IMO this makes the most important point at the very end. “Being disciplined” itself is a consequence of motivation, or is effectively that. Building habits however, requires very little discipline or motivation so long as you build them strategically - I.e. start so small it’d be ridiculous not to do it regardless of how motivated or disciplined you are.
And by “start small” I mean “floss one tooth per night for 3 months to build a flossing habit” small. Let your good habits progressively and slowly consume more time, similar to what bad habits do.
For all intents and purposes you should just assume both discipline and motivation are completely mythical and you should construct a system of high-leverage habits to obviate the need for them. You don’t rise to the level of your talents/motivation/discipline, you fall to the level of your habits.
Individual experiences of ADHD remain varied - it sounds like you have some significant executive dysfunction (I do as well), and it responded well to your medication. I'm really happy for you!
I get so tired of popular wisdom that assumes that all people experience life in essentially the same way, and that the 'recipe for success' should be universal. "Discipline" is a nonsense word to the folks with executive dysfunction, you might as well tell us that the key to personal success is learning how to fly. Everyone else is doing it, so it must be easy - you just need to try harder!
Exactly! I didn't start getting anywhere with anything until I realized that I should ignore what other people told me about getting stuff done. For whatever reason, I don't respond to normal motivators. There are a few giant labels that get slapped onto people to try to make sense of how different peoples' brains work but for a lot of people just fall somewhere in between. I'm not ADHD, but I'm...something. And I think that situation is a lot more common than is commonly acknowledged.
That has been written about quite a bit. Can't remember any of the terms placed on it, but I've seen many Hacker News entries about maximizing that phenomenon.
The phrase coming to mind is productive procrastination.
This isn't easy, but sometimes it works for me. One of the tricks is making sure it really is productive. For example, I work from home so picking up around the house or doing dishes can actually be very productive/helpful for me, but I've definitely found myself bogged down in mindless tasks that didn't really move the needle.
Good luck figuring out the real cause in our modern medical system. I agree though, I think a more holistic approach would benefit most.
Psychiatry and psychology, in my experience, are both just a game of pin the tail on the condition -- simple, vague heuristics are used to diagnose conditions based on patient interviews.
I have ADHD, and during the diagnostic process, I never had a sleep study, any bloodwork drawn, scans, etc.. Could it have been something else? Not like I will ever know.
What's the old say that doctors commonly tote? "When you hear hoof beats, don't look for zebras when there are horses in the room."
It's so damaging because sometimes one needs to be looking for "zebras."
As some with ADHD as well, the medication has helped me concentrate, but doesn't do enough for my executive dysfunction on a larger scale -- I still have a lot difficult focusing, inertia required to start a task, planning, organizing, following through with things, etc..
The medication does wonders for my physical symptoms of hyperactivity, which is justification enough to take them in my opinion.
However, something I have started to learn about stimulant medications are what I consider its true dangers. It's not necessarily dangerous for one's health, at least at therapeutic dosages, but rather it's extremely easy to become overly reliant on these medications, and if/when you stop taking them, lose access to them, etc. then life tends to sucker punch you back into reality -- a life where you can no longer maintain everything you were able to do, but yet the expectations are still as if you are firing on all cylinders.
I feel like I am living out the plot of Flowers for Algernon, and honestly, it's somewhat bothersome to me.
I resonate with this a LOT. Been on and off stimulants over the last decade. Just recently gave up 30mg daily XR cold turkey after dealing with too many yo-yo accessibility issues and hating the way my life was being essentially dictated by my access to medication. It's been 2 months now and I am finally starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but a substantial amount of my cognitive energy every day is dedicated to just managing my attention and the work that I am doing. It sucks.
Are you talking about issues accessing medication? If so, I completely agree. The system is rather difficult and unforgiving to navigate -- that alone makes deters many from even attempting to get treatment, and I do not blame them one bit.
I take IR instead of XR, and I am about to be in a similar boat as you.
How bad is the process of going cold-turkey? How long does the Hell that I am in for last? I have serious concerns for keeping my current job without access to medication, but part of me wants to know if I am just being overly anxious and hyperbolic, or if I am actually am screwed.
I think it varies wildly from person to person. When I've quit stimulants in the past it was really just a week or two before I was close to what felt like my baseline. The hardest part for me was the daytime sleepiness.
do you mind sharing which medication? I'm on adderall and while it can help me stay on a specific task, and has changed my life drastically, It does nothing for me as far as forming habits.
