You are right. On the flipside however this can lead to fatalism of the "if I can't change anything why even bother"-kind.
If you want to form a habit of doing sports for example, it certainly makes a difference whether you see yourself as a unsporty lazy-ass that will never achieve anything, or whether you see yourself as a unsporty person still looking for a way to get into this and make it part of your life.
What I think is important is to break habits out of band. If you are eating unhealthy or too much a good starting point is to limit your food ordering, cook yourself more. And then you can control what you can cook by buying the right things in the right amount. Ideally you don't go grocery shopping hungry then.
So make following your habit the thing that requires extra steps and is complicated, while the better alternative should be easy, available and fill you with some sort of joy. For me jogging became about listening to new music albums or my favourite podcast while exploring new parts of town. So instead of just moving my body, the sports part was actually just a nice side effect to an activity I actively enjoyed.
Sure, depending on your condition, such simple tricks might not work for everybody, but my point is: The mind is powerful. It tricks you into many bad habits, it can also trick you into the good ones if you wield it the right way.
Raw willpower alone will not help you, you also need to identify patterns and avoid creating situations where you fall back, depending on your situation this might mean even things like totally restructuring your life, cutting off contact, moving somewhere else, etc.
There's a difference between "sheer willpower" and "wanting to change and putting in effort toward habit breaking strategies". There's quite a lot of knowledge about habit forming and breaking, and one of the key strategies is to set up measures so that you don't have to rely on willpower during the key moments when you're being tested.
People need to have the "willpower" and commitment to change themselves, that is different from expecting them to not do drugs when they're in withdrawal and holding the drugs in their hands.
This is why there are things like gambling blacklists, where gambling addicts can register themselves so that they can't relapse in a moment of weakness. They need the willpower to register themselves so that they don't have to rely on the willpower to not go into a casino when they pass by.
I think that is because it is a terrible message. It isnt an either/or situation, and successful breaking habits does rely on willpower, just not willpower alone.
Smart strategy can make things easier, but there is no strategy that makes it easier to stop heroin than do to keep it.
It advertises the idea that with the right circumstances, you can make it so that the desirable option is always the easiest option - this simply isnt true.
To break a habit, you have to replace it with a different habit. Willpower is one of the ways to do that, but others are more successful on more people.
The reason why so many people hire a coach for physical activities, diet or even life decisions isn't so much that these are extremely specialized domains that need high expertise; it's that having someone make the decision, i.e. not relying on willpower, is often more effective and easier. It also leads to accountability: you have to show results to someone else, not just to your brain. And for most people, that's also more effective and easier than willpower.
Telling people to get over themselves and take charge is generally a well-meaning, but often misleading call to action. And after a couple of failures, the lesson they'll learn is that they're weak and ineffective and there's nothing that can be done about it, which compounds the problem instead of solving it.
I think there is a fundamental misalignment here about what constitutes willpower.
The coach isn't a contradiction to willpower. You still make the choice to get up and go when you are lazy, you have just changed the incentives and accountability.
It also takes willpower and initiative to hire a coach.
If you avoid anything difficult and quit the second things get hard, no a mount of support will help.
By all means, use every trick in the book to make it easier. However, you are setting yourself up for failure in life if you avoid everything that requires effort, or think everything can be made easy with enough tricks
For some reason you and others seem to think every action or decision takes the same amount of effort and willpower. That's the only contradiction I see in these comments which is causing all these conflicting opinions.
I beg to differ, and we know this. Want to stop taking heroin? Stop surrounding yourself with people who take heroin. See a medical professional. Get away from wherever you get the heroin. Try to get your life in order so you have other things to look forward to.
It's a terrible, terrible idea to just "stop taking heroin". Pray tell, if you see someone who is an heroin addict and they say they are going to stop it and make no changes to their life, do you believe for a single second they are going to succeed? Hell no.
>Smart strategy can make things easier, but there is no strategy that makes it easier to stop heroin than do to keep it.
You then say:
>Want to stop taking heroin? Stop surrounding yourself with people who take heroin. See a medical professional. Get away from wherever you get the heroin. Try to get your life in order so you have other things to look forward to.
Those things are all a complex sequence of tasks that requires a huge amount of planning, logistics, task initiation, etc etc. Not to mention money, uncertainty, fear etc. They are literally orders of magnitude more difficult for a person to do than continuing to take heroin.
It'd be like if I told you, "want to stop being hungry for breakfast in the morning? Just go change your whole life instead of eating a bagel."
