Jakub Petrykowski blog

Mindfulness Meditation - breathing, body scan

Summary: Short introduction to mindfulness meditation - with instruction sets for breathing meditation and body scan. 

I've had lots of conversations recently which at one point or another led to topics like mild social anxiety, procrastination, perfectionism, and interpersonal communication. I suggested that there are ways to change the way we experience these things -- and so the topic of meditation came up.

The reason I connected meditation with anxiety, procrastination and other issues is because meditation is supposed to help us deal with stress. Meditation practice makes us more aware of what's going on in the moment, including judgemental thoughts about ourselves (perfectionists judge almost everything they create as suboptimal / not good enough) and troubling feelings - anxiety/fear, anger, etc. You'd think that making you more aware of something will only make it worse... but the whole attitude in mindfulness is about acceptance and non-judging. You train yourself to accept difficult emotions and to recognize judgemental thoughts as non-critical aspect of your life. They are just thoughts and emotions, not absolute truth you must follow.

I've been practicing elements of mindfulness meditation recently. Specifically, I'm following ideas and instructions from Jon Kabat-Zinn's book Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness. The book contains a clear instruction set for body scan meditation program, breathing meditation and some yoga practice.

From my experience, starting a regular meditation practice is difficult:

• it requires plenty of time. E.g. initial program in Jon Kabat Zinn's Stress Clinics requires participants to do 45 minutes of body scan every day for 8 weeks. It's very easy not to meditate on any given day because it feels like doing nothing or wasting time.
• it takes a great deal of effort. It's easy to get distracted, uncomfortable, even forget what you were doing. The whole point it to train our ability to concentrate, but it's just difficult.

If you are interested in trying meditation (just to see what it's like), I suggest you do both breathing and body scan meditation, just to see what it's really like.

Breathing meditation

One 15-minute session of breathing meditation. I suggest not using audio-guided meditation. In my experience, listening to another person's voice makes it hard to focus on breathing and nothing else. Also I have found it remarkably difficult not to fall asleep when lying on my back -- sitting meditation is much better for this.

The following written instructions come from Jon Kabat-Zinn:

Assume a comfortable posture lying on your back or sitting. If you are sitting, keep the spine straight and let your shoulders drop.

Close your eyes if it feels comfortable.

Bring your attention to your belly, feeling it rise or expand gently on the inbreath and fall or recede on the outbreath.

Keep your focus on the breathing, “being with” each inbreath for its full duration and with each outbreath for its full duration, as if you were riding the waves of your own breathing.

Every time you notice that your mind has wandered off the breath, notice what it was that took you away and then gently bring your attention back to your belly and the feeling of the breath coming in and out.

If your mind wanders away from the breath a thousand times, then your “job” is simply to bring it back to the breath every time, no matter what it becomes preoccupied with.

Practice this exercise for fifteen minutes at a convenient time every day, whether you feel like it or not, for one week and see how it feels to incorporate a disciplined meditation practice into your life. Be aware of how it feels to spend some time each day just being with your breath without having to do anything.

Body scan

One 45-minute session of body-scan. You can use these audio instructions from Jon Kabat-Zinn himself. The first 45 minutes are for body scan, the rest is for other modes of meditation practice.

In my experience the primary challenge is to keep going... i.e. you will get distracted a lot, and may just start doing something else. This is why I think it's so hard.

Results?

If something changes in the way we feel on a daily basis it's hard to say what the reason was. If you take some pills and feel better, was it really due to pills? Or did you eat better? Sleep better? Did you just regress to the mean?

I think it's a tragedy that we pretty much can't know for sure what was the result (or lack thereof) of any particular lifestyle change, including diet changes, exercise, meds, therapy, meditation and so on. But I'm willing to risk a  bit of wasted effort in order to get a chance to improve how much positive energy I have every day. Talking to my friends convinced me that some people don't believe in such efforts too much.

If you do try meditation, let me know how it goes :) Were you able to do full 15 minutes for breathing or full 45 minutes for body scan, or did you stop for any reason? :)

Tiny Habits, a reliable method to create new habits

If you want to learn a reliable method to build new habits into your daily life,  I strongly suggest you enter free Tiny Habits workshop. It is designed and run by B. J. Fogg, a Stanford scientist working on behavior change in both academic and business settings.