The meds won't help you "show up" after the euphoria phase of the first week. But while you are now able to stay on task and complete it, you still have to pull yourself from the couch to the task that needs doing.
I have been medicated for a year now, and the common advice of "just do 5 minutes and nothing more" to get myself started now actually works. I still hate doing chores (I am procrastinating rn because my flat needs some cleaning), but if I start, you better believe they will get done and I might do a little more just because now I have dopamine to tell me "this is good stuff you're doing, carry on", whereas before I was fighting every second the urge to just leave the thing halfway and go do something else. Life was hard.
I'm on lisdexamfetamine FWIW.
EDIT: the dopaminergic system is exactly how you form habits. When taking amphetamines, you have more dopamine, thus habits are much easier to create. Both the good and the bad ones. You just have to fight against the lifelong learned helplessness that effort is not worth it. That takes a long while to rewire. Ok, time to close HN and clean my flat.
> The meds won't help you "show up" after the euphoria phase of the first week.
As some comments above mentioned everyone is affected differently. I have been on adderall for well over a decade, and constantly for the past 5-6 years in which I formed habits and routines that never stuck when I would go off and on due to hating the 'blunting' effect I felt it had on my creativity and personality.
So a couple months ago when I couldn't find them in stock anywhere I figured no big deal, I could keep doing what I was doing and maybe I was using the meds as a crutch anyhow. I was hoping I would get my old 'fun' personally back to go along with my new older-wiser-mature-self that had good work habits and routines. It's been such a complete disaster I had to ask my doctor to lower my dose because that was the only strength one pharmacy had left out of over 20 stores I called, and had them search other branches. Now I have to choose which days to take them because I have to take twice as many to get the workable dose. It sucks.
I don't think I'm suffering from emotional and creative blunting, but I take a relatively low dose (20mg + 20mg 6h later), so that it works only when I am good shape and eating well. In fact the better my diet, the stronger it feels.
You have much more experience than me, but I believe with stimulants too low a dose is much better than too high a dose. During titration I tried the dosage immediately after and I was a machine, both in productive output and in emotional bluntness. I could've reached my full potential but honestly, it's not worth it.
Now I feel with good diet, good sleep and a little exercise I'm operating at 70% of my capacity, while the rest of my life I was running at 20%. This is good enough for me. When I'm off the meds I can see only negatives: hungry, horny, restless, bored, anxious. Perhaps a little more lighthearted, to be honest.
I agree eating right and exercise makes a huge difference and is working well enough right now by taking meds every other day and making sure that on those days I follow a good eating and exercise routine because it will help carry over the habit to the next day--not always, but most days.
My problem taking a smaller dose is that it puts me to sleep. I sometimes split my original dose to use as a sleep aid because I get great sleep on it. Falling asleep on adderall was not fun to tell my doc or the pharmacist when I first started on adderall. I was recommended for more screening. It still makes me tired for 10-15mins as the first dose kicks in.
Lighthearted is a good word to describe the differences I feel as well. Though I am quite hyperactive, maybe they are related--bouncy and lighthearted off and matching the calm of the Vulcans on them.
I've definitely experienced the small dose sleep aid thing. Noticed it from the caffeine I was self-medicating with before being diagnosed. I've assumed that what's happening is that it's suppressing the distractions that are keeping me up.
Some pharmacies will always tell you they're out of stock to see if you're willing to wait to order them, because they're afraid of facilitating abuse. Rite aid is notorious for that.
> but if I start, you better believe they will get done
I have a note titled "ADHD med cleaning spree" where nearly immediately after taking meds I start to realize how messy my surroundings are and just start cleaning because quite magically, cleaning is now just cleaning.
These "you need discipline, not motivation" remarks are as superficial as the cheap motivational ones.
They fail to adress documented disorders, like ADHD. And also the fact that a huge chunk of the population had its dopaminergic system completely hijacked by artificial stimulants, ranging from food, drugs, social media, etc.
They're so superficial that their answer would be: "you can circumvent your dopaminergic mess with discipline."
Ah, but then you need to remember to make the checklist, and you need to remember to check it. If I get past the first step, I invariably fall afoul of the second.
I have a folder right next to my bed. The only thing I need to remember is to grab the damn thing when I get up. I'll say it's a 90% success rate :)
But more importantly, you'll need to work on your assessment of "invariably". If you think all efforts are predestined to fail, they will. Get help if you can't do it alone.