I think this is good advice (don't just try to exercise your willpower, change your surroundings), and it holds for making good habits as well. If I want to start doing daily exercise, it's not likely to work if I just wake up at six and try to will myself to do it. Make an appointment to play tennis with somebody the day before--then you're socially obligated to show up. Do it frequently enough, and pretty soon you'll know a bunch of people who also play tennis; they'll start making appointments with you to play. Is this a "habit"? Or is it just a natural outcome of the environment you've surrounded yourself with?
Technical ability and knowledge just doesn't correlate with critical thinking at all. At worst, it makes you more likely to fall into that common trap of believing you're "smart" and therefore know everything about everything.
I would say it does correlate with some type of critical thinking, but not the one related to social/cultural/philosophical issues. What I say might seem strange at first, because critical thinking is presented as some kind of super-universal skill that you can freely apply to anything but in fact it's not. Kinda like one would think that a good singer would automatically make a good dancer because of being able to feel the rhythm etc. but in reality the correlation is not as strong as one would expect.
:) can I please get an explanation why it's obvious to you that there is not correlation between singing and dancing ability? I'm genuinely curious
EDIT: I can't dance nor sing for shit so I guess I'm a living example of falling victim of some sort of logical fallacy.
I don't think there is an obvious correlation or obvious absence of correlation. In some sense, it's heuristics all the way down; but where one might see an obvious correlation, the one who is applying critical thinking sees only a possible correlation.
You didn't provide any argument supporting your assertions. So your critical thinking is not really that critical, because you can't really defense your claim.
Okay,singing requires manipulation of your voice (diaphragm + airways. You also need to know the correct posture to keep,but its not 100% necessary).
Dancing requires manipulation of your feet, legs, hips, shoulders, arms, hands, and head. Sometimes your belly and butt as well.
Just having a sense of rhythm isn't good enough. You can bob along to a rhythm with 100% accuracy, and not be "dancing." You need to know how to move your body in a way that is rhythmically accurate and pleasing to the eye, coordinating different body parts in alternating, but synchronized patterns. It's a totally different skill set. Musicians,for example, are often very reluctant dancers.
But sense of rhythm and good hearing is required to both singing and dancing. So there is a common skill. Singing requires manipulation of your body (diaphragm) and so does dancing, so your muscle coordination must be good, again common skill. And it just happens that there is not a single famous singer that behaves on scene like a typical non-dancer you can observe in a club.
So obviously there is some correlation between singing and dancing. It might not be very strong but it's obviously there and categorically saying that there is no such correlation what-so-ever is really strange.
There are a lot of famous singers that don't dance on stage. Neil Young, Kurt Cobain, Geddy Lee, Bob Dylan. Having a sense of rhythm and a good ear just aren't enough to make you a good dancer.
Your examples of singers that don't dance on the stage don't prove that they can't, but just that they don't want to.
I was asking about someone who is a well known singer but actually tries to dance but really can't and it shows.
And again, we are talking about correlation, and not exact match of skills. So it wouldn't mean that a great singer is automatically a _great_ dancer, too. Just that if someone is really good at singing he is likely to be pretty good at dancing but not necessarily exactly as good. Maybe that's part I didn't articulate clearly earlier.
And you were with them when they casually danced in clubs and you saw they actually can't dance? Or you are around that that kind of musicians that actually never ever dance for fun at their leisure?
Went to many music festivals, clubs, dances with them. They couldn't dance. They weren't incapable of learning how to dance. They just weren't automatically good at dancing because they were good at playing music.
I think a significant factor is tech skews young. Once your gem turns black, it's time for carousel. (Amusingly, if you understand that reference, you're probably already older than many tech companies are comfortable with).
Many parts of computer science are literally nothing but pure wrangling of thought with logic. Fighting bias systematically is a major part of the trade.
Computer Science is the worst named discipline. Many times when reading code it's like a window into someone else's mind, or a direct window into your own confused mess of a mind from the past.
Problem is, it's really really complicated, and no matter how good you get, or how much practice you put in, it still feels like we humans are trying to fly by flapping our arms.
I only recently started working with SWE type folk in the last few years and while they are, on average, the smartest people I have ever met, they’re also some of the least well-rounded and most siloed minds I’ve ever encountered.
If you kicked a heroin habit, good for you! Societally we still can’t use “suck it up you pansies” as a drug rehab strategy just on your say-so.