Tiny Habits is a 5-day, low effort online course. You define 3 habits you want to practice by following specific (and unusual) instructions. You're done after a week, hopefully with a new understanding and skill in building new habits yourself, for the rest of  your life. Workshop only deals with 3 habits, but of course you will almost immediately start more if the method works for you.

So far more than 7000 (!) people have done the workshop. I just finished, too, and I'm a fan! I have searched for this kind of results for more than 4 years now. Tiny Habits is the first systematic 'technique' for changing behavior that has actually sticked with me. Results are very encouraging.

I won't yet share the details of the method. I think it's best if you sign up for the next available course and read the instructions doc you'll be emailed. It describes the method in its entirety. Enjoy!

PS. Kudos to Andrzej for sharing Tiny Habits with me.

The Power of Happiness book review

I recently read a book titled "The Power of Happiness: A Comprehensive Guide to Daily Joy and Well-Being" by Timothy McKinney. 

If you're looking for an introduction to the topic of happiness from the point of view of science, this book is a decent place to start. It's a light read, and it's short. It provides a good overview of several imporant concepts about happiness, like helplessness, negative emotion, connection between personality and happiness, or money and happiness; or the effect of daily routine on your well-being. 

The author doesn't go into much detail on any particular topic; in that sense the title is a bit misleading; once you find something of interest in the book, you'll need to dig deeper in other places.  The scientific parts are mixed with motivational quotes taken from non-scientific sources (e.g. self-help "guru" Tony Robbins). This isn't always a good thing. Still, it was easy enough for me  to ignore literary quotes and focus on the main content.

Roughly half the book consists of exercises that may help reflect on your own life; however, based on extensive experience with these and similar exercises from many other books, I am skeptical that they will change anyone's life, not without experiential learning like in-person workshops or coaching.

Conclusion: if you want a quick read with lots of introductory concepts and pointers for more detailed reading, get the book. But if you ever read a book by a renowned psychologist on the topic of well-being (happiness, optimism, emotions, neurobiology of well-being), go after more in-depth books by best authors (if books are even the right medium; experiential learning might be a better idea).

Note: I'd like to thank the author for providing me with free copy for my Kindle. 

Making informed decisions, part 2

Summary: It's hard to make informed decisions. Sometimes experts aren't your best allies. In this post I share examples of "good" experts, and a few tips for making better decisions in key areas of life.

In Part 1 I described the problem of making informed decisions. I used health & medicine as an example area which is hard to master.

In Part 2 (this article) I explore some detailed aspects of the problem, including examples of "good" experts.

Positive exception: experts who share

Internet has done much good in the area of educating people. It’s the largest educational tool ever created. There are entire websites dedicated to sharing knowledge, both facts and “how to” information. Wikipedia, discussion boards, specialized topic sites, blogs. They are a great step forward in helping people be better decision makers. Yes, there is lots of bad information out there, but the very availability of high quality information is something amazing.

Many of these sites are ran by experts who actually share useful, relevant findings. They often do it for free - on Wikipedia, on their blogs. They earn enough living through existing channels that they don’t have to worry that some people will not come to them because they learned too much.

One community I’d like to call out here is computer programmers; it’s an incredibly vocal and open community in general, with a huge "open source" movement (giving not just free advice, but free software, some of it best in class). Computer programmers also share knowledge among themselves in many ways, with some recent innovations like GitHub or StackOverflow being amazingly popular and useful to hundreds of thousands of people worldwide.

People who share their work and expertise eventually get rewarded -- they get better jobs, earn credibility in the community, make interesting relationships.

I think this is one of the great ways to become a true leader: inspire others through sharing what you did and what you learned, letting others do that or use that, too. It’s a combination of public service and commercial work, because you usually get lots of benefits when you publish useful stuff on the Internet.

Some non-fiction book authors are also this kind of "positive" experts, provided they actually know what they are talking about.  People who dedicate their time to share knowledge and thus educate people are in my opinion doing a big favor to the society. They get paid a little for selling the book, and perhaps more in career opportunities that writing a book can bring.

