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Swimmer963 comments on Action and habit - Less Wrong
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I was thinking about that as I was writing this...I thought I'd mentioned it at some point, but I guess not. Thus telling my friends I'm going to go to the gym or the pool later makes it a lot more likely that I'll actually go, even if they can't verify whether I do or not. Useful tactic.
Ya. NaNoWriMo suggests this technique when they recommend bragging as a form of self-motivation. The idea being that if you brag to your friends/family/colleagues about how amazing your novel is going to be, then you'll be too embarrassed to not do it :)
I remember a post describing a study that showed that telling others about your resolve makes it less likely that you'll do it (can't remember relevant keywords to look up the post).
Here's that post: Image vs. Impact: Can public commitment be counterproductive for achievement?.
Interesting. Note: I can't go read the original paper as it's behind login, but based on my guess at what kind of goals they're talking about it's mainly aimed at "identity"-based commitments (though a long-range goal is also mentioned).
eg claiming "I'm a writer / I'm writing a novel" as opposed to "I will write 50,000 words this month"
I speculate that there is a big difference between the two above claims. The first one, you can get away with claiming - and gain social credit for not doing anything to accomplish it apart from carrying a writing journal and... I dunno, dressing bohemian and living in a garret for a while. You can "be writing a novel" for years...
But if you make a very specific claim eg "50,000 words written in November" - a claim that can be backed-up by evidence of regular progress (for nanowrimo... anybody can go see your actual word-count), then I reckon you can't back down quite so easily.
Thanks!
Someone else linked to that somewhere in the comments. The idea is that if you tell all your friends about your high-status plan to write a novel, and they congratulate you, then it becomes a 'social reality'...you get some of the benefits of having written a novel without having done any work, and so you're less likely to do the work.
I wonder what would happen if you told your friends about your plans and they were extremely skeptical. From personal experience, I think that to a degree you feel more motivated to 'show them' and 'prove yourself', as I did when nearly all my friends and family were skeptical that I could learn to sing. I did learn to sing. However, my friends and family were also skeptical that I could become the youngest person to swim across Lake Ontario (at 14) and I didn't end up doing it...without my parents' material and financial support, it was pretty much impossible.
Hmmm - just shows that different people are different. I find that if everybody around me is skeptical then I'm far less likely to do it. I'm demotivated because I feel unhappy that they don't "believe in me". I prefer my friends to be supportive.
Where?
I went through all the comments and tried to find it. I can only conclude that I saw it somewhere else. I'll keep looking and see if I can find it for you.
This was the original post: Image vs. Impact: Can public commitment be counterproductive for achievement?.
You mentioned it. Since it's also true that everything (that you care about) affects your thoughts, consider my post a musing inspired by the first line of the poster, and nothing more.
Interpreting "destiny" to mean "your situation", the poster paints a true (incomplete) picture.