HiddenBrain - Strategies Against Ruts And Stuckness

Last updated Sep 20, 2023 Edit Source

# Podcast Notes:

The goal gradient:

As the goal becomes into sight, the experience in working towards something begins to exhibit a “downhill” motivational effect.
Inversely, we become much slower towards the middle of the process – where the start and finish lines are equally disconnected. The lack of “landmarks” such as a ship within the sea, where there are no indicators or sense of progress. This will lead to a sense of progress.
Create sub-goals along a map, as this allows you to track progress tangibly.
Shrink goals as small as possible, as the smaller the units of work, the better you can track it.
This way, each small task unit can simulate the “step-after-step” or “rep-after-rep” mentalities echoed by runners and Arnold Schwarzenegger respectively.

Motion builds momentum – utilise small victories, even if simple, to lubricate the motion towards the larger ones:

Author example: Setting a timer for 60 seconds, to push self to write any amount of words, towards a longer writing goal. My own anecdotes:
Solving easy coding problems, to lubricate the logic muscles and reduce friction to coding sessions/tackling harder problems or projects.
Short gym workouts, to ease into larger ones.
Short “just get out the house” cardio sessions, that turn themselves into twice a week longer ones.

The paralysis of perfectionism:

Perfectionism signals flaws and failure to your own feedback systems – this kills motivation, and stifles productivity.
The quality of user-generated output, is potentially only accessible by first “pouring out the bad stuff”, and getting past the low quality generation of content.
Are my ambitious goal setting methods, with tight personal deadlines (shoot for the moon and reach the stars method) not conducive to overall productivity due to this effect?

The lack of dialogue over shared stuckness:

Social media is particularly terrible for this - as there are no highlighting of stuckness and slowness, despite it being a natural phenomena to progress.
This “pluralistic ignorance” is amplified as only successes are shared, from a network of people, in a way that it is consistently visible, implying a normalcy that is false.
Breakdown the pluralistic ignorance, by breaking the silos between people, and opening dialogue between the frictions, stuckpoints and obstacles!

A long journey is rarely a linear path:

Success is not often through a single golden ticket route – by this strict binary definition, success would seldom happen.
- Define success through a system, bring the locus of control internal – and measure success by elements in which you have control.
- e.g Time spent coding, problems solved, projects created etc.

Quantity is a unavoidable precursor to quality:

You NEED the misses, to have successes in aggregate.
Try multiple approaches, and try different things, in order to find the right path.

Steady practice evolving into a sense of no progression - plateaus:

Habituation could lead to this effect – you gain expertise to the routine and system, as opposed to reacting to the target challenges.
Comfort, provided from doing the same thing over and over again, turns into complacency that leads to stagnation.

Find what really matters – every topic contains an overwhelming volume of information

Learn to strip away and set artificial constraints on input data, as to develop effective comprehension and productivity.

Negative Stereotype Effect:

Awareness that you belong to a group that have a stereotype of being poor within that community, it CREATES the effect of increased metal stuckness and low morale.
- Do not let the stereotype effect define your potential – recognise it, maybe, as a challenge, but not a defining characteristic.

Action above all

Being stuck is about being in one place, but wanting to be somewhere else.
Ultimately, the thing you have to do the most, is ACT and move towards that direction.
In the act of doing, you show to yourself inserts change and potential – whereas sitting still and thinking, simply does nothing but perpetuates the current situation.

Hitting the button to shuffle the letters

Having, and achieving any goal, even if unrelated to the main muse, provides movement that can aid unstucking:

Be aware of the “U-shape” trap to feelings of progress.

The middle of the journey will be the most difficult, and also where the majority of these strategies can be applied.

Break up and shrink goals and tasks to be as granular as possible. This provides an effective way to track and sense progress.

Create a map towards goals, comprised of these granular tasks as it’s units. This allows a visualisation of total progress, expressed in granular, seemingly unimportant completions.

Never aim for perfection.

Perfectionism is a detriment to all systems. It provides only compounding negative feedback, as anything that is not perfect, is a failure.
Utilise small victories, no matter how novel or even unrelated, to build movement.
Be aware of the requirement to leverage quantity, to find quality (pouring the bad out first).
Action, no matter how unsure the direction, is often better than to sit and wondering will maintain cirucmstances – It provides the circumstance exposure to potential.

Fight against habituation, which ultimately, leads to stagnation.