I agree. In the past, I’ve tried to just be disciplined, stop procrastinating, and push through no matter what, and it lead to horrible burnout where I spent weeks/months being fairly ineffective. If you’re not sleeping at all at night and can’t think straight during the day, even for a couple minutes, you’re simply not going to be effective. You’re also liable to make really bad decisions that will drag on you even after you’ve recovered.
Having a routine though, even a very flexible routine, has been very effective. Things become automatic. Settling into an effective routing often involves not worrying too much about discipline, though. It's easier for people to get to the gym everyday if the goal is "get to the gym, and do something" than it is if the goal is "get to the gym and do a rigorous 2 hour workout." Small steps and environmental changes, as well as not stressing over what's optimal, have been the most effective approaches in my experience.
As someone who also has ADHD, making the gym locker room a step on my daily trip home from work and the place I shower was what finally got me working out regularly. Still, some days I show up, shower, and leave, but most days (3-4 days a week) I'll be able to convince myself to go do a workout, since I'm there anyway.
Motivation is a weird thing. Or maybe it's several things shoved into one word.
A very common mistake is to procrastinate doing something until you feel motivated. Our minds often doesn't work that way.
But if you start the task without any motivation, or expectation it will get done, you'll often find yourself motivated and making progress within minutes.
In reality, once you put some effort in, that can make you motivated.
I wish I could learn this faster. I can't even count the number of things that I've procrastinated and burned hours or days of brain focus on avoiding that ended up taking 10 or 15 minutes to just accomplish once I finally started.
Me too. What's helped me a lot is to just relentlessly make "what counts as starting" smaller and smaller until it's doable. Where "file taxes" is very very hard, "look through email and remember name of my accountant" (and many other TINY tasks...) is much more doable!
I've noticed a lot of times what appears to be procrastination is actually uncertainty as to how to proceed. The mind recoils from it's own inadequacy and just labels the whole thing "bad". An advantage of breaking it down as you say is that it pushes the uncertainty a step further away. You may not know what's required to do your taxes, but you know what's required to search your email. Many times, the way to perform the next step is produced by performing the current one (e.g. your accountant tells you what documents are needed) so the overall task is not nearly as painful as you anticipated.
these tasks are similar to the 'intellgent dumbing down' talked about in Getting Things Done, no wonder they work!
Having said that...I'm not diagnosed as ADHD but I definitely feel I exhibit executive dysfunction symptoms, and one of my siblings was diagnosed, so I'm feeling confident I'm ADHD adjacent at least...and just trying to implement Getting Things Done helped me immensely. Not only does it help with having a less stressful day (no longer do I have "what am I missing? what am I forgetting? Ahhh, angst!" feelings), it also helps me to just stay on task and/or when I switch tasks, know that I have the confidence to come back to wherever I was.
IMHO the problem is that there are so many interesting and semi-intrinsically motivating things that it's very hard to shut them out and "put some effort into" whatever you are "supposed to be doing".
Yep. I will say though, its always possible, barring any sort of medical reasons, to get disciplined.
I've had months where I go to the gym and then something happens and its easy to not go. There's nothing on this earth stopping me from picking that back up, other than myself... which reminds me, I need to start going again. Crazy thing is you _know_ you'll feel better but getting up and going can be a drag sometimes.
>Crazy thing is you _know_ you'll feel better but getting up and going can be a drag sometimes.
Yeah, that’s because most of your agency is hooked up to the monkey brain. You’re not really fighting anything, your apparent incentives just don’t drive you to go.
He mentions building habits in part 2 of the article, using the boiling the frog analogy (imploring the reader to use it for good instead).
My question, though, is how does a good habit expand into a great habit, without motivation? For your tooth example, once you start flossing you might as well floss all your teeth. The upfront cost of getting started with the floss is the worst part of it, but once you're there it's easy. This isn't true for all habits though. For many it's easy to just bail out fast. If I started doing 5 push-ups a day will I eventually do 100 and then 1000? Or would I settle somewhere on a mediocre range because it's easy to stop? Is there some sort of recursion or positive feedback loop that kicks in that rescues me from mediocrity if all I have is discipline and not motivation?
If you start with 5 push-ups a day, you'll hit your limits fast just increasing push-ups by one a day, so spread out your improvements by increasing in several exercises, adding more if necessary. Not to do all of them at once every day, but ones to switch between daily. I started something like this years ago, and I'm still keeping up on it. If life happens and I have to take a break from it, I restart it later and reduce my goals so that it doesn't seem so bad trying to jump back into a routine I was maximizing earlier.
