What motivates me May 20, 2014
The topic of personal motivation came up in a conversation a little while ago, and I had a hard time pinpointing exactly what motivates me.  The reason, which I figured out after some time, is because I don't need an external force to motivate me to do my job, or to work hard, or to produce good work.  I just do it, partly out of a sense of responsibility, but also partly because it's "the right thing to do."  I guess you could say I'm self-motivated.  Frankly, I find it baffling that some people simply don't do the work they're assigned.  They need some additional incentive, aside from "because it's your job."  When something is assigned to me or I decide to start a project at home, I do the work because that's what I was tasked with doing or that's what needed to get done.  I already get paid to do my job, and home projects tend to benefit the homeowner directly, so the incentive is taken care of.  The reason I continue working on something until it's finished and meets my standards is because that's what needs to get done.  I have a hard time even writing this, because it doesn't make sense to me how anyone could do things differently. #psychology
Changing intuition May 19, 2014
I've noticed lately that certain things that didn't used to seem intuitive to me are starting to become intuitive.  This suggests that intuition changes over time and depends on circumstances and experiences, which means it's not really intuition.  It's knowledge.  But people talk about it like it's a fixed quantity of stuff that each person has in equal measure.  My intuition should be the same as your intuition, which should be the same as everyone's, etc.  Or I guess more accurately, people with the same job or the same background or the same mental abilities should have the same amount of intuition.  But I constantly find myself butting up against colleagues who try to appeal to our equivalent levels of intuition to avoid having to explain things.  "Don't you get it?  It's intuitive."  If you have to explain it, it's obviously not intuitive. #psychology
Knowing when to quit May 7, 2014
Like I mentioned, I'm having a hard time completing a particular task at work.  The thing is, I'm an engineer, and part of my job function is to do things that seem impossible.  Engineering is essentially advanced problem-solving, and many parts of an engineer's job start with the sentence, "I don't know what to do or how to do it, but I'll figure it out." 

The issue I'm running into at the moment is that I'm stuck in a perpetual failure loop, and the task I'm trying to accomplish isn't unique.  It's been done before by various people for various applications, and several people who are capable of doing it are sitting in cubicles right near me.  So the obvious question that comes to mind is this:  Why am I spending all this time and exerting all this effort trying to do something that can be done more quickly and easily by someone else?  Sure, there's the argument that if I never attempt anything difficult, I'll never grow or learn anything new.  And of course there's a lot to be learned by failure.  But at some point, I think failure should be recognized as failure, and we should move on.  It's difficult as an engineer to know when to stop trying to solve a problem and when to let someone else try. #psychology
Perpetual failure Apr 15, 2014
Lately at work I've been working on solving a complicated problem that's really just a series of smaller complicated problems.  I work at it all day, every day.  But when I go home at the end of the day, if I still haven't solved the main problem, it means I've effectively accomplished nothing.  Sure, I might've solved some small problems throughout the day, so my end-of-day status is slightly different from my start-of-day status.  But overall, if the main task isn't complete, my job isn't complete.  It's a cycle of perpetual failure. #psychology
Naturalism and chemophobia Mar 27, 2014
Naturalism, or an appeal to nature, is the fallacy that things that are natural or found in nature are better than things that are artificial or created in a lab.  This sounds good on the outside but is of course false.  Hemlock and poison mushrooms come from nature.  Boom, argument over.  But when used in the justification of diet and medicine, naturalism always sounds reasonable to me.  I need to get over that. 

