So I'm sitting at home instead of attending a party because I have to
get some work done, work I could and should have done earlier, work
I'd hoped to get done yesterday, work I intended to get done shortly
after getting out of bed many hours ago.
I need to get my career stuff in order. I've come up with lots of
good ideas, written some interesting programs, met some interesting
people, worked on some interesting projects --- but so far utterly
failed to achieve anything significant. At jobs, I've obtained
satisfactory results, results that could be expected, but nothing I'd
call a major achievement.
The last eight months have been a very nice sort of sabbatical ---
I've worked on interesting contract projects, read lots of interesting
books and web pages, baked, pondered, and settled into a new home and
my relationship with my soulmate. But now I'm getting spring fever,
and not for pretty girls. I want to achieve.
I find my achievements limited not by skill, vision, ambition, or
situation --- for I have plenty of undisturbed time, plenty of
resources, plenty of skill, plenty of opportunities, and plenty of
pipe dreams --- but by my own discipline. My time is spent on reading
the news, reading Slashdot, reading my email (endless email!),
chatting with friends on IRC, and occasionally going out to see other
people. This is a very frustrating situation.
I don't know much about how people acquire self-discipline,
unfortunately. I hypothesize that most disciplined people acquire
self-discipline as a set of habits, habits initially fostered by more
primitive means, such as what is now called operant conditioning:
rewards and punishments. From my limited knowledge, it seems to me
that this is the way army boot camps, martial arts schools, and
monasteries foster self-discipline.
I have two difficulties with this approach.
One is that, historically, I have been very resistant to coercion; my
fault of pride contains its redeeming virtue of steadfastness. (Often
steadfastness or stubbornness arising from pride blinds one to the
truth; fortunately, I have observed that I am less prone to this
blindness than most people, although this was not true in my
childhood, and that substantially impeded my learning.)
The other is that knowingly submitting to such a situation, when one
is free to leave at any time, seems to require substantial
self-discipline.
I am reminded of this story John Hall recently posted to FoRK:
Apparently in some periods of Chinese history you could have seen the
following:
4 men are lugging a load using poles. The 5th man holds a whip, using
it on the 4. An example of a slave like situation? Actually, no.
The man with the whip is employed by the other 4. He earns a set wage,
less than the other 4 stand to make if their load is delivered ahead of
schedule. This solves an economic problem. If all 4 work hard, they
all get paid well. If 3 work hard, they all get paid well. But if at
least two other men don't work hard, then your hard work is for nothing.
The best individual strategy is to slack off, while this leads to a bad
group result. Hence hiring the whip wielder makes economic sense.
Should I hire a whip-wielder for myself?
My current strategy is more or less as follows. I will acquire a
workplace. The simple change of setting will help me to escape my
current habits of poor self-discipline; if I can maintain good work
habits in the new place, it will be a major improvement. I will also
eat well; my current diet is far better than it used to be, and this
seems to help a lot.
Beyond that, I don't know where to start. Small victories, perhaps?
A set of self-discipline exercises graded in difficulty from easy to
more difficult as an aid in bootstrapping? I don't know.
--
<kragen@pobox.com> Kragen Sitaker <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
This is exactly how the World Wide Web works: the HTML files are the pithy
description on the paper tape, and your Web browser is Ronald Reagan.
-- Neal Stephenson, at http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning_print.html