> it seems as useless as all the other "just quit doing <whatever bad habit you have>" advice.
At the end of the day, that's what you need to do though. The sooner you accept that, the easier it will be to change. It's about self discipline. Everyone is looking for some easy way, but it's not easy. It's doing what you know you should be doing every second of every minute of every day. Will you slip up sometimes? Absolutely, but don't let it derail you.
Check out Jocko Willink's podcast sometime (or the Youtube excerpts or his Instagram). His no BS approach is what finally made me realize that there are no techniques, just self discipline. When asked how to get up early, the response is set an alarm and get up.
I think a good place to start would be the Joe Rogan and Tim Ferris podcasts that had Jocko on as a guest. Both were great interviews and give a summary of what he's talking about.
Jocko has a Youtube channel with clips about discipline which I think are good, but they are soundbites so miss nuance. For example, many people get hung up on getting up at 4:30am, but they miss the point. Getting up early is about getting a discipline win the first thing in the day. For me, I get up between 5-6am and go right to the gym. This means I'm in bed no later 10pm, which in turn means no more wasting time doing stuff like reading FB or Twitter or other nonsense. The other benefit of this, is who the hell gets up at 5am to read Twitter? I hope no one. If I'm up, it's time to be productive.
If you're still into learning more after that, and like history at all, I would start at his podcast #1. He reviews historical military non-fiction books, relates them to leadership and discipline, and finally wraps up with Q&A. I love history and at this point in my career need to be the best leader I can be, so they are super interesting for me. It's funny (scary?) now anytime I want to be slack on something I hear Jocko's voice in my head saying 'no fucking slack'.
I found Jocko Wilink on Casey Neistats channel. Also a good interview. There's other examples such as Jeff Bezos who also wakes up early as well, and sleep early etc
I started today actually waking up at 6 AM to spend 40 minutes working out at my homegym, and another ~40-50 minutes taking online course work or working on personal projects. Then I go to work. After work (6 PM), I usually go to meetups / take a breather for at least 1 hour, and then do personal project work starting around 8 to 9PM. Bedtime to me starts at 10 PM now, worst case at 11 PM.
Sundays I sleep in though, b/c Saturdays are less predictable, and sometimes I need a hard reset day. When I get really tired and fatigued and don't want to workout, I just do a 1-2 mile jog/run and that resets my cycle
It really is all about winning the first battle of the day. I didn't feel like getting up this morning, but I forced myself too, and didn't hit the snooze button at all.
Mentally you can only handle 2-3 spurts of high productivity in one day. When you workout in the morning, you get a physical high and also a mental high starting the day. It slows down, picks back up again possible mid-day, and again at night to me at least.
On the weekends I do sleep in until 7am or so mainly because my gym doesn't open until 7am on the weekends. I'm going to start building a home gym soon so I can save the time driving back and forth to the gym.
I tell people that while it sounds silly, winning that first battle each day is a big thing. Get up, win. Gym, win. Now skipping that donut or working on something I would normally procrastinate on is easy.
I wrote a related post on discipline and my general workout routine like 3 months ago on HN. In principle its the same thing as Jocko's podcast, but I think its also important to both have a daily physical and mental routine. Mental things could be journalling /meditating / blogging etc, just pick one and roll with it
Homegym is pretty convenient, what's nice is I can knock out an entire workout in 40 minutes (from warmup to cleanup, and my morning breakfast - workout shake) while watching 20 minutes of youtube / TV / anime etc at the same time. This is how I psychologically reward myself when I workout.
I wake up and go straight to 5-10 minute warmup w/ 3 lightsets and a light jog. I usually workout wearing nothing but my boxers then shower after. But I usually wear shoes and gloves to make it official though, b/c I need the extra gripping. I mentally associate an adrenaline rush when wearing certain gear, so this normalizes progress made.
