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jimrandomh comments on A "Failure to Evaluate Return-on-Time" Fallacy - Less Wrong
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I think a large part of the problem is simply not having the right mental toolkit to make these evaluations. It's not that people are evaluating return on investment incorrectly, so much as not evaluating it at all because they don't know how.
I've recently started using "Naritai Project" as a mental category (in reference to Tsuyoku Naritai), meaning something that improves myself or my habits, as a one-time act. For example, locating a more convenient gym counts, creating the habit of exercising regularly counts, but exercise itself does not. Anything classified as a Naritai Project is automatically high priority.
(And yes, I know this is a horrible abuse of Japanese grammar. Looking up the correct conjugation isn't important to me.)
I think it's not just an abuse of Japanese grammar; you've picked the wrong bit of the phrase. "Tsuyoku" is "stronger" and "naritai" is "I want to become". May I suggest "Tsuyoku Project" instead? (I think it even sounds better...)
(I know very little Japanese and am open to correction on this.)
I think "Kaizen Project" would respect the Japanese roots best, but I think the suggestions below work better for other reasons.
Tsuyoku is the adverb form of strong (tsuyoi), so it would translate roughly as "strongly". In Japanese "strongly become" is equivalent to "become strong".
I suggest "Tokujyou Project", which would translate roughly as "bad-ass project".
Why not just call it "self-improvement"? The phrase had more specific connotations in the linked post (self-improvement as opposed to self-abasement), but those don't apply here, and in general avoiding needless cryptic jargon is good PR and anti-cultishness.
That does seem to make sense, but for some reason I can't quite place, the phrase "self-improvement project" suggests long-duration projects to me, while the concept I'm driving at is focused on one-time acts of analysis and precedent setting. I can't think of a good way to express this distinction in a catchy English phrase.
"Life refactoring" would work for people with a programming background.
edit: Although the pedant in me says it is a mix of optimisation and refactoring. Refactoring has the right connotations of single instance changes and less confusion from other sources than optimisation.
Best suggested phrase so far. And searching seems to indicate that it's unused.
Life hacking on the other hand is a widely used phrase with a similar meaning.
That's an obviously good idea, now that I see it written out, and I'm going to try it.
Some of those things really are one-time, like finding a more convenient gym. Creating a habit takes determination over a longer time-span, though. When I try it, I need about a week before I no longer need to spend conscious effort maintaining a new habit, and another week before it's entrenched and I don't have to think about it anymore. I suppose you can still classify this as a one-time act, that just happens to take a while.
I wonder, what are some other Naritai Projects? I want some, so if anybody has some ideas, please post them. Some of my ideas:
Minor dietary change: exclude or strongly limit a single type of food. If you regularly eat candy, your dental health will probably benefit a lot if you swear off hard candy and strongly limit your consumption of any other sort of candy. I did this after my dentist had to do some unpleasant drilling, and it was a two-week process, as described above. The same sort of method can apply to alcohol, if you find yourself drinking too much.
If you're in college: go on a several-hour study binge on one of your classes where you try to understand the subject in greater detail than the class requires. Power-read a textbook, hit up Wikipedia, prove theorems while pacing back and forth in an unused classroom, whatever. And skim way ahead, even if you don't understand everything. Surprisingly, this gives a lasting boost to performance in that class. Improving your understanding early on improves how fast you learn, which improves how fast you learn, and so on -- education yields compound interest. It also improves your morale, at least temporarily.
But looking it up would be a one-time thing, and would make your grammar more correct forever! ;-)
I know that using the correct grammar would actually make your phrase harder for LWers to remember, so it would be a net loss. Still, it suggests another Naritai Project:
For diet, in my experience, trying to eliminate a food directly is nearly impossible; instead, I approach it from the opposite direction and look for foods to add, which can displace the unwanted ones. From this angle, a lot of subtle failure modes become more obvious; to displace candy, you need something (or some combination of things) that's equally convenient (or you'll backslide when you don't have time to cook), non-perishable (or you'll backslide when you haven't grocery shopped for awhile), portable (or you'll backslide when travedlling), and calorie-containing (or you'll backslide when you really need the calories).
