I've had times in my life when I've been really prolific and times when it would take a Herculean effort to get anything worthwhile done. When I'm prolific, it's not because I'm exercising self-control to stop myself from watching Netflix — I'd just rather work on Thing X than watch a movie. When I find myself watching Netflix instead of putting in time on something I've been wanting to do, it's because at that moment the movie is more appealing than the work. It's the same force pushing in different directions.
I'm not saying you can get by with no self-control (there are always some less pleasant things you need to do), but I think taking this article at face value might lead people down the wrong path.
When this happens to me I challenge myself first to figure out why the work is less appealing, and then once I've figured that out I attempt to remove the block. This strategy has been somewhat successful, but sometimes the barriers are too big and annoying and horrible to push through :|
In those cases, on goes the movie and I simply hope that time and help from others will resolve the issue.
I generally find that it's better to indulge my lack of focus in a controlled manner than it is to try fighting it.
While I can see bursts of undirected creativity stimulating small, quick discoveries, anything that takes longer than, say, a week (probably more like a day), just doesn't seem achievable.
Then again, you said your "best work", not biggest. I suppose those are actually be mutually exclusive in many cases.
The stuff that can be finished in a week often feels like my best work, though, at least intellectually (and you can get a good amount done in a week if you're excited about it). The week-long side projects tend to have more novelty, which sometimes even results in more impactful published papers: you're proposing the first X to do Y, and you have a working system to boot (in academia not always required, but a nice plus if you have it).
My biggest projects tend to require some focus and months, but they tend to be more of the grind variety. Take that initial prototype, either one I've produced or one someone else has published, and build a Real System on it, working out all the details, including engineering and theory as appropriate.
Generally speaking, my approach to programming is more trial and error than organized and methodical. But then again, my work style doesn't work in all situations nor does it work for everyone else. I'm generally better at starting a project than finishing one. However, just like some projects take longer to finish than others, some projects take longer to start than others. So I I don't think that time is terribly pertinent.
With that in mind, a certain amount of distractibility is a blessing for me. If something distracts me, that means it will distract whoever is finishing a project. Therefore, it's important to address those distractions ahead of time.
For instance, ive been in a few one way fights in my life, I've never hit anyone back. I remember the adrenalin rushing through my body and the fight or flight response gearing up, but my mind overcomes that and I usually end up talking myself out of it or someone else interjects.
But because I control the fight or flight I end up getting the shakes after the incident because I didn't fight back nor run away, since shaking is the physiological response to burn off the adrenalin.
Personally, I feel I'd have done a lot better in those situations if I'd acted on impulse and actually fought back. Hell even running away could've served me better aswell.
http://www.amazon.com/Meditations-Violence-Comparison-Martia...
Even if you've never been in a violent encounter, this book will help you understand how you will react. Keep in mind, you don't choose when you become part of a violent situation, violence chooses you.
What I'm saying is that I think you probably did the right thing.
Discipline needs to be directed by intuition, which is connected to impulse. So it's not simply about the ability to suppress impulse -- creative ideas come as strong impulses. It's about the ability to harness and direct your impulses in ways that make you happy. If that's watching films all night, then maybe that's fine. I know some people who would need to exercise quite a bit of discipline to control their workaholic impulse for a night in order to sit down and enjoy a good movie...
The self control permitted you to make that choice, in either direction, instead of having it made for you by impulse.
(As an aside, a less brave person could easily have the opposite experience. They hypothetically did not have the self control to overcome their fear and fight when they should have. They gave into the impulse to be passive/surrender.)
In simpler terms you have no way of knowing if listening to the impulse to fight back would have led to legal charges, serious injuries or death - for you or your opponent.
I'm sorry, I know this is HN and not reddit but my lack of self-control has prevented me from keeping this one to myself.
To respond in seriousness, I'm the same way. There's several times I haven't allowed a situation to escalate to the point I had to fight, but afterwards I always find myself wishing I would have.
I hate stuff like this. When people say that their being is the only right thing.
He could have gotten her pregnant too, but that wouldn't have been as good an example, since that would require the women to take risks too.