Its pretty convenient not having to dress up when I workout. Also its convenient not having to worry about working out at night, b/c I usually do it pretty late. You have to do it at least 1 hour before you sleep. Today I did pullups / biceps / upperback.
That's because advice doesn't solve anything. Action does.
You can ask for a million different variations of advice but you won't get anywhere until you take action. And only you can do that for yourself.
EDIT: for the replies, I don't mean that advice is useless. Guidance is important, but even the best plan doesn't matter if you don't actually do something.
Plus there's a certain irony in the existence of the attention economy willing to wax at length on the idea that a lot of things are more complex than 'just stop/start doing it'.
'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.'
> That's because advice doesn't solve anything. Action does.
> And only you can do that for yourself.
Aside from the continuing vacuity, and the rather oxymoronic nature of "Advice doesn't help"-advice, I'm pretty sure that idea is just wrong?
Advice is a rather fundamental mechanism of humanity's success. Not just as in "ask a lawyer/doctor", but as something so common we don't even notice. It allows to tap into a vast repertoire of wisdom, and brings the benefit of fresh sets of eyes, with often minimal costs and efforts for either party.
I also fear this you-can-do-it attitude is slightly too close to Prosperity Gospel for comfort: Telling people they just have to be more disciplined is bound to fail more often than not, and leaves them with the complete burden of guilt. There's a point of diminishing returns for emotional pain as a motivator.
That not only ignores the rather substantial influence of luck, other people's action, and other factors beyond one's control. It also discounts all other personal factors possibly contributing to someone's misfortune. Maybe they just aren't cut out for professional sports/pulitzer price journalism/whatever... Or they have chosen some endeavour that just isn't a good fit for their personality (in terms of social v analytical, outside / inside, action / concentration,...). In such cases, powering through is rather ill-advised unless your stock options are close to vesting.
You’re leading an army off to war, your scouts have just reported back, the first engagement is sooner than you thought it would be and you have to shift tactics. You want advice from your (hopefully) qualifies advisors.
You are competing for a woman’s affection, and it is an uphill battle and there are other potentially better qualified suitors but if you could just do one thing to put her over the edge and squarely in your camp, you just might be able to seal the deal. This wouldn’t be the worst time to get some pretty decent advice from a good mate.
You want to lose weight. You want to put on muscle. You want to teach yourself to draw. At this point you don’t need advice. All the information you could possibly need is not only out there, but very easy to find. What you need is to take action, and do the thing you claim you want to do. You’ll find that in most respects, you are already eminently qualified to figure out which actions you need to take and in what order. There has never been a better time to be alive than now for finding out the very basics in a readable format for whatever it is you want to accomplish.
Some things really are as simple as do or don’t do. That’s not to say everything is, but most things in life are just not very complex once the matter of first principles are essentially solved.
I should've been more clear. I added an edit. The point is that advice is not going to physically make anything happen. You can listen to all the advice in the world but it is still upon you to make a move.
As for the rest of your comment, I'm not really sure what you're arguing. Life isn't fair, but 90% of success is just showing up. Most people don't.
> What are some techniques that folks use to convince themselves to only worry about their shit and not dwell on shit from other people?
1. Just removing the sources of unhappiness can go far. Block all the websites that make you feel bad. Unfollow people that stress you out. Uninstall apps from your phone. Or go even further, and turn off internet entirely.
2. Mindfulness meditation can help catch these negative thought patterns and redirect them.
You're framing this as an internet problem, which it is not. Before the internet it was called "keeping up with the Jonses" and one can not simply uninstall their environment, whereabouts and reception of social status and class telegraphing from others.
I honestly couldn't care less and consumerism is deeply offensive to me. I often think I belong in a different time, when commercialism and consumerism wasn't such a thing. There was a time not so long ago that people took pride in saving, repairing and making do.
> There was a time not so long ago that people took pride in saving, repairing and making do.
That's a myth. Just like pretty much all of the "in the past, it was so much better because people X" constructions.
