April 4.

2016-04-04T16:20:38Z

April 4. Continuing from last week, yet another stray thought on motivation. I was watching an interview with UFC champion Miesha Tate, and she was talking about how she got obsessed with wrestling in high school. Her school didn't have a girls wrestling team, so she would wrestle the boys and always lose. How was this motivating? Because every time she lost she learned stuff, which she applied to her next match to lose by a smaller margin. She established a rhythm -- fight, learn, adjust, fight -- with positive feedback in two places: the reward of learning and the reward of coming closer to winning.

(I do the same thing when I write about music: listen, notice stuff, put it into words, and use those words to guide my next round of listening, approaching but never reaching full understanding.)

How often does life work like this? Almost never. In social behavior, when you make a mistake, you rarely find out exactly what you did wrong, and you usually don't get another chance with that same person -- unless they're a family member, and then you're just learning to match their particular dysfunction, which will not work when you're out in the world getting one chance each with people who have completely different dysfunctions. It's a miracle that anyone ever becomes socially competent.

In school, when you take a test or turn in a project, they tell you what you did wrong, but you don't get another chance -- you're stuck with that low grade for life, and then you move on to badly learning something new (that you'll probably never use).

You do get good feedback and multiple chances when you're being trained for a job -- but only if your trainers are good, and pretty soon you reach a plateau where you're no longer learning, just going through a routine for a paycheck.

I've just spent all afternoon writing and deleting drafts, trying and failing to go somewhere interesting with this idea. All I can say is that we need to set up society so that we spend our lives enjoying getting better at skills that make life better for everyone, and this is going to take a really long time.

April 1.

2016-04-01T13:50:12Z

April 1. Another stray thought on motivation. Last week I wrote that nothing I've done in real life matches games for rewarding moment-to-moment action (but writing can be close) and someone asked me, what about the stuff I did on the land? This illustrates a principle that you can only really understand with life experience: what makes a project seem rewarding from a distance is completely different from what makes it feel rewarding as you're doing it, and it's normal to have one without the other.

Building a cabin sounds wonderful, but it's such a massively complex and alien project that I just felt overwhelmed; and how-to books, with thousands of things that have to be done in just the right difficult and expensive way, only made it worse. Growing fruit trees is something I can wrap my head around, but it's not something where you can get in the flow, and there's little connection between effort and reward: I put countless hours into trees that died, while the most successful thing I planted was a blue elder that I probably spent ten minutes on.

One thing I did up there that felt rewarding was throwing logging debris into piles. It has clear benefits, making the land more beautiful and walkable, and making habitat for critters, and every little action is clearly visible permanent progress. Cutting lower branches off trees to open up the woods and reduce fire danger was similar. In hindsight, by writing the landblog, I was carrying readers on my shoulders so they could enjoy stuff I wasn't enjoying enough myself, and if I had it to do over again, I would do a lot more stuff that's fun to do and boring to tell other people about. This is good life advice in general.

Ran Prieur

April 4.

April 1.