A nice perk of starting my full-time position in January is that I have 3 uniterrupted months “off.” I say “off” instead of off because I am not truly without academic responsibility. For example, I participated in a CCC workshop on finding “grand challenges” in Sociotechnical Cybersecurity and am shepherding the writing of one of the four […]
Category: Personal development
Beginnings: Old and New
“I want to be a C. scientist” That’s what I told my brother, with an impish grin. He was visiting Bombay from New York, circa 1997, during a break from his studies at the Stevens Institute of Technology. He was pursuing a degree in Computer Science. He asked me what I wanted to be when […]
How to Use Habit Helixes: A Tutorial
I’m going to teach you how to use habit helixes. If you don’t know what those are, read my previous post. In short, habit helixes intertwine multiple success spirals into a domino chain and embed them into a tigger-routine-reward habit loop. They should be useful for people who already know how to use success spirals […]
Habit Helixes: The case against small change
I’ve had some conversations with people about success spirals. Expectedly, some are skeptics. A common counter-argument is that success spirals are unexciting and slow [1]. Start with writing 1 minute a day? After a month, maybe do 10 minutes a day? How long will it take to write a novel with that level of commitment? […]
Success Spirals: Getting Out of A Rut
Success spirals are powerful, but have downsides. As outlined in the book, The Motivation Hacker, you can only fail at success spirals so many times before your expectancy is permanently damaged [1]. While I have not personally experienced this, it is a possibility that can inhibit my using success spirals when I am only half-committed […]
Live Success Spiral Walkthrough Conclusion & Recap
[1] A success spiral is an immediately usable, powerful tool that can help you overcome inertia and make effortless progress towards living your ideals (e.g., exercising regularly, playing an instrument). The concept is simple: start small — so small, in fact, that it is effectively impossible to fail — and gradually build on your initial […]
Live Success Spiral Walkthrough: Update 1
Right now, I am keeping track of some of my success spirals publicly on this spreadsheet. You can read more some details about why I’m doing this in a previous post, but the basic point is to do a live walkthrough of using success spirals to fight off procrastination and actually accomplish things. My plan […]
Live Success Spiral Walkthrough for 30 days
When I started this blog, I posted a tutorial on how to set up and use success spirals to live your day-to-day ideals. Ever since then, I’ve wanted to do a live walkthrough to share exactly how I use these spirals in practice: From the inception of the success spiral through to its review phase. […]
A Tutorial on Goal Selection: Focus on Effort, not Results
It’s easy to set yourself up for failure with poor goal-selection strategies. In this post, I hope to provide some specific actionable insights to help avoid that. I previously wrote a tutorial for creating effective success spirals. One core component of that tutorial is creating a spiral structure: A comically low starting goal that is impossible […]
How You Can Use Success Spirals: A Tutorial
In my last post, I talked about one of the tricks I use to realize my ideals: success spirals. In this post, I’ll go into a bit more detail of how to create an effective success spiral. Success Spiral Summary To recap, a success spiral is a concrete instantiation of the principle of constant improvement: […]