There is of course an issue that everyone can publish a book. What I'm saying is not that "books are helpful in making informed decisions", but rather "there are some experts who dedicate their time to educate everyone through writing books".

Scientists might be another group of positive experts, provided that access to scientific papers is made free and easy - which is not the case right now. Once every scientific paper sponsored by public funding is accessible for free (something that I hope will happen during my lifetime...), I'm sure there will be people who will make it accessible and understandable for laymen, e.g. by making summaries and collections of such papers, e.g. "Science of diabetes 101".

What can you do to make better decisions?

• Develop varied network of friends and loved ones who can become your “proxy” experts.
• Be such an expert for others in your area of expertise.
• Read a few books on a given topic written by the best people in the world.
• Define a few critical areas of your life -- “Core competencies” -- which you will take responsibility for. Then slowly learn the basics of these areas, over the years becoming a bit of an expert yourself; you won’t become a doctor or a computer expert by reading a few books and a few blogs a year, but you may well be the most knowledgeable person in your street. For me the core competency areas include e.g. health, personal finance, psychology, English language. It has served me well on many occasions.

 

Making informed decisions, part 1

Summary: Most areas of knowledge are so big and complex that most people will never know anything about them. This includes some areas that affect everyone every day, like health/medicine. Non-experts have a hard time making good decisions.

In Part 1 (this article) I describe the problem, using health & medicine as an example area of life which is hard to master.

In Part 2 I explore some detailed aspects of the problem, including examples of "good" experts.

Making good choices in health & medicine

You make health-related choices every day. What you eat, how you relate to others, career choices you make, how much you exercise -- all this influences your well-being.

But medicine is a huge body of knowledge. It's also constantly evolving. Even doctors have trouble keeping up; some doctors don't even try to keep up, thus indirectly harming their patients when they apply old methods of treatment and give advice based on old research when there are already more effective ways to help patients. There are also many parts of medicine which are simply controversial because there is no conclusive research to date, so different experts will tell you different things.

What’s particularly hard, some critical health effects are only visible in the long-term. A single “bad” day in terms of bad diet, lack of exercise, smoking or drinking too much alcohol do not result in any immediate problems. Long-term effects remain intractable. So we don’t learn from “mistakes”, because mistakes are in the habits, not individual behaviors.

Online information is hard to find, often incomplete or simply wrong. It’s hard to evaluate without expert knowledge. You’ll find conflicting information of pretty much any medical topic. It’s not just that there’s lots of bad medical information on the Internet, even the parts that are good are scattered and hard to tell apart from the “bad” information.

Moreover, doctors and pharmaceutical companies don't really have economic incentives to "solve" the problem of unhealthy lifestyle. Why? Because they are mostly in the "treatment" business, not in the "prevention and education" business. Think about it. If everyone lived a healthy lifestyle, doctors and those companies would lose majority of their income. They would still be needed to diagnose and treat some conditions, but many products and many consultation hours would simply be unnecessary, and many conditions would be avoided altogether.

Note: I don't think that complexity issue or incentive issue is specific to medicine. However, health is a major area for everyone in which problems may have dramatic effect on well-being. In the worst case, when individuals consistently make bad medical decisions throughout their life it leads to huge financial costs and great suffering.

Where does the problem come from?

Humans are learning a lot very quickly through science and business specialization; the world is very complex. So our civilization gets more and more advanced, and we get more and more “ignorant” compared to the experts. In that sense we get more "ignorant" over the years, even if on an individual level we are learning. And we keep being ignorants in all the areas except the few in which we specialize. 

• It's very hard to check if given piece of advice or information is “true” if it’s from a field we’re not experts in. 
• Results of our decisions are often delayed past the point of “no return”, so learning from our own experience is impractical
• Man is weak. We like sugar. Cookies taste well. It's biology (see post on hyperbolic discounting, though the issue is... yeah, more complex)
• Typically, the fields which are less scientific are more prone to error and speculation
• More money => more FLP issues (business thrives on sales, not on helping people make good choices)
• We live on “autopilot” (heuristics, biases). It minimizes effort on our part, but it leads to poor choices when non-obvious knowledge is out there
• Personal experimentation is very difficult. It’s impossible to run proper experiments on ourselves, e.g. how do you experiment with diet without ruining your normal life? How do you control for emotions, stress, weather, other foods you ate recently etc. when trying to figure out the effect of, say, sugar on your well being?
• Lack of competition, especially in form of cartels or monopolies, will probably aggravate the situation regardless of the field
• In the end, sometimes even experts get it wrong, i.e. experts make bad decisions, too.