The key was to make it a habit I do every day, like brushing my teeth. If I've had a bad day and miss doing my "workout routine" (such that it is, I'm no Arnold), it feels weird to miss one and I look forward to doing it the next day. So in that way once you've made it to a certain point it's self-fulfilling.
Atomic Habits is good. I personally found much more success with BJ Fogg’s “Tiny Habits” regime. He has a book by that title (which I’ve not actually read) and lots of resources online.
It’s been a while since I read Atomic Habits but I came away with the view he was missing (or just not sufficiently emphasizing) something.
IIRC Atomic was still making things too “big,” i.e. the habit should be so small it fetches accusations of insanity by bystanders and your celebration, accordingly, can be ridiculously small too (just physically smiling induces a tiny reward, which is all that’s necessary for a sufficiently small preceding habit).
Also he allows the option of “time and place” to trigger habits which IMO is very bad advice. 100% of new habits should be placed directly behind an already-established habit, and specifically one that’s already resilient to variations in time-and-place. Takes a while to think of these habits (because they’re truly automatic) but you already have at least a dozen and identifying them is half the trick.
Not sure I’ve seen a breakdown, been studying the format to try to replicate in my own writing. Currently applying to a technical book, we’ll see :)
The format follows what I’ve seen called as the English Essay style (as opposed to European style) – you start with a personal story, yours or a character’s. You use that story as a narrative device to make your point. The character works as a sort of template of the reader. For books, using multiple stories – up to 2 per chapter - works best. Weaving the character stories in and out throughout the book creates a sense of continuity and makes it easier for people to follow.
Whenever you want to make a point, you show the point or at least the situation with a character story. Real stories work best. You also lay out the point explicitly. The reader should never be made to guess. Setting it up as a punchline works, but use this sparingly because, again, readers don’t like to guess.
The whole book should have one, at most two, key points you want to make. It should be reducible to a pithy tweet. The rest of the book is there to make the point sink in for the reader.
The difference between making a point and conveying a point is crucial here.
I have yet to write a bestseller so I am likely missing some ingredients. This format applied to blogs/emails has worked great. People love it.
If you’re aware of other notable examples, would be interested in links to them.
As for my guess, it’s at a best seller format, it’s 100s of tiny chapters, which makes the readers feel like they’re rapidly discovering new information.
Appears writing style you’re referring to might be called “Quest-based technical narrative” — where the author mixes in a topical plot to provide context and maintain read interest.
While I am unable to recall the name of the book, recall a book on chaining hacking exploits that walks through a a fictional story while weaving in technical details.
I don't like recent political spins and ramblings of Jordan Peterson (basically very pro-Putin and pro-Trump last time I checked, and stopped cold turkey with him after that), but as a psychologist he made tons of excellent and practical remarks before that.
One of them which sticks with me is about fighting addictions and habits - every time you win this internal fight (go do something unwanted, don't light up that cigarette or drink alcohol) you get a bit stronger and addiction gets slightly weaker. Same for habits and defeating procrastination.
The hardest part is the first step, when opposite side (in your own persona) is strongest and it feels its too high a mountain to overcome. With addictions you never chip it away to 0 - that's the unfortunate cold hard truth, but you can chip it away into something you can manage continuously. Good habits are often self-fueling after crossing some threshold, ie exercise and eating healthy.
He was so good when he stuck to psychology. It really sucks, all of these public intellectual types think once they become popular it gives them an easy opportunity to make money by speaking about domains they clearly have no expertise in. As soon as Peterson started talking about religion, philosophy, and various politics, it all went downhill very fast.
I do make an exception with all of that when all the pub science guys shit on religion though. Can't seem to get enough of that even though I'm out of my angsty atheist teenager phase by 20 years
It's just a character trait of pop psychology/motivators/influencers. It's not like 'successfully not doing x makes it easier to permanently stop doing x' is a profound or new idea.
These folks need to feel popular and build a brand and its really hard to just stick with one thing, as it limits your audience, so you grow in to other venues.
Telling people what they want to hear in a nice package that makes them feel smart is a business as old as time. Oprah built a whole empire off of it. The internet has just widened the reach.
This isn't a turn for Jordan Peterson. It's who he's always been, and a lot of people tried to warn you about it 5+ years ago. The only new thing is that he's not trying to dress it up in fake objectivity anymore.
