My Ambition Vs. My Body

Prologue:
There's a quote that I heard from Youtuber, Elliott Hulse, that has always stuck with me:
"Don't be a loser. Be a winner."

At first you'd think that he's saying the same thing in both sentences. But he's not. The first sentence is telling you to work at avoiding the traits that negatively impact your life, which lead you to failure. The second sentence is telling you to nurture the traits that positively impact your life, which lead you to success. Buddhists often say that enlightenment is found by 'unlearning' all the wrong things we learn in life. I.e: Achieved by not being a loser.

This idea is important in understanding the following blog post.

Body Vs. Ambition:
My body wants stasis.
My body wants quick dopamine hits from Facebook and Youtube.
My body wants to have lies ins for as long as I can lie in for.
My body just wants comfort: which means no work, no stress, no painful achievement.

But my body gets out the way and I'm able to move forward because my body also wants to avoid negative feelings (I respond well to negative reinforcement):
My body is scared of being told off for being late for work.
My body is scared of being judged to be lazy by my peers and colleagues.

These things that negatively reinforce me keep my body check, so that I can then use my time to get work done and don't spend too much time lying in bed or looking at Facebook.

But what if you take away the negative things that move me forward by negative reinforcement? That's what's happened when I became self-employed a few weeks ago. All of a sudden, my body didn't feel any repercussions if I stayed in late. My body didn't feel any repercussions if I stared at the computer for hours a day. But my ambition felt it. And my ambition was thrown into turmoil when I became self-employed.

I became self-employed to satisfy my ambition: so that I could have more time to dedicate to the things I wanted to do in life. I want to write a book. I want to create a product that I could sell under my own company. But something counter-intuitive happened when I carved out a lot of time in my week (by becoming self-employed) to pursue the things I wanted to pursue more: I ended up doing less.

"If you have work that you need to get done: give it to the busiest person you know." 

When I bought myself more time, I ended up removing the things that push me forward through negative reinforcement. The busiest person probably has five deadlines he needs to meet, which are scary and push him forward to get all of his work done. Negative reinforcement is a great motivating force.

This begs the question: how do I resolve the problem of continuing to move forward, when the previous negative reinforcement has been removed? How do I find negative reinforcement to get my body out of the way, so that my ambition has room to work? My ambition alone - which positively reinforces me by being something that I can run towards - is clearly not enough: I still need to maintain some negative reinforcement that gives me something to run away from as well. In my search for a good solution, there is one obvious initial requirement: a good solution involves keeping the large amount of free time that being self-employed grants me to use in fulfilling my ambition. I.e: going back to an employer - where I have a 9-5, eating up all my time - is not a good solution.

The initial answer seems obvious: I need to find some new source of negative reinforcement. However a lot of people find negative reinforcement by putting themselves at a disadvantage.

Sink Or Swim
Giving yourself some negative reinforcement is the kind of thing people are trying to achieve when they jump into the deep end by quitting their job to set up a yoga class (even though they have no idea how to run a good company) because they "want to follow their passion" and they know that they'll never do it, unless they go for the 'sink or swim' route. The scary prospect of sinking might be the only way we'll ever swim. Yet these people have only achieved one thing: they're not being a loser. They've removed the things that stop them from being successful (being in bed/staring at the computer all day) by pushing their body into running away from the scary prospect of sinking. Sadly, they have no idea how to do the other requirement: being a winner. Being a winner requires knowing how to run a good company, which may require years of learning. Sadly, due to the huge learning curve of starting your own company, this approach is usually doomed to fail: people look for negative reinforcement so badly that they achieve 'not being a loser' at the expense of 'being a winner'.

Luckily I haven't gone for - and don't believe in - a 'sink or swim' mentality. My previous job as a development engineer - which involves developing new products through careful steps - strictly taught a mentality against the 'sink or swim' one.

"Bold hearts may leap into the abyss, but rational minds develop a strategic plan for descending gently into it"

Rational thinking is what is nurtured in a development engineering environment: when we need to learn how to make something new (learn how to swim), we need to learn a process of doing it while easing in slowly: so if things go south, we don't sink.

In this way, I've become self-employed and still have a salary from a 2-day-a-week job. In this way, I've created a stable financial foundation so that I won't sink while I'm learning to swim.

A True Solution
So how do we find good negative reinforcement this isn't at the expense of being a winner? After examining the 'sink or swim' model, it's clear that the first step is to create a good financial foundation to support you while you learn to swim.

Now you've done that, you've removed the scary prospect of sinking again. So the second step is to find new ways of reminding yourself about the idea of sinking. After studying this idea, I also realised that negative reinforcements in turn create habits, forming two hierarchies of behavior that I need to change. I need to change the habit, and I need to change the root of the habit (which are positive & negative influences):

1. Change habits: my body wants to stay in bed, look at Facebook or be lazy. If we recongise this, and recognise that we've remove the previous negative reinforcement, we'll see how our habits get worse. Just enforcing the habit of not allowing any more than 5 minutes in bed should help push towards better forward movement.
2. Recognise that I need to continue to practice how not to be a loser: Give myself some negative reinforcement. I hate running. So if I don't do at least 8 hours work and live by my own set rules (e.g. getting up within 5 minutes) then I'll have to go for a 30 minute run. And I'll get fitter if I'm lazy. It's a win-win.
3. Practice how to be a winner: continue to invest time in learning how to achieve the things I want to achieve.

Spending Time To Work Out How To Spend Time

I've recently left my job as an engineer to help a friend start up his company. One core thing that a big company does for you when you work for them is give you direction. You don't have to look at where you want to get to and work out how to forge a path to get there: usually you go into a company and your manager tells you what to do. Then you go ahead and do it.

One of the hardest things I've found so far is to give myself direction. After coming out of a corporate environment, it's all too easy to feel lost, not see a clear path to go down, and then procrastinate by watching Seinfeld (my latest addiction) all day. I've found that I need to start spending a bit of time in the morning, taking a step back, thinking about the work that needs to be done, before I'm able to go ahead with my work for the day. This is the time I spend working out how to spend my time.

I'm lucky that I had a little bit of complexity in my last job, to acquaint me with how to overcome unknowns. The more complex your job is, the more unknowns you'll need to address and then illuminate before getting your work done. In my last job, I had what I'd like to call 'micro unknowns'. I knew the task, but I didn't know how to get from where I was to a point where the task was complete: at least not completely. When you're given micro unknowns, you're given a direction & an end-point, your job work out the path from where you are to the end point.

Now, I've got two unknowns. I've got micro unknowns, but I've macro unknowns as well: working out what the tasks are. This involves thinking about all the potential things that I could do, the market for those things, the skill-set I have to achieve these things, and why I'd want to do them. The macro unknowns are what give us direction and an end-point.

And then, at the simpler end of the spectrum, you can choose to do a job that requires no unknowns. I've lately experienced this after becoming a Deliveroo rider for a while. There's something strangely rewarding about doing a low-skill, labour intensive task. I think it's because there are no micro- or macro- unknowns. All you need to do is: get the food. Give food to customer. Rinse and repeat. You know exactly what you need to do, all that's left is to do it. You can get into flow without constantly coming up against barriers of the next unknown. And then when your shift is over, there are no loose ends to tie up. You know exactly where you stand and you can completely forget about the job until next time.

It's a skill to manage unknowns in your job, but I feel like I'm learning how to deal with them. And this blog post helps: the first step to solving a problem is understanding the problem.