danlucraft comments on Humans are not automatically strategic - Less Wrong

153 Post author: AnnaSalamon 08 September 2010 07:02AM

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Comment author: danlucraft 15 April 2012 09:24:23AM *  6 points [-]

Perhaps the only way to train yourself to achieve long-term goals is to use short-term motivation to improve your automatic behaviours, instead of trying to train ourselves to have motivational systems that work on long-term multi-step plans.

What if we broke down the action steps of your algorithm into:

  • ask yourself what kind of person achieves goals like this by habit
  • ask yourself how you could change yourself into that kind of person, perhaps by establishing new habits
  • evaluate whether your new habits are effectively causing you to do things that work towards your goal.

So, forget about long-term plans. Instead select and implement short-term plans that:

  • incrementally improve your position, so more opportunities that you can act on occur.
  • change bad habits into more goal-directed habits
  • put you into situations where you are likely to take actions that further your goals, automatically
  • increase your intrinsic enjoyment of things that are directed towards your goals

So, for example, starting a startup is less Step 1 of a Grand Plan to become a millionaire, and more a way to put yourself in a situation where you will have to do things that you think help towards becoming a millionaire, and will change you into more the kind of person who does things that make you a millionaire.

Of course, this whole thing is just one big long-term plan after all :) But it's a more specific one.