My most important self-improvement project recently has been researching and experimenting with nootropics. Gadget shopping can sometimes be a self-improvement project; buying a Roomba is better than cleaning, for example, and buying a smartphone can convert a lot of downtime into reading time. Trying new software, particularly in categories you've never used before, gives you new capabilities. You do have to be honest with yourself about how much the actual benefit is, and how much money is worth to you, though.
Any time spent searching for and addressing bad habits is especially well spent, if it has a reasonable chance of turning up new insights. But they only count if they're actionable; deciding to be more considerate is worthless unless it's followed by thinking about or researching a specific cue to consider, deciding to study more is worthless unless it's followed by choosing a distraction to eliminate, etc. This is mostly a matter of sitting down with a diary and thinking. (Thanks Alicorn, for pressuring me into doing this more; my diary's been getting a lot more entries since I started reading Luminosity, and some of those entries had important insights.)
Depends on the songs. :)
Hmm, what's Japanese for "I want to become cooler"?
If I have the grammatical pattern and the loanword right (I probably don't), I think it might actually be "Kuku Naritai".
I'm afraid you don't, sorry. The "-ku naritai" pattern only works for the "i-adjectives" (it goes like tsuoyi->tsuyoku, ureshii->ureshiku), and hardly any loanwords turn into those - at least, not while they're still recognizable as having originally been English. Otherwise it would be "XXXX ni naritai", as the commenter above you suggested. Also note that this only works for "[subject] wants to become X"; "[subject] wants Y to become X" is completely different (something like Y ni X(ku/ni) natte hoshii, correct me if I'm wrong).
Examples:
tadashiku naritai - I want to become right (in the sense of right answer on a test, right thing to do)
beisutsukai ni naritai - I want to become a Bayesian (Personally I've always thought that risei-ryokusha, "one with the powers of reason", would be way cooler, if only because it would then play well with "First off, I'm not interested in ordinary people. But if any of you are transumanists, Singularitarians, or Bayesians, please come see me! That is all.")
My best guess would be "kuuru ni naritai"
I once spent a few very silly hours with Steve Rayhawk coming up with 'autothexis': poor archaic Greek for 'self-sharpening'. I like it because you can use it to talk about self-improvement in Seed AI as well as in your own life. Now it's my email address and profile name on various sites. Also, autothectize, autothectic, and my favorite because 'intelligence explosion' is unwiedly, 'thectodammerung'. ;)
Unfortunately, there seems to be no easy way to say 'self-improvement' in English. I thought about this for a few minutes once and found it moderately disturbing.
However, there are 42 ways to say "self-improvement" in Japanese.
So that's why '42' is the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything...
Anthony Robbins coined the word CANI, which is short for "Constant And Never-ending Improvement".
Some might find it useful. Me, I can't take it seriously because it's too close to the Finnish word "kani", meaning "bunny" (as in the animal).
He also trademarked it. ;-) Might as well use "kaizen", since it's pretty much the same thing.
Compare with the mildly archaic English word "coney", also meaning rabbit.
Given to choice to start a running habit, which would you choose? a) Buying new running shoes b) Starting to run with your precious shoes
Psychological research suggests that b) has a higher chance of producing a lasting habit. Your strategy would however suggest that a) can be billed as high value wile b) doesn't.
It's no good idea to try to feel satisfaction for something else then following through on the habit. It reduces the satisfaction you can expect by actually following through because you already felt some satisfaction for the goal. Therefore you are less likely to follow through.
There also a related TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_keep_your_goals_to_yourself.html
I would count (b) only the first time, when it's precedent-setting. I wouldn't count (a) at all, unless my current shoes were in such poor condition that they were a genuine obstacle to running; the connection between buying running shoes and running is quite tenuous, despite the name and the marketing.