A note on incentives and ethics of experts

Doctors and pharmaceutical companies are "experts". But they are not really that “good” for us. It’s not their business to educate us. They want us to keep coming back for what they are selling. It's true for most professionals. Again, doctors are in the “treatment” business, not in the “education” business.

So if you are an expert in any field, what do you do?

Do you try to get the same client again and again, or do you help the client become self-sufficient?

In my own experience as a teacher or trainer I always strived to provide the learners with enough understanding and tools to make them independent; but I'm not kidding myself; most people are not as benevolent.

Incidentally, Dan Ariely recently wrote about this kind of conflicts of interest among dentists in the USA. Read it, it's short and to the point.

So when you are paying for the services of an expert, keep this in mind:

• Experts are paid for what they know - so they don’t have such a great incentive to educate everyone. You need to remain your expert status to be worth something in the market.
• It’s easier to remain being an expert by NOT helping others become experts than it is by learning NEW (better) information all the time. This leads to entrenched systems.
• Some people pretend to be experts and we just get fooled. It can work if such a ‘fake’ expert gets many new clients quickly and if they can’t warn each other. Also, often you get paid for something before the result is visible.

You may need to ask lots of questions to get the "most" of your interaction with an expert; they won't just tell you all they know.

Part 2

In part 2 of the article I'm showing examples of "good" experts, and a few ways I use to solve the problem.

Books on habits and cognitive biases

Two books I highly recommend if you're interested in how personal /organizational habits can be instilled, and how you fool yourself on a daily basis probably without knowing it (and what to do about that):

"Power of Habit" by Charles Duhigg

Many case studies of how various individuals and organizations reshape their habits. The book is not instructional in any way and I would love to see more in-depth look at actual challenges to building new habits on individual level.

Some interesting bits from this book:

• Once a strong habit is formed, it's always present in our head, so it's always possible to relapse. 
• A solid way to remove bad habits is to identify (mostly environmental) cues that make us start on the bad routine; replace the routine with something else that's not as destructive but what also gives same reward. Trivial example: you feel like eating a snack; normally you'd go for a cookie or something; instead you learn to always have a healthier snack (nuts, fruit) at your desk, which provides similar reward.
• Often we are on our good behavior most of the time, but when pressure rises (e.g. Starbucks employee gets into an argument with an angry customer) we do something we later regret. The clever idea is to have a plan ready for when that happens; example in the book: Starbucks employee prepares a written plan for dealing with an anticipated, very stressful situation. That makes it more likely for him to behave "well" where otherwise automatic "bad" behavior might be unavoidable.
• More references to the idea that "willpower is depletable resource" (e.g. why do people often spend most of the day eating healthy food and eventually go on to clear out half the fridge at night? :) I'm not saying it looked like sound scientific research, but it was a good anecdote that when tired / stressed, we act in ways that we don't like later on. That's why I like the suggestion to be mentally prepared for the bad moments to minimize their impact.

"Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman

A detailed, broad account of how we are prone to mistakes of thought without ever realizing we make them - by describing two systems, System 1 and System 2 - aspects of how our minds work, and how they work together to produce judgements/decisions. I wish policy makers, educators, business people and parents had the kind of mindset Kahneman advocates, i.e. we're wrong more often than we realize, and it may lead to poor results at work and in personal life. 

Some interesting bits from this book:

• Every chapter of the book suggests ways to speak about the issues Kahneman describes, e.g. examples of the way to talk to others in order to combat specific cognitive biases discovered by scientists - like these:
• combat halo effect: “She knows nothing about this person’s management skills. All she is going by is the halo effect from a good presentation.”
• combat wanting only to support what you already know: "“They didn’t want more information that might spoil their story. WYSIATI.” [WYSIATI = what you see is all there is, a cognitive heuristic Kahneman describes in detail] 
• Even more research suggesting that when people are tired and their "System 2" is depleted  (System 2 is the conscious, slow, deliberate, doubting aspect of the mind/brain), they are prone to bad judgement.
• Many good examples for each of the most prevalent cognitive biases like the halo effect or availability bias (I think I was hit by that one in at least half the conversations in my life) 
• "Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern." and "It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness." - in other words, the more you know, the more information you can hold in your 'active' mind at a time, the more critical, careful and doubtful you will be. This sounds to me a lot like why non-nerds laugh at nerds; nerds tend to hold much more information about a topic in their heads, and this perhaps leads to what non-nerds call "philosophizing". I'll leave you to pick sides in this eternal conflict :)

The hard part, as usual - implementing it all.

Thoughts on willpower, blood sugar and learning too fast

A few random thoughts:

• Willpower - is it a depletable resource? Or maybe it isn't? The article suggests it's probably a dead end. Based on my small experiments with diet changes, changing habits in my case requires environment control, self-education, self-awareness and planning. No moment-to-moment willpower necessary, and in fact if it comes down to that, I usually fail and eat that delicious but unhealthy treat/cookie/pizza.
• I've bought & tried a glucometer. Very cool device, allows you to test actual effects of food on your blood sugar. It's amazing to be able to perform an actual blood test yourself, at home, within less than a minute, using a device that costs around $20. Brilliant.
• I'm experimenting with eating food which has low glycemic index, and seeing how this affects my moment-to-moment energy level, focus, emotions and optimism. So far the results are very encouraging. If you don't know what it is, and you'd like to have more energy and focus on a typical workday, I recommend learning more about glycemic index. 
• There is a phenomenon I'd call "learning too fast". I've concluded that I was reading too many books, and analyzing various areas of my work and life too much, without acting. The way I evaluate it is by looking at the ratio of applied knowledge (change in a way I do things) to acquired knowledge (instructions on how to do things differently, taken from books, friends etc.). This ratio is appallingly low for me. I'd say that I apply maybe 5-10% of what I read in the last year, and that only includes advice that I decided to be meaningful and worthwhile. Rate of knowledge application is just as important as rate of knowledge acquisition. They don't need to be equal, but learning too fast compared to applying what you learn may lead to frustration ("I learned so much, but there are no improvements in my daily work/life") and is just waste if you dedicate lots of resources to it.

Self-control and hyperbolic discounting in humans

Summary: the way people choose smaller-sooner rewards or larger-later rewards is well modelled with hyperbolic discounting, as opposed to exponential discounting known from the world of finance. I am wondering if there's a technology we could use to make people choose larger-later rewards more consistently.

I did some reading on self-control recently, and so I found out about hyperbolic discounting through the book The Science of Self-Control. It shows an approach to self-control, along with its consequences for addiction.

If you like video, here's 3 short videos discussing temporal discounting (in order of appearance: no discounting, exponential discounting, hyperbolic discounting).

The key concept here is preference reversal. Apparently, humans (and some animals) tend to prefer larger-later (LL) rewards to sooner-smaller (SS) rewards if both are available in the sufficiently far future. But as time goes by, SS reward becomes disproportionately more valuable and at some point becomes the preferred choice - just because both are now much closer in time.

For example: in the evening we plan to get up at 7 am rather than 9 am, but in the morning that preference seems absurd and we prefer to sleep until 9 am. 

Put another way: instant gratification (smaller-sooner, SS) pleases the present self while delayed reward (larger-later, LL) benefits the future self.

The book presents the idea and lots of related research, along with how this relates to the development of addiction.

For those really interested: Hyperbolic discounting model contains a constant, the discount factor. The lower the constant, the more likely we're to choose larger-later rewards. Research on humans and various animals (e.g. pigeons) indicates that the more developed the animal, the lower the discount factor, i.e. the longer the perspective when making choices. Also, for humans, the older a person is the lower that factor is (i.e. experience makes humans do better choices over time).

I'm haunted by vision of a technology that would help people make better decisions. We usually know which option is the best in the long term, but we act against that judgement anyway. If there was something that would reverse the trend...

Now some tricks mentioned in the book include broadening time horizon when making decisions, or including commitment mechanisms (e.g. setting our environment up so that the SS choice would be more painful should we choose it in the future). However, they are all "soft" mechanisms, i.e. prone to manipulation by ourselves and in my experience simply don't work.

I'm wondering what would work, e.g. what technology or training.

More on self-discipline

Summary: As I promised to Greg last week, I read through six old articles on self-discipline by Steve Pavlina. Here's detailed comments on these, and how I think his ideas relate to my earlier post on methodical work as a habit.

Note that I am not familiar with scientific research on the topic (though perhaps it would help me a lot if I read a few papers), except that I've seen some books mentioning evidence suggesting that willpower is in limited supply in humans.

Let me discuss each of the six articles by Pavlina in the context of my previous post on methodical work as a habit.

• Part 1 (on self-discipline in general)  - 
  
  I like his definition: "Self-discipline is the ability to get yourself to take action regardless of your emotional state" 
  
  He claims that self-discipline can be trained like a muscle. I sure hope it can. But he shows examples like, say, getting up early in the morning. Well that sounds like building an individual habit of getting up early rather than working on "self-discipline", doesn't it?
  
  Obviously when you train a repeatable behavior, over time you will get better at that specific behavior. But does it later "overflow" into other areas of life?
  
  By training those individual habits or behaviors, are we improving our capacity to self-discipline in any area?
  
  I think more likely than not we are simply training individual habits. Whether or not we increase our capacity to act regardless of emotional states remains unknown.
• Part 2 (acceptance) -  he merely restates that after a long time of practicing various habits (working out, diet, ...) he had made great progress in these areas of life. 
  
  Here's the key sentence: "It’s still hard work, but I’ve become a lot stronger such that things that would have been insurmountable for me at age 20 are easy today"
  
  It sounds a lot like he basically trained well in these specific areas he named, so they are easy to him now, but that doesn't mean a bit that doing something new is easier! Also we don't know what "would have been"... 
  
  Since these areas of his life are now governed by long-trained habits (10 years or more), obviously he can focus on other things, which appears to him like he was much more disciplined in general. But in general means simply in these areas of life.
  
  Also, perhaps his own general ability to push himself and work hard methodically is far above average (and possibly rather constant over adult lifetime), which is what allowed him to build those habits in the first place... 
  
  Basically he now doesn't use up a lot of "discipline" on those "basic" areas of life, and can use this "energy" on something else. That doesn't mean he improved his self-discipline. It seems to me that over time he setup good, optimized routines for all that he does effectively; one result is that he is physically and mentally stronger now (exercise, diet etc. all are known to improve mental and emotional capacity a lot!) and he was able to organize his habits and life so that he can focus on higher level, bigger objectives where he just can't waste time on washing up etc.
  
  He then calls this improved situation in his life "improved self-discipline", but it is simply a set of new habits and better mind-body condition which allows him to operate on a different level (be more successful etc.).
  
  So this second part only strengthened the following model in my mind:
  
  - some things should be done on a regular basis (I call them "maintenance projects", ones where regular work brings good results)- turning these things into habits is a great way of having them done (maximize efficiency);
  - once they are habits - which may take months or years to build - we can focus on more important, bigger goals and achieve them with more ease since the baseline is working on autopilot for us.
  
  I don't see self-discipline as a muscle anywhere in the picture so far. Let's go on to the next part.
• Part 3 (Willpower) - this article seems to refer to scientificly researched area. Yes, willpower is in limited supply, and some people seem to be able to distract themselves from dangerous thoughts and tendencies which on the outside may have the appearance of strong will  (famous marshmallow experiment comes to mind).
  
  Pavlina states that knowing this, one should use that limited supply of willpower to organize his environment  so that sustaining "good" habits is easier. I like this idea, and won't argue with that :) It's actually known technique in the self-help industry.
  
  I am a fan of "environment control" when building habits (examples: changing diet, doing workout etc.). In other words - by setting up specific environment, make it hard to fall into bad habits and easy to maintain good habits, and you'll succeed. No revolution here, and if it says anything about willpower or self-discipline it's that we should never rely on them too much! :)
  
  He sums it up nicely: "By the end of the day, you’ve used your willpower not to diet directly but to establish the conditions that will make your diet easier to follow." But is it willpower we use to setup environemnt? Is it that "hard" emotionally to get rid of sugar or remodel house?
  
  
  I think that's the way to go with new habits. It might be one of the least controversial ideas in the whole self-help industry :)
• Part 4 (Hard work) - this article shows that he is a hard worker, and I guess most of us would agree that hard work is good and brings great results over time :)
  
  If someone is naturally a hard worker, someone focused on improving oneself and his surroundings, that's great. But what if someone isn't? How is self-discipline related to choosing "hard" work (that which challenges you, per Pavlina's definition)
  
  So again, I agree with the value of hard work and even with his specific definition of hard work, but how can one do more of hard work if he wishes to? What's the method? He never discussed it, and that's what I was looking for.
• Part 5  (Industry) - this article states that our lifestyle implies certain tasks that require a lot of time investment from someone - could be us, could be someone we hire or ask for help. 
  
  Not a word about self-discipline here. He simply suggests to be wise and only do the stuff that really needs to be done, and even delegate if possible. I have nothing to add. 
• Part 6 (Persistence) - His definition of persistence in article 6 is the same as his definition of self-discipline in article 1 ("Persistence is the ability to maintain action regardless of your feelings." vs "Self-discipline is the ability to get yourself to take action regardless of your emotional state.")
  
  This article is mostly about when to change direction (goals), but it does have a hint at what keeps Pavlina persistent: a clear vision of the future he really desires. "Persistence of action comes from persistence of vision. When you’re super-clear about what you want in such a way that your vision doesn’t change much, you’ll be more consistent — and persistent — in your actions. And that consistency of action will produce consistency of results."
  
  Again, this is hardly surprising or controversial. Some sources on facilitating change (like "Switch") are adamant on providing crystal-clear direction when we want any kind of change to happen.

So in the end, the general mechanisms or values stated by Steve Pavlina in these articles are very close to what I believe, e.g.

• hard work brings great results, 
• it helps to be clear about what we want, 
• if you control your environment, changing habits gets much easier
•  it's good to be realistic about what you can achieve (my restatement of his article on "acceptance")

I am not sure that by building arbitrary new habits we improve our self-discipline, but it could be so. Human behavior seems to me much too broad a topic to nail it down with such a simple concept as "self-discipline", here's some reasons why I think so:

• what's emotional regulation role in what appears as "self-discipline" or willpower? (I mean the struggle between executive center of the brain and the amygdala or other areas; not an expert, but I mean the part that is supposed to be made stronger by meditation)
• since we know some traits of emotional intelligence can be improved in adults with relatively simple practice, isn't it more useful to see  self-discipline just as one aspect of emotional self-regulation, which is just one aspect of emotional intelligence? If so, what does research on EI tell us about ways to improve self-discipline?

You see, I now like to think in terms of behaviors and things (as opposed to opinions and ideas):

• what actions do I perform specifically (what do I say and when, where do I go, what do I look at, what question do I ask myself at what time) to achieve change/objective I am after?
• what things (e.g. tools) do I bring into my life to make a new habit? to "appear" more disciplined? to do more hard work? to get more done? I.e. how do I redesign my work/home environment?

Actions. Things. These are controlled and real. If specific actions and things bring results I want, that's great.

In the absence of these specific instructions, I am of course willing to look at other concepts - emotions (if I feel them); metaphors (if I can understand them). 

So what I'm looking for is perhaps a detailed, step-by-step instructions that will lead a randomly selected person to becoming a disciplined hard worker :) Any suggestions outside of what's already discussed above?

Methodical work as a habit

Methodical work leads to success. 

Methodical work means being disciplined, working a lot, staying motivated, persevering despite setbacks. 

Methodical work brings results, but the work itself often stays invisible to others.

My personal challenge - and in general the key to long term growth of any person - is to stay motivated, disciplined, to do the work on a regular basis. In other words, I wish to work methodically towards my long term goals.

It's  hard. Why? Well, I guess we all know the answer. It's tiring. More often than not humans crave rest, fun, relaxation, pleasure, peace, quiet.

Work frequently means indecision, ambiguity, effort, anxiety, stress. 

Short term desires are easily satisfied. Instant gratification is easy to get, especially when we have personal freedom, time and money. 

Long term goals, even if well understood by an individual, simply lose to what some call "lack of strong will". 

I am leaning towards the belief that this thing called "strong will" doesn't exist. It's imaginary. It doesn't have its own brain area. It's not that most people don't have it (but some do). Nobody does.

If someone is called disciplined, motivated and methodical, it simply means that he has a habit of working. This habit is stronger in him than a habit of satisfying other (short term) desires. He works more often and with more ease than he watches soap operas or eats donuts.

Working is a habit. It's a habit to choose work-like tasks and actions over non-work-like tasks.

As most habits in most people, it can be trained. I'm training it right now. Not sure how exactly - haven't found a single book on the topic so far. So I'm looking at what hard working people do and how they think.

I recently read a book about methodical work titled "The War of Art".

Now, "The War of Art" has two aspects. One of them is positive, another not so much.

The positive is that the book contains a great description of what methodical work looks like in the real world. The author calls a person doing methodical work "a professional". The book contains detailed description of the behaviors and mindset of a professional (as opposed to an amateur).

A professional does the work every day. He knows his trade well. He doesn't fall victim to everyday excuses. He understands it's going to be tough to work every day. He knows he'll face fear or anxiety of publishing what he did; he doesn't trick himself into believing he'll never get tired or afraid. He doesn't stop when others criticize his work.

A professional does the work every day.

I want to be a professional in that sense. I don't think I ever was; I was more of an amateur (inspired and agitated, but easily distracted), sometimes guided by fear (especially in school, but also at work, afraid of losing face). I'd rather be a professional though, guided by a habit of hard work.

So that aspect of the book, what a real pro looks like, was nice. A good summary of what methodical work is and what it takes to do it. (It's not free! Workaholics usually sacrifice their personal relationships, good health or other life opportunities!)

The other aspect of the book is spiritual. It's pretty bad.

The spiritual dogma of the book sounds so ridiculous to me that it was really painful to find it in the same book as the no-nonsense description of a pro. The author believes that there are gods, or God, demons, angels, Muse, "other dimension" beings all around us. The book mixes all this together in a "surely you must believe in something like this!" soup. Terrible. 

The author believes that all great work comes not from people, but through people. Where does it come from exactly? Why, obviously there must be some ethereal beings that inspire selected artists (the professionals) while not inspiring others (the amateurs). They reward hard work with inspiration.

I do not approve of such nonsense. It's a classic example of a human being replacing what he doesn't know or understand with fantasy that makes sense to him. I think that the usual case is that a person is so uncomfortable with not having all the answers about the foundations of the world that they accept whatever nonsense reaches their ears.

Luckily it is quite easy to skip those "spiritual" parts since the book is divided into a series of extremely short chapters (1-2 pages each). Start a chapter, estimate how many angels show up, skip if more than zero. Worked well for me.

I am now very much focused on how to build a habit of methodical work. Doing some research, but also trying myself. Building that mindset of a pro. Incidentally, I'm a StarCraft player and I watch Korean pro league; it's quite informative as well. These are pros like any other and they also work hard, starting at an early age.

It might be the habit that's extremely hard to build. Once I acquire it though, perhaps I could share the trick with others. Would be really great to be able to help others become methodical in their work -- for a lifetime. Imagine a society that is more methodical at work than other societies around. What an advantage! Or more broadly, what a boost to human civilization if it was typical of people to be hard working citizens?

Also, once I build that habit it should feel great and bring great results quickly. As you may have noticed, I strongly believe that it's learnable and that it's indeed a habit. Could be wrong. That would be sad.

It's going to be hard work to change the motivation to work from "I love doing it so I keep doing it" or "I fear not doing it so I keep doing it" to "I will do it now because I said so, despite really craving something else at the moment". But I believe this is what long term success requires.

Do you?