Month: March 2021

The most important things in life are, well, the most important things in life. They’re your values. You get to decide what they are and what they mean to you. It’s a big decision, and not one you can put off. Because you use your values every day. Your values are how you judge your actions. Or put another way, your actions are how you express your values.

The Purpose of Questions

It’s not always easy to see the impact our actions make. Often the effects can’t be seen or felt until much later. We need another tool to pry this understanding from reality, the question.With a few questions we can step back, and see the bigger picture, or dive into the details.

But questions can give us more than just understanding. They can also fuel our motivation. It’s not enough to know that your actions change something important. You also need to feel it too.

Questions should demand action

Some questions (most) are answered with words. The best are answered with actions. This starts with the way you phrase your question. Instead of asking yourself how something works, ask what you need to do to change it. This keeps your end goal in mind (you do want to use that understanding, don’t you?). While you’ll still need to gain understanding, focusing on the end goal helps you to filter out information that isn’t necessary. By asking what you need to do, you’ll push yourself into using your insight.

Questions should contrast possible outcomes 

For years, I’ve set goals and then tried to force myself to take the actions necessary to complete them. This led to me dragging myself to the finish line, tired and bruised, or quitting before I even got there. I didn’t realize that there was an alternative, so I tried to bulk up on willpower. Instead of relying on willpower, I’d recommend using whypower (it’s a more renewable resource). Constantly direct your focus to what you’re aiming at. When things get hard, look back to your why, instead of trying to follow arbitrary commands from your past self.

And questions are the best tool for this. Questions can be used to contrast the differences in the possible outcomes, and show how your actions will steer you towards one or the other. Where are your actions taking you? Is that somewhere you’d like to go? What about it makes it so? How is your action taking you there?

A Question for You

What question can you ask yourself that will most help you reach your goals?

For me, it is this: “Is this helping me learn to become a more capable writer?”

The Happiness from Activities Changes Over Time

The first slice of pizza is far better than the last. Nobody has to ask “are you going to eat the first slice?” Because the answer is obviously yes. The first slice is hot, and you’re hungry. By the last one, the pizza is room temperature, and you’re full.

You get the most benefit when you start out, and as you spend more time you don’t get as much. Until eventually, you’d rather throw the last slice away than eat it. Watching tv, exercising, planning: most activities are like this. The first TV show is critically acclaimed and well written. It captures your focus from start to finish. After another ten shows, you realize that you’re flipping through channels, searching for an antidote to your boredom. You race off to do something, and it feels great. So you put more time in, but then stops delivering what you wanted out of it anymore. Until eventually it’s actively making your life worse.

This is true for specific activities, and for similar kinds of activities. Watching the same show ten times in a row will lose its luster quickly. But the same holds true for related things. Ten consecutive episodes of a show will start to drag. Ten detective shows in a row would be a burden to watch. A full day spent watching TV would be a bother more than a break.

Stop Doing What You Enjoy

To increase your happiness, stop doing things that you enjoy, while you still enjoy them. Our current mechanism for stopping catches us far too late. We usually quit once we’ve squeezed all of the joy out and start to taste bitterness. Instead stop while you are still enjoying it. Note when your enjoyment goes down a bit. Is it after one movie? How many slices until you aren’t excited about the next one? Eat pizza until you don’t enjoy a slice. Then take one less next time.

This is a difficult prescription to follow. Observe your experience when something goes from fun to a chore. Mark that moment. What changed? How much time had you spent? What were you feeling? To stop sooner, you’ll need a precise understanding of when an activity stops being worthwhile, and what that feels like. Instead of draining it dry, save some enjoyment for the next time you do that activity.