Neglecting to use a condom in the heat of the moment? I imagine the line becomes grayer. It's not longer this abhorrent thing where the consequences are binary (did or did not rape), but instead more of a risk/reward thing where judging the consequences requires more fuzzy logic.
Caesar also feared thin men, because they could overcome the smaller temptations that small-time power brought with it, focussing instead on going big-time.
Of course with a lot of self-control maybe the app guy would just sit down and write the apps. But can self-control then not also backfire? At other times HN is flooded with articles about failing early enough or being prepared to change course. Self control would prevent that and therefore make you less adaptive (at least one possibility).
As for the kids with Marshmallows experiment, yeah, I've heard about it, the guy also wrote a bestseller called "Emotional Intelligence" (notice he is good at marketing). But how many kids did he test? Has it been repeated? And maybe it was other factors - perhaps the kids not taking the Marshmallows were more intelligent and had already learned that Marshmallows are bad for you. Perhaps kids from families with higher socioeconomic status feed less candy to their kids, so the kids craving for candy less were already from better backgrounds. (Not saying that is the explanation, just saying there could be lots of factors at play besides self-control. Personally, I never liked Marshmallows, not even as a kid...).
It is not about judgment, it is about studying the interaction between human traits and the society.
As for the critique of the experiment, proper screening and appropriate statistical analysis allow to rule out these factors.
Just read the research paper for yourself http://www.columbia.edu/cu/psychology/metcalfe/Old%2520Lab%2...
I actually assume it was a good study, but still, what is self-control? It seems a rather fuzzy thing, if measured by marshmallow craving. It might be too simplistic to reduce things to it.
Maybe the guy watching movies is trying to relax?
I used to have bad self insight into how worn out I was. Now I try to listen to my body and take it easy when needed.
Sooo... Today I exercised. Tomorrow I'll watch Pan's Labyrinth, which I just bought on Bluray. And I won't read up on a few class libraries I want to learn more than seeing that movie again... :-)
Edit: I should write out the point simpler: Maybe the guy has a bad year/decade for some reason beyond his control (family, health, stress, etc).
I read this as 'Self-control is great because I have great self-control.' I'm a big believer in the thesis of this article (to an extent, anyway: I'll take someone with high intelligence and low self-control over an extreme example of someone with low intelligence but high self-control), but he completely turned me off in the third paragraph. And then again when he likened a fifth grader wanting a treat right now with an adult committing statutory rape.
Jonah Lehrer writeup for the New Yorker (6 pages) http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/18/090518fa_fact_...
The actual research (direct link to PDF) http://www.columbia.edu/cu/psychology/metcalfe/Old%20Lab%20W...
The gist is that self-regulation appears to be a limited resource in the brain. This has many important implications, but the most relevant one is that treating it as a psychological phenomenon (resulting from certain ways of thinking or the presence or absence of certain personality traits) will only get you so far towards better utilizing it, if it gets you anywhere at all. As with time, thinking of willpower as a scarce resource that ought to be guarded carefully and spent wisely yields benefits that brooding about lack of it does not.
This will hopefully steer you away from the trap that the submission author fell into, wherein we paint over all matters of behavior or habit with layer upon layer of cognition and meta-cognition. We all love rationality and making conscious willful decisions, but as far as our brain is concerned, it’s more of a hobby than a full-time job. Whatever good goal-setting systems and positive self-image do, they evidently are not at the heart of the problem of self-control.
Self-control is mentally controlling yourself. It takes an active, thinking, controlled mind to put off what is self-indulgence now for one's own greater good. This may be subjective but I find that most intelligent people are self-controlled by definition.
It's usually used to refer to something more akin to self-awareness than raw horsepower. Noticing that you didn't understand a paragraph that you just read is something that some people have to learn later in life than others, for example. It may have to do with intelligence, but also probably motivation and cognitive skills.
Edit: fixed typo I may have -> It may have
Still, I agree that Self-Control is absolutely important when it comes down to pursuing your dreams. The benefit (or destruction if you don't self-control) comes at a average-over-time basis
Yeah but the guy who does build the empire around a flash app has to have the impulsiveness to actually do that, too. It's equally possible to be gridlocked by fear of failure masquerading as "impulse control".