Some people feel that way now. Some people have always felt that way. But many people have always felt a pressure to compete with those around them, in whatever ways were available and socially acceptable at the time.
It's possible that if you go all the way back to before urbanisation, the people in a small farming or hunter-gatherer community would feel less of that pressure because there was simply less to compete about, and more mutual support....but I suspect that even then, people would have competed in their own ways.
In terms of the specific "there was a time" you mention...OK, yeah, there kinda was. It was the Great Depression. People "took pride" in saving, repairing, and making do because there was literally no other choice besides doing without.
Despite the various problems we suffer today, I don't think that's a good model for our society.
It's the same solution though, just don't go to the shops.
I get my groceries delivered and basically don't go to shops unless I have a specific thing I need. That's not a burden for me because I hate shopping anyway.
Not really. The internet is the primary way we receive information about a large number of people. Turn off that source and the envy must dry up. For the rest, there’s meditation.
Freedom from something is no freedom. Modeling your life based on things you want to free yourself from is not truly freeing you from them.
To be free is to understand the root cause and tackle that. To truly understand why seeing pics of your buddy's hawaiian family vaction makes you feel bad.
This might be counter-intuitive but in addition to stoicism, I love helping others when I can. Whether it's answering easy questions online, helping a friend with a business problem, somehow being a startup mentor, or volunteering. I feel the best when it's in person because it gets me out of my own head and sort of into someone else's- trying to understand them, what they're going through, what they're thinking. Being able to see things from another perspective gives me insight into my own problems. Hearing other people's fears and anxieties, sharing my experience with similar issues, and being like hey it's normal and this is how it turned out for me. Sometimes they just need to be heard or get it off their chest and be told everything will be okay, because it usually will.
It has also made it easier for me to ask for help about problems and be receptive to advice and feedback from my mentors- all the times when I was on the other side, helps me see the other side. So I guess maybe that's why people advise to always be teaching someone else while also being taught yourself.
Last, patience. I know I'll get there eventually. Marathon not a sprint.
Decide what you are trying to accomplish. Determine useful metrics for the goals in question. Check those metrics and try to improve on your performance as indicated by those metrics.
Rinse and repeat.
If you want to make $500 this week, it isn't relevant if Joe Bob McMillionaire did that in five minutes on Monday morning. It is relevant that it's noon on Friday, you want to call it quits by 5pm and you are only at $400. Can you make another $100 in just 5 hours, or does it look like you need to choose between hitting $500 and quitting at 5pm? What can you learn from this week's failures and successes to make it more likely that you hit $500 next week and also get to go home on time?
setting up a website blocker in firefox has been amazing.
yes I can easily turn it off, but I don't.
I still habitually type in time wasting distraction urls and it blocks them and I go "oh yeah"
so you could do something like block all news websites except on weekends or something
I've been reading "The subtle art of not giving a fuck" (https://www.amazon.fr/Subtle-Art-Not-Giving-Counterintuitive...) and there's one point I try to follow: if you don't have control over something, then you shouldn't let it emotionally affect you, aka "you shouldn't give a fuck". Otherwise your life will be emotionally driven by things outside of your command and you'll just become insane.
Example: you can prepare all you want for a job interview or a date, dress appropriately, rehearse all you need, this is all something you control. But ultimately you have no control over their final decision, so you shouldn't let it negatively affect you and be mad/sad/puzzled. Reach for rationality, understand why you failed and improve on this for the next time
I'd go against the grain and recommend reading a modern book that's more guided and more of an overview, before reading the classics (which are great and very approachable!). A Guide to the Good Life, for instance, or Stoicism and the Art of Happiness.
One thing that I'd like to think helps me is being genuinely happy for others' success.
This is the easiest to do for your close friends and family, but as you get to fringe friends, acquaintances, and former colleagues, the seeds of jealousy start to sprout.
