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 […]
Tag: goal selection
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 […]
5 Ph.D. Survival Tips
I recently had to give a short presentation on “survival tips” as a Ph.D. student [1]. I thought I’d summarize that presentation in written form, too. Now, there’s a lot of material out there on how to succeed as an academic and as a professional. This post is going to be a rehashing of those […]
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 […]
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 […]
On this blog
This blog will become great [1]. But this is only my first post, so I thought I’d cover some of my initial motivations for establishing a blog. In a future post, I hope to share more about how I started this blog, if any of you are interested in doing the same (short version: I’m using WordPress on […]