{"id":14292,"date":"2024-06-28T17:53:17","date_gmt":"2024-06-28T17:53:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/?p=14292"},"modified":"2024-06-28T17:53:17","modified_gmt":"2024-06-28T17:53:17","slug":"hard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/2024\/06\/28\/hard\/","title":{"rendered":"hard"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I\u2019ve been rediscovering lately that I\u2019m too hard on myself.<\/strong> And I don\u2019t mean this in the tedious interview question sense, like \u201cMy greatest weakness? Probably that I work too hard.\u201d That answer is typically meant to imply, \u201cYou should totally hire me, because you\u2019re going to get more labor from me than a reasonable person would sell you at this price!\u201d Whereas my answer is closer to\u2013 I\u2019ll exaggerate for effect\u2013 \u201cYou shouldn\u2019t<\/em> hire me, because my attitude limits my output and I don\u2019t get anything done.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I say I\u2019m too hard on myself, I\u2019m not making a request to be reassured socially.<\/strong> I\u2019m not really interested in hearing \u201caw, don\u2019t be!\u201d or \u201cthat must be rough,\u201d or \u201call ambitious people are,\u201d and so on \u2013 responses that are meant to soothe a person who seems to need soothing. I won\u2019t fault<\/em> someone for responding that way, since it\u2019s quite natural for most well-intentioned people to respond that way. What do I want, then? What I\u2019m really trying to do here is accurately assess of the effectiveness of my approach at achieving my goal: to publish good-enough essays at an brisk tempo. And I\u2019d give myself a D here. It\u2019s easy to imagine someone here saying, \u201cyou\u2019re doing it again, you\u2019re being hard on yourself!\u201d and I do have to laugh at the recursion. Because if I were less<\/em> hard on myself, I would have published more frequently, which would merit a higher grade. I published ~20 essays in 28 months. I would give myself an A if I had published 4 per month. 4 times 28 is 112. I\u2019d give myself an A for publishing 100, B for 70, C for 50, D for 25. See, I\u2019m actually quite lenient when it comes to scoring!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The area where I\u2019m harsh\u2013 and unproductively, \u2018needlessly\u2019, laughably so\u2013 is at the threshold of determining is worth writing, what is worth publishing.<\/strong> If we split me up into multiple selves\u2013 say there\u2019s Writer-Visa and Manager-Visa\u2013 I would seriously consider firing Manager-Visa, because he\u2019s been doing a terrible job. Or, well, I guess me writing this is a way of me having a 1-1 with him<\/a> first. (I highly recommend bouncing out to reading the linked blogpost, because it\u2019s great context for everything I\u2019m talking about here.) I\u2019m not a very good manager. I\u2019m not being fake-humble here. I can quite confidently say that I\u2019m a competent writer. But my self-management skills are lacking. Which is good news! It means there\u2019s room for improvement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Have you watched the movie Whiplash? (I don\u2019t recommend it.) Different people have different interpretations, but to me it\u2019s straightforwardly a horror story of a terrible mentor who abuses his students \u201cin pursuit of greatness\u201d. The protagonist of the movie triumphs in the end, but I\u2019d say he does it in spite of<\/em> his terrible teacher, and that his teacher deserves no credit for his flourishing. But it\u2019s always easier to notice when somebody else is doing a bad job. It\u2019s harder to notice when we\u2019re doing it ourselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And\u2026 come to think of it, I actually have a few data points of people who\u2019ve worked with me who\u2019ve described me as a good manager, because I do try to make an effort to make people\u2019s jobs easier, help them know what is expected of them, what the targets are, and so on. But \u2018for some reason\u2019, I hardly ever give myself<\/em> this assistance. Which I\u2019m re-realizing is a kind of self-alienation, a self-abdication. Yikes, man! But alright, I have some experience dealing with this class of problem in other areas of my life, and I\u2019ve learned not to get all twisted about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What I learned is\u2026 you don\u2019t actually need to spend a lot of time and energy ruminating on all of the details about the problem. That can just be tiresome and disheartening. The problem doesn\u2019t need to be maximally detailed, it just needs enough detail for you to take the first reasonable step towards progress. I have a clear goal, which is easily half the battle. I want to publish more regularly. What\u2019s stopping me? It\u2019s that I have these excessive, inflated ideas about \u201cwhat is worth publishing\u201d. But\u2013 I\u2019ve given other people this advice before\u2013 when you\u2019re just starting out, it\u2019s literally unclear what\u2019s worth publishing and what isn\u2019t. You aren\u2019t savvy and discerning enough yet to know. Sometimes the things you write off as irrelevant or unimportant actually reveal themselves to be really valuable later on. How do you tell the difference? Here\u2019s the neat thing: you may not actually precisely need to know. There is no context-independent answer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everything I\u2019ve written above is best thought of as preamble that got me to this point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A strange, funny, interesting thing used to happen when I was working on my book Introspect<\/a>. I would wake up bright-eyed in the morning, have a nice shower, a cup of coffee, and sit down to work\u2026 and within minutes I would be seized with narcolepsy. I\u2019m serious, I would very seriously feel an intense compulsion to go to sleep. I\u2019d typically lie down on my sofa and fall asleep immediately\u2013 which contrasts interestingly with the fact that I\u2019ve had trouble sleeping at night all my life. I would then have these really vivid, emotionally challenging dreams. And I\u2019d typically wake up tired, \u2018shaken\u2019. Here I found it helpful to have learned about \u2018box breathing\u2019. If I didn\u2019t know how to calm myself down with the breath, I probably would have kept putting off working on the book, because that experience was quite unpleasant. I always felt like I wasn\u2019t ready. I had to eventually come around to accepting that I would never<\/em> feel like I was ready.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve noticed that the same thing is happening lately with my essays. Whenever I sit down to write my essays, I get really tired and sleepy. But this is complicated by the fact that I have an 8-month-old baby boy, and as such I have been genuinely quite sleep deprived. So things are somewhat murky. But I know that I want to be writing and publishing essays. I know that my standards are too high and I should lower them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Box breathing is simple enough to explain in a sentence: inhale deeply as you count to four, hold for four seconds, exhale fully as you count to four, hold for four seconds, repeat. I\u2019m not too strict about the timing when I do it. It\u2019s just deep breaths with holds in between. The holds seem to really make a difference.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been rediscovering lately that I\u2019m too hard on myself. And I don\u2019t mean this in the tedious interview question sense, like \u201cMy greatest weakness? Probably that I work too hard.\u201d That answer is typically meant to imply, \u201cYou should totally hire me, because you\u2019re going to get more labor… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s5gxNz-hard","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14292"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14292\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14293,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14292\/revisions\/14293"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}