Have you spent any time wondering how those people knew this was coming years ago, but you didn't see it?
Nope. For the same reason I know many people who voted for Trump, and then didn't after four years of him.
They just didn't care to spend more brainpower on the issue than they already had. Most people have better things to do than be the most well-informed voter or investigate the history of the people they see on YouTube.
...start so small it’d be ridiculous not to do it regardless of how motivated or disciplined you are.
And by “start small” I mean “floss one tooth per night for 3 months to build a flossing habit” small...
The idea of doing something every day in a row for 3 months causes me pain and revulsion. If I think about it a bit longer, I I know I would get mad at myself for missing a day, and would get really mad at myself for forgetting for 2 years, and I'm already jumping the gun at trying to avoid setting myself up for failure. I floss my teeth when they feel dirty, anything else seems unsustainable. But maybe that's why I don't have motivation or discipline.
I wish I could build good habits, and getting mad serves no purpose, but it happens. Seeing other people have morning rituals, and mowing their lawn on a schedule, and whatnot seems like a magic trick. I only commented because starting small doesn't make it seem any easier to me, though I do understand that it might help someone else.
> And by “start small” I mean “floss one tooth per night for 3 months to build a flossing habit” small. Let your good habits progressively and slowly consume more time, similar to what bad habits do.
The difficulty here is primarily in initiating the task consistently imo. Once you are already at the point of flossing one tooth there likely isn’t much mental resistance to flossing the others. I think it’s better to do things that lower the resistance to starting the task in the first place as opposed to just making the task smaller.
That's exactly the point: activation energy is the hardest to summon, and once you have it's "easy" to finish the rest of the habit (e.g. floss all your other teeth).
If "floss one tooth" is still too much, go smaller: "take my floss out of the drawer and put it on the counter."
For me I don't believe there's a way to make the activation small enough of a thing that I would be able to consistently do it. If my task were to consistently lift a finger every Monday I don't think I'd be able to do it.
Right, but breaking down tasks after "activating" the task probably isn't very useful. Doing the one tooth thing doesn't really help since once you are already there, the gap between doing that and the rest of the teeth is basically nonexistent. You might as well start off flossing all your teeth if you are able to get to the flossing part.
Breaking down activation energy is also hard. Taking floss out and putting it on the counter feels like it might not be reinforcing enough.
Something more useful might revolve around storing the floss in a more readily available position or using something like floss picks and/or other things that might reduce friction. But ultimately, I think everything eventually boils down to raw discipline.
Doesn't those go hand in hand? You dread starting because you don't want or have the energy to spend 20+ min on it. So you reduce the task to taking 5 seconds and eliminate the reason for it being hard. Say, put on one shoe, if you want to develop the habit of walking.
Well this is kind of "smuggled in." If you are flossing one tooth, you need to have floss readily available. The point is that you are eating the (yes, usually significant) startup cost and that's it. Keep doing that until it's not even a cost for you, then you can start eating into the variable cost of a more complete habit.
As far as knowing to initiate the habit, place it directly behind an already established habit. Flossing is easy since you probably brush your teeth regularly.
I think what I'm trying to say though is that there's no benefit to starting with one tooth if you have already paid that "startup cost". Since at that point the cognitive load of flossing one tooth vs flossing all your teeth is basically nonexistent.
One tooth is strictly less time, less commitment, less cognitive overhead than all your teeth.
Simple as that.
Of course this is just the regime that helped me build 4 or 5 brand new daily habits in under two years, all of which I had tried and failed several times before. YMMV.
> You don’t rise to the level of your talents/motivation/discipline, you fall to the level of your habits.
"The enemy's gate is /down/!" (downward) [1]
That is, orientate yourself such that where you want to go is as easy/automatic as falling.
[1] Ender's Game, and the Ender's Shadow sequence. Though, I wish the catchphrase had used "downward" rather than "down", as the latter is confusingly similar to "has fallen / is breached".
You can think of the habits as the goal, "motivation to build and maintain good habits", which ends up looking like motivation and discipline for more external things. The inner driver though is to maintain good habits.
And by “start small” I mean “floss one tooth per night for 3 months to build a flossing habit” small. Let your good habits progressively and slowly consume more time, similar to what bad habits do.
For all intents and purposes you should just assume both discipline and motivation are completely mythical and you should construct a system of high-leverage habits to obviate the need for them. You don’t rise to the level of your talents/motivation/discipline, you fall to the level of your habits.