The Producers
Max your production with these ideas.
Just Do it (Again). It is frustratingly hard to do what you plan to do. One reason for that is
time inconsistency. “In the moment, people often want to be entertained. On reflection, they often want to be improved.” (
here) To overcome such fickleness, we need to rig the game with our ‘in-the-moment’ self. Mark Paluta and I
wrote a short note on how to rig the game. Here are two small points by Mark that I think were especially fun:
There are two other helpful mental models for building habits. One is momentum, and the other is error correction.
Momentum: P(do the thingt+1 | do the thingt)
Error correction: P(do the thingt+1 | !do the thingt)
The best way to build momentum is to track streaks (
famously used by Jerry Seinfeld). Not only do you get a reward every time you successfully complete the task, but the longer your streak, the less you want to break it.
Error correction on the other hand is turning a failure into motivation. Don’t miss two days in a row. Failure is part of the process, but do not let it compound. View the failure as step 0 of the next streak.
Chasers
Say Cheese. “Sodium Citrate is the secret ingredient to make any cheese into smooth, creamy
nacho cheese sauce. Coincidentally, Sodium Citrate’s chemical formula is Na₃C₆H₅O₇” —
Massimo
Representation Learning: “Vision is a process that produces from images of the external world a description that is useful to the viewer and not cluttered with irrelevant information.”
Marr and Nishihara
Lost in Translation: “Life is short, “The Idiot” long.” —
David Remnick on Constance Garnett’s ability to move on from a word or a phrase that she didn’t understand when translating a book.