You can be genuinely happy for others’ success while at the same time feeling extremely stressed that a competitor’s version of Foo is doing better than yours, etc. In fact, others’ successes can often be real, genuine, not-ego-or-jealousy-related-at-all indicators that whatever you’re focusing on is not good enough and there is not room in the market for what you’re making, which is both critical to know about and respond to, and also super stressful.
IMO anyway, being genuinely happy for others’ successes is totally orthogonal to the topic of this thread. Being mean-spirited about others’ successes would possibly be some other, different type of stressor for a different type of discussion.
It is "no duh" advice, but as some type of entrepreneur it's really really easy to fall into a trap where you're scrolling through Twitter and seeing people who are more successful than you always talk about how great life is, and you see them sell 5,000 things in 2 hours because they have half a million Twitter followers, etc..
Then you listen to their podcast or read something they wrote, but after you approach them 1 on 1 you quickly find out they don't even follow their own advice and you suddenly begin to get angry because these people are successful from lying to people but they put on a good show in public, and there's nothing you can do about it.
When really, all you have to do is unfollow them and concentrate on your own stuff because you'll improve your situation by focusing on things you can control.
It's sort of like Nike's phrase "just do it". There's so many ways you can apply this to life, and it's a text book example of "no duh" advice, but sometimes you need a reminder from something outside your brain that it really is that easy to snap out of it and do whatever you're trying to do.
Recognize that other startups are rarely the threat. Doing nothing / business as usual is the threat. Care about solving real needs for your customers.
Maybe so. In my experience 'helping' in most cases sides with other time/nerves wasting exercises - like browsing twitter in other form. Role playing, not actual real thing.
Getting better in what I do (whatever that is) first (so focusing on what I do), then helping as a side effect, that's possible.
This reminds me of the advice in "How I’ve Attracted the First 500 Paid Users for My SaaS" (I liked the article overall). I'm more confident in my disagreement now.
Ignoring competition does not make it go away. Being a competitive person is good, and it gives you an advantage. The top of most any field is comprised of very competitive people.
I do not agree with this very generic advice. You shouldn't back down the second you feel any pressure / stress, this is not the behavior of a competitive person. If you are getting irrationally jealous or saddened to an unhealthy degree, you should learn to deal with this. If you are unable to, you should reconsider whatever field you're in.
It seems common for people to move goalposts when talking about this, as if being competitive and not ignoring competition detracts from your ability to improve your own project, or to be able to think independently of what competitors are doing.
> The top of most any field is comprised of very competitive people.
Being competitive is good, if it helps you succeed. The degree to which you can be successful if you just "focus on your own shit" vs. paying close attention to what your competitors are doing is going to depend on what you are doing. If you play football professionally, you absolutely need to pay attention to what the competition is doing to succeed. If you write code for a living, you are going to be way more successful paying attention to your own shit than spending time paying attention to what everyone else is doing. It is just stupid to say that being competitive is the only way to get to the top of your field. Being the best at what you do will get you to the top of your field, by definition. The drive to get you there can come from wanting to be better than everyone else, or it can come from somewhere else.
"There’s only two things that will improve your situation:
1. Concentrate on your users, audience, customers, fans.
Figure out what they want. Develop a deep connection with them.
2. Improve your skill, expertise, competence, product.
How can you get better? How can you make your product better for the people who use it?"
There is also a responsibility for well-informed people to encourage and join initiatives that are 'good' and interesting. This is the way ethical and useful initiatives can be promoted and can 'win' in the marketplace of ideas.
Indeed. If he were a real Hackernews he'd be up at 4 am to do his daily 5 mile run before eating paleo breakfast and then working on his MVP for 12 hours solid.
I’d agree that agonizing over what your competition is doing isn’t wise, but at the same time if you have no idea what your competitors are doing you are in trouble.
The goal is not to ignore the competition but get better at controlling how you react to it.
What are some techniques that folks use to convince themselves to only worry about their shit and not dwell on shit from other people?