best music learning method, greatest body improvement program. Perfect is the enemy of good. It's something I grapple with on a daily basis.

nwienert 3y ago

I think the new generation of weight-loss drugs are going to be a revolution because they give you power over bad habits, wholesale. ICYMI: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2023/05/ozempic-addictive-behavior-drinking-smoking/674098/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2023/05/ozempic-a... Anecdotally, they really work. It’s not just your food cravings that are mostly stopped in their tracks. But in some miraculous fashion it seems all your “bad” cravings are squashed, while your good ones (side projects, chores, work) stay intact. The only good one I can see slightly down is sex, but as well with that it does also feel like you have a lot more control in that area. I think we’ll eventually see them as first line prescriptions for all types of addicts. It’s part of the reason I sort of want to throw some money into their stock, but then again it’s hard to know how that all turns out as multiple manufacturers have these drugs and there are many more analogues in the pipelines. But I find it so interesting, as it really upsets my notion of morality. Yes, resisting your temptations without drugs seems like the obvious better world. But our modern world is simply overflowing with temptation. Fast food, advertisements, sugar in everything, caffeine in everything, drugs everywhere. It was far easier to be ascetic when there just wasn’t that much around. But suddenly on one of these drugs you feel… powerful, in a way. Like you’ve gained a superpower. It’s a really weird experience, and I don’t hate it.

vorpalhex 3y ago
unpaywalled link: https://archive.is/7mxOi https://archive.is/7mxOi
abnercoimbre 3y ago
This is fascinating. Do you know if these anti-addiction effects have only been studied with the weight-loss drugs? I'm too skinny (133 lbs) to take them, but am interested in the rest of it.
- nwienert 3y ago
  I think at the lowest dose you could still maintain weight while getting the effects.

hotdogscout 3y ago

I think failure is a better groomer for success than success. Every truly great achievement of my life came from prior humiliation from failure.

nektro 3y ago

"The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried."

zh3 3y ago

> We often hear that making small incremental improvements every day can lead to great things. This popular piece of advice rings true... A journey of 10,000 miles starts with a single step. You can only cross a chasm with a mighty leap. YMMV.

wonderwonder 3y ago

Andrew Tate (I am in no way condoning his character) has an interesting video where he talks about discipline vs motivation. If you need to be motivated to do something then its probably not going to last, discipline is what makes things last. Combined with patience is how we see real change and results. If we wake up at 5am to go to the gym, many of us are motivated when we set the alarm but that motivation is gone when the alarm rings, only discipline can make you get up day after day instead of hitting the snooze button. This applies to all aspects of life. Its the reason so many new years resolutions die after a few weeks. Why diets fail. Why the gym is packed in January and back to normal in March. If you need to be motivated to succeed, you will likely fail, only discipline will get you through both the good and bad times. Discipline is what separates the great from the average or even good.

stillbourne 3y ago

Can't have excellence without a shit ton of failure

desireco42 3y ago

This went dark quickly... I hope author is in good shape and drug free now.