Chemophobia is the related idea that things that have complicated chemical names are inherently bad.  This is essentially an argument from ignorance.  Everything is made of chemicals, and certainly not all chemicals are bad.  Eggs contain hexadecenoic acid, and blueberries have methylbutyrate.  And these foods come from nature, so they can't be bad.  We've come full circle. #psychology
Altering consciousness Mar 25, 2014
Humans tend to do a variety of different things to alter their state of consciousness.  Sure, there are illegal drugs.  But even legal drugs are taken to speed up (caffeine) or slow down (alcohol) our perception of things.  Certain activities like meditation and yoga aim to relax and focus, which is often different from our normal operating state.  Reading a book, watching a movie, or playing a video game often include a sense of escaping reality, or at least temporarily substituting a fake one for the real one.  Listening to music and possibly admiring art (not my thing) have the ability to energize us or shift our focus from the small to the big. #psychology
Systems vs. goals Mar 19, 2014
Scott Adams talked about systems vs. goals in his book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.  It's the idea that having goals sets you up for failure, since you'll typically only perform a task until your goal is met.  After that, you won't perform the task anymore, and you'll likely fall back into old patterns.  So it's essentially about forming positive habits, and how a system (or belief system) will help you continue a positive habit, while a goal will ensure that you'll succeed and then promptly fail. 

I've realized I view exercise as a system.  This is at least partly because viewing it as a goal is too disappointing for me.  If my goal with exercise is to gain muscle or run long distances, I get easily discouraged when these goals aren't achieved in a reasonable amount of time, whether because I'm not investing enough time or effort, or because my genetics preclude me from being a muscular or athletic human.  Either way, not achieving goals is unfortunately a great reason to stop trying.  When I instead view exercise as a system to achieve physical and mental health, it doesn't really matter how much muscle I don't gain or how far I don't run.  As long as it counts as exercise, it's working.  It's basically just semantics:  Instead of a specific short-term goal, it's a nebulous long-term goal. 

It's been the same with school and work.  I never really had any concrete goals, such as how well I wanted to do on a test, or what job I wanted in five years.  My nebulous long-term goal is to spend copious amounts of time relaxing on a warm beach.  So my system has been to do well enough in school to get a good job that will pay me enough to achieve that goal.  The details don't really matter. #psychology
Opinion consensus Jun 8, 2012
Movie critics who make top-ten lists of the greatest movies of all time consistently agree with other movie critics making those same lists.  Citizen Kane, The Godfather, etc. are always at the top of the list.  Knowledgeable people generally agree on the value of things.  But I find myself disagreeing with these people.  My opinion contradicts the consensus, which makes me feel like I'm in the wrong, because it would seem that at some point an opinion becomes as close to a fact as possible while still remaining an opinion.  Even if you disagree with the opinion, you can often look at something objectively and conclude, yes, this piece of art is objectively good and objectively valuable and, while I don't personally like it, I can understand how other people can like it.  (And of course, this is the same for music, books, etc.)  I try to make my opinion match the consensus, but that's a failed endeavor.  I can't convince myself to like Moby Dick, Casablanca, Bruce Springsteen, no matter how thoroughly I expose myself to them.  Either my opinion is wrong, or the consensus doesn't apply to me. #psychology
Personal taste Feb 28, 2012
A short while ago, I was at a wine tasting at a vineyard in Italy, and the head honcho tried to explain in his Italian-accented English the importance of personal taste.  He said something like, "My wine has won awards all over the world.  It's widely regarded as a great wine by people who know what they're talking about.  But if you don't like it, that's ok; you're allowed to not like it."  I like that whole idea.  I sometimes have unusual tastes in wines, music, hobbies, etc.  And I often feel compelled to try to explain why my tastes don't match up with the tastes of "the people who know what they're talking about."  But when it comes down to it, personal taste is a circular argument; it is what it is.  You can't convince me to like something I don't like.  And that's that. #psychology
Rewarding failure Nov 18, 2011
The bank that currently holds my mortgage was one of the ones that failed circa 2009.  It got taken over by the government, then sold to a bigger bank, then later sold to another bank.  Thankfully this had absolutely zero effect on me as a mortgage holder, aside from worrying that it might have an effect on me as a mortgage holder. 

I just got a letter in the mail from this bank offering me a good deal on refinancing.  I'm actually thinking about refinancing anyway, but I'm hesitant to go with this bank because it feels like I'd be rewarding failure, and that's not something I really want to do. 

Related:  Advertising a failure #psychology