Ambition snowballs/Get ambitious slowly works very well for me, but sonepeople seem to hate it. My first reaction is that these people need to learn to trust themselves more, but today I noticed a reason I might be unusually suited for this method.
two things that keep me from aiming at bigger goals are laziness and fear. Primarily fear of failure, but also of doing uncomfortable things. I can overcome this on the margin by pushing myself (or someone else pushing me), but that takes energy, and the amount of energy never goes down the whole time I’m working. It’s like holding a magnet away from its twin; you can do it, but the minute you stop the system will snap back into place.
But more than I am lazy and fearful, I am easily bored, and hate boredom even more than I hate work or failure. If I hang around my comfort zone long enough I get bored of it and naturally start exploring outside. And that expansion doesn’t take energy; in fact it takes energy to keep me in at that point.
My mom used a really simple example of this on my brother when he was homeschooled (6th grade). He’d had some fairly traumatic experiences in English class and was proving resistant to all her teaching methods. Finally she sat him down in front a computer and told him he had to type continuously for X minutes. It could be literally anything he wanted, including “I can’t think of anything to write about”, he just had to keep his fingers typing the entire time (he could already touch type at this point, mom bribed us with video games until we got to 60WPM). I don’t remember exactly how long this took to work, I think it took her a while to realize she had to ban copy/paste but the moment she did my brother got so bored of typing the same thing that he typed new things, and then education could slip in.
So I’m not worried about being stuck, because I will definitely gnaw my own leg off just to feel something if that happens. And it’s unclear if I can speed up the process by pushing myself outside faster, because leaving comfort zone ring n too early delays getting bored of it (although done judiciously it might speed up the boredom).
Ambition snowballs/Get ambitious slowly works very well for me, but sonepeople seem to hate it. My first reaction is that these people need to learn to trust themselves more, but today I noticed a reason I might be unusually suited for this method.
two things that keep me from aiming at bigger goals are laziness and fear. Primarily fear of failure, but also of doing uncomfortable things. I can overcome this on the margin by pushing myself (or someone else pushing me), but that takes energy, and the amount of energy never goes down the whole time I’m working. It’s like holding a magnet away from its twin; you can do it, but the minute you stop the system will snap back into place.
But more than I am lazy and fearful, I am easily bored, and hate boredom even more than I hate work or failure. If I hang around my comfort zone long enough I get bored of it and naturally start exploring outside. And that expansion doesn’t take energy; in fact it takes energy to keep me in at that point.
My mom used a really simple example of this on my brother when he was homeschooled (6th grade). He’d had some fairly traumatic experiences in English class and was proving resistant to all her teaching methods. Finally she sat him down in front a computer and told him he had to type continuously for X minutes. It could be literally anything he wanted, including “I can’t think of anything to write about”, he just had to keep his fingers typing the entire time (he could already touch type at this point, mom bribed us with video games until we got to 60WPM). I don’t remember exactly how long this took to work, I think it took her a while to realize she had to ban copy/paste but the moment she did my brother got so bored of typing the same thing that he typed new things, and then education could slip in.
So I’m not worried about being stuck, because I will definitely gnaw my own leg off just to feel something if that happens. And it’s unclear if I can speed up the process by pushing myself outside faster, because leaving comfort zone ring n too early delays getting bored of it (although done judiciously it might speed up the boredom).