In my experience, pleasantness and unpleasantness are day to day feelings that sometimes work in my favor and sometimes don't. Many times I have a responsibility which requires unpleasant things, and it makes it more difficult to do, and might make me unhappy if my happiness is based on daily frustrations and successes. That type of happiness tends to have very little to do with our goals. Since it's also very unpredictable, seeking this form of happiness is elusive and error prone.
Maybe there's a different emotion I could seek in my life. Potentially that feeling of accomplishment. Accomplishing something feels great. A lot of people have realized this, single player video games were based on the idea. It is, however, not hapiness. Happiness comes and goes.
If I allow my happiness to flow and fluctuate and act as it always does, and rather focus on getting that feeling of accomplishment, my attitudes change. When I approach a challenge, I don't focus on whether it will make me happy. When I do that, I think about the immediate perks, but also about all the potential frustrations that accompaygne the task.
So I think about it as accomplishment. If I do this task, I will accomplish something. Taking out the trash, 10 points. I don't care about the actual points I have, as the points aren't what I seek. So I don't even keep track. But as games are goals and games have points, it might be easier to connect in your mind with some points.
Go out running. Don't think about how long you have to run for, or how fast you have to run. Don't even worry about the clothes you're in. Just get on your street, and run in a direction. Any speed. Any pace. Now that you've started, and you've jogged enough to get warmed up, pick an object a short distance away and race to it as fast as you can. When you get there you'll be winded, and tired, and you might even vomit. Vomiting is just some random frustration though, it has nothing to do with the accomplishment that you just ran faster than you have in the past x years.
If you do decide you like accomplishing things, then this pattern of setting goals and reaching them can be done with tasks lists and check boxes. Build a momentum of doing it.
The next step is to align your goals to your dreams. Then take that momentum and checklists, and you'll feel more energy than ever to getting what you want done.
I'm not specifically referring to you keeptrying, I was simply writing some ideas down and ended up switching to second person since it was more natural for me to write that way.
I am also going to point out something else that the author of the article misses that you get.
When I was just out of college, I worked in a cafeteria for a year, serving food. Sometimes I washed dishes (300 people per meal to one dishwasher for dishes and one for pots and pans). One thing I found was that this was boring work, but there were ways I could make it fun. What was my limit in washing dishes? (with the mechanical help, about 450 people per meal before I had to ask for help).
Serving food? I'd identify all the foreign students and try to learn the food terms in as many languages as I could. Cutting turkey with a carving knife for sandwiches? I'd see if I could do as well as a deli slicer in thinness and consistency, as long as I could do it fast enough not to allow a line to form. Heck I even had Saudi students make up signs in Arabic to indicate pork and wine in dishes.
My bosses hated the fact that I played all these games. They also hated the fact that I would step in to help out the lunch cook when needed if it didn't mean totally abandoning my post. They said it wasn't my job and I was helping someone else be lazy. I said I was having fun and improving building skills at the same time. That said more about them than about me.
If there is one thing that has served me well in starting my business it's that approach. There is nothing so dull that it cannot be made a game out of, where I cannot challenge myself to do it better.
I would say though that it is important to have goals that don't always align with your dreams. Sometimes one has to make grunt-work interesting in seemingly meaningless ways, but those ways are never meaningless. For example (when I am living alone, which I sometimes do), I might challenge myself as to how little I can spend on food in a month while eating a healthy diet. Sometimes out of all this some degree of creativity is born, and that makes all the difference. Sometimes that creativity comes back to my business.
And so.....
Self-improvement is not something to be learned from a book. It comes from making actions into challenges, first a few, then many.... until it becomes a habit. When we exercise we get stronger. When we exercise our overall capacities we become greater.
I like this perspective. There's just one problem with it: while many would likely find it sensible, most don't share your ability act in a rational fashion.
I'm of the mind that most people are overwhelmed by impulses; therefore, they choose what's immediately desirable, over what they know to be the right thing to do.
Then of course, my post isn't altogether that different from yours, in terms of its applicability to the common person. While I can ask folks to reconsider their motivations, and seek out the things they love, few will in fact do so.
You don't start out this way with it being a habit. You start out by saying "I want to make this interesting. What game can I play while I do it?" Maybe it's seeing how fast you can take out the garbage. Maybe it's something just picked up for the sake of the challenge (the GP used running as an example).
The point though is that if you do this a few times, it will start to happen more and more and eventually you will make a habit out of it.
I don't think anyone is incapable of learning. I'd say the reasons more people don't do it are (it's not easy) and (there's no hard evidence, therefore it's easy to dismiss).
At the end of the day, there's one solid evidence of advice that I've ignored one too many times.
I agree that you cant think in terms of pleasantness/unpleasantness but we are human and we will feel good or bad about anything we do. Its inbuilt.
When I say 90% of being an entrepreneur is unpleasant - I mean it in a good way :). Ie, its unpleasant because its new to me and therefore I'm learning and I would still do all this crap than be at my old 9-to-5 where I was chasing other people's dreams - namely my bosses dream of getting promoted.
There's a huge difference between unpleasant and unhappy. :)
My whole point is that too many people keep thinking of finding that great job where you do what you love. But the whole point is the only way you can get to that point is by being successful in the first place - enough so that you can pay others to do what you don't like.
So while building up that capital of success your going to be doing heckuva lot of stuff you don't like.
I think a lot of people don't get this.
YOU CANT GET TO DO WHAT YOU LOVE WITHOUT HUGE PAIN aka SACRIFICE.
Maybe there's a different emotion I could seek in my life. Potentially that feeling of accomplishment. Accomplishing something feels great. A lot of people have realized this, single player video games were based on the idea. It is, however, not hapiness. Happiness comes and goes.
If I allow my happiness to flow and fluctuate and act as it always does, and rather focus on getting that feeling of accomplishment, my attitudes change. When I approach a challenge, I don't focus on whether it will make me happy. When I do that, I think about the immediate perks, but also about all the potential frustrations that accompaygne the task.
So I think about it as accomplishment. If I do this task, I will accomplish something. Taking out the trash, 10 points. I don't care about the actual points I have, as the points aren't what I seek. So I don't even keep track. But as games are goals and games have points, it might be easier to connect in your mind with some points.
Go out running. Don't think about how long you have to run for, or how fast you have to run. Don't even worry about the clothes you're in. Just get on your street, and run in a direction. Any speed. Any pace. Now that you've started, and you've jogged enough to get warmed up, pick an object a short distance away and race to it as fast as you can. When you get there you'll be winded, and tired, and you might even vomit. Vomiting is just some random frustration though, it has nothing to do with the accomplishment that you just ran faster than you have in the past x years.
If you do decide you like accomplishing things, then this pattern of setting goals and reaching them can be done with tasks lists and check boxes. Build a momentum of doing it.
The next step is to align your goals to your dreams. Then take that momentum and checklists, and you'll feel more energy than ever to getting what you want done.
I'm not specifically referring to you keeptrying, I was simply writing some ideas down and ended up switching to second person since it was more natural for me to write that way.