In Bits & Pieces, I share some brