There are things like programming that I’m naturally interested in, and get very good at without much effort. Then, there are things like meditation that, at least historically, I have not been similarly good at, at all, when compared to myself with programming.
A friend of mine is an exceptional technical meditator. And for him, the mindset he approached meditation with seems very similar to the mindset I originally approached programming with. A playful, serious exploration and pushing of capabilities and following of his interests. Random projects like “Can I make my tactile field into a ball?”, “Can I split my consciousness into independently running threads?” feel very analogous to me learning programming and thinking, “Can I write a virus that changes people’s desktop to random gopher pictures and persists?”, “Can I write a compiler for rust to Lua?” etc.
(Note that I’m using “mindset” here to refer to their entire mental state in relation to the goal, with all the subtle nonverbal feelings and unconscious bits! I don’t mean something as shallow as “growth mindset v.s. not”. There’s so much more going on than what we’re aware of, or can even describe once we introspect and try to. When I say “my mindset was” I’m casting a partial understanding I have into lossy words. There’s a ton of loss between this and the true objects of interest. Keep that in mind! I’m tempted to use a new term like “motivational architecture” to avoid the shallow thinking associations that the term mindset has, even if it is close.)
Similarly, my same friend has had trouble writing for a blog, despite knowing the long-term benefits. After a lot of back and forth interviewing, we realized that, when I’m writing a blog post, a large part of my motivation comes from sharing what I’ve written with specific people I know and being able to talk about it! I’m by no means a prolific writer, in fact, my blog has been relatively stagnant for the last few years, even if historically I wrote a lot (and derived many benefits from it! Fellowships, people reaching out, etc.)
His motivational architecture, in contrast, was similar to mine with meditation! His mindset, if rendered into words, I think was something like: “I should write more” (ugh) “for the long-term benefits” (long delay) “writing is less interesting than other stuff, needs force” (ugh). Contrast this with mine, which roughly rendered into words would be “Oooh this is such a cool idea! I want to share it with my friends and see their reactions and lower the activation energy to share this in the future!”
The failure we were both making was not realizing other people were running around with drastically different mindsets and relations to the same goals! There can be so much hidden variation, generally that people aren’t even conscious of! Without realizing all the subtle differences in mindset that can be going on, it’s easy to exclude the solution from your search space, prematurely thinking that other, successful people just have “more discipline” or otherwise are magically different from you.
As for shifting your mindset once you realize there’s a better one. I’m still figuring this out, but my main takeaway so far is to pay a lot of attention to your mindset and, whenever you notice you’re doing the bad thing, STOP. Better to do nothing than to entrench bad conditioning. So, rule #1 is DON’T DO THE BAD THING. This is, as far as I can tell, really important when your past behavior looks like “I keep trying to do this, I do it for a bit and then burn out, then try again much later”. If doing more of it anti-motivates you (on average), something is horribly wrong, stop immediately!
Beyond stopping the bad thing, you can try vividly imagining doing the thing with the wholesome mindset you want to adopt. You might need to change exactly “what” you’re doing a little, but that’s fine, often good in fact. I’ve noticed my motivation is generally trying to track how valuable things are, and if my motivation drops this is usually a sign I’m working on the wrong thing (or the right thing in the wrong way). Very important though; if vividly imagining doesn’t arouse that kind of inductive, “pull” motivation, and you’re still doing it out of a more “push”-y, “should”-y place, then stop! Do something else. You can’t force yourself to stop forcing yourself. Don’t stress it, over the long run becoming genuinely obsessed will be far more valuable than trying yet again the thing that hasn’t been working! Insanity is repeating the same thing and expecting different results (assuming that this is a domain you’ve been stuck. If not, all good.)
A lot of what I’m talking about is well-described by Joe Hudson’s want over should and other content on goals. But I haven’t heard the rendition of this idea that’s like, “hey, you idiot, the reason some people have an easy time doing the same thing you have a hard time is because their mindset is different. Consider investigating the differences between your mindset and theirs, and figuring out how you can shift yours”. I also expect eventual gains from the more detailed first-principles thinking I’m doing here, even if entirely adopting an ontology like Joe’s could result in some immediate gains, the lock-in is scary. There’s so much more we don’t understand!
I’ll share more notes here as I understand more. My study of myself continues!