New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Does learning self-improvement techniques help?
Ask HN: Does learning self-improvement techniques help?
2 by SeanAnderson | 0 comments on Hacker News.
I'm starting to develop some software as a hobby. I've been in a rut for a few months and usually having an interesting side-project gets me fired up again. I'm developing a virtual pet, and pairing it with some lore, gamification, and other bits, to get myself checking in daily, practicing mindfulness, journaling, and meditating. It's gonna be like if a cyberpunk aquarium became your therapist! Anyway. Gaining a deep understanding of this problem space seemed important to me for two reasons. It's necessary to be customer-obsessed to build good software and, because I'm in a rut myself, I felt I stood to personally benefit from gaining a deeper understanding of techniques used to bring people out of ruts. I'm not a stranger to the self-improvement space. I've read The Power of Habit, Atomic Habits, Thinking: Fast & Slow, and some others. I've attempted to apply these to my own life to varying degrees of success. I definitely experience a burst of motivation from having been inspired from the reading, or perhaps the reading is a side-effect of being in a burst of motivation, but, either-way and long-term, all I feel I come away with is a deeper awareness of how my mind works and not long-lasting, personal changes. So, after reading and researching these areas more for my software, I began to hear this nagging voice in the back of my mind. It said that learning about self-improvement is a trap. That it feels good and is satiating, but is a poor and misleading substitute for action. And I think I agree? I feel well-versed in techniques, but have seemingly only gained the ability to watch myself fail with a deeper understanding of why humans generally fail. It's not that I'm worried I'll continue to slip. I'm confident I'll bounce back at some point and trend positively for months or years, but I am starting to worry that my software will fail to achieve its goal. If learning about self-improvement hasn't permanently affected me then perhaps doubling down and trying to affect change through software is fool-hearty? Or maybe I have improved, but am blind to it from my own perspective? Or maybe others meaningfully improve after self-help education and those people would write better software? Or perhaps there's no amount of learning that results in self-mastery and the belief that increased awareness reduces the friction between inaction and action is invalid? Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Learning is helpful, right? But it's not action. Is it possible to teach the skill of taking action on one's awareness?
2 by SeanAnderson | 0 comments on Hacker News.
I'm starting to develop some software as a hobby. I've been in a rut for a few months and usually having an interesting side-project gets me fired up again. I'm developing a virtual pet, and pairing it with some lore, gamification, and other bits, to get myself checking in daily, practicing mindfulness, journaling, and meditating. It's gonna be like if a cyberpunk aquarium became your therapist! Anyway. Gaining a deep understanding of this problem space seemed important to me for two reasons. It's necessary to be customer-obsessed to build good software and, because I'm in a rut myself, I felt I stood to personally benefit from gaining a deeper understanding of techniques used to bring people out of ruts. I'm not a stranger to the self-improvement space. I've read The Power of Habit, Atomic Habits, Thinking: Fast & Slow, and some others. I've attempted to apply these to my own life to varying degrees of success. I definitely experience a burst of motivation from having been inspired from the reading, or perhaps the reading is a side-effect of being in a burst of motivation, but, either-way and long-term, all I feel I come away with is a deeper awareness of how my mind works and not long-lasting, personal changes. So, after reading and researching these areas more for my software, I began to hear this nagging voice in the back of my mind. It said that learning about self-improvement is a trap. That it feels good and is satiating, but is a poor and misleading substitute for action. And I think I agree? I feel well-versed in techniques, but have seemingly only gained the ability to watch myself fail with a deeper understanding of why humans generally fail. It's not that I'm worried I'll continue to slip. I'm confident I'll bounce back at some point and trend positively for months or years, but I am starting to worry that my software will fail to achieve its goal. If learning about self-improvement hasn't permanently affected me then perhaps doubling down and trying to affect change through software is fool-hearty? Or maybe I have improved, but am blind to it from my own perspective? Or maybe others meaningfully improve after self-help education and those people would write better software? Or perhaps there's no amount of learning that results in self-mastery and the belief that increased awareness reduces the friction between inaction and action is invalid? Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Learning is helpful, right? But it's not action. Is it possible to teach the skill of taking action on one's awareness?
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