In the time you set aside each day to work your ass off, ignore anything that makes you consider stopping.
Self Help
12
Mar 09
to make a change
Two stories that I know I should be learning from:
- Paul Graham on overcoming distractions. By creating an Internet-Only computer.
Quote:
I now leave wifi turned off on my main computer except when I need to transfer a file or edit a web page, and I have a separate laptop on the other side of the room that I use to check mail or browse the web. (Irony of ironies, it’s the computer Steve Huffman wrote Reddit on. When Steve and Alexis auctioned off their old laptops for charity, I bought them for the Y Combinator museum.)My rule is that I can spend as much time online as I want, as long as I do it on that computer. And this turns out to be enough.
24
Feb 09
Motivate yourself with “loss aversion”
I really enjoyed this story on “Prospect Theory,” or the idea that loss aversion can be an effective motivator in goals related to health improvement like weight loss and smoking cessation:
“What we know about incentives is that people work a lot harder to avoid losing $10 than they will work to gain $10,” explains Ayres. “So something that’s framed as a loss is really effective at changing behavior.”
Related to that question I was asked sometime back: I wonder if a gym membership might be even more motivating if you received a daily email updating you on the wasted dollars you’d spent by not working out in the last ‘X’ days.
4
Jun 09
difficulty
I remember once having a discussion with a guy who knew a lot about professional basketball. He had read an article from a big sample of NBA players who they felt would be the most formidable one-on-one opponent in the league. The answer was fairly unanimous: Vince Carter. Now that’s surprising. Why Carter and not Kobe Bryant or LeBron James or any number of other, far more accomplished, offensive players? The answer, this guy told me, was the same in nearly every case: “you have no idea how hard it is to do the things that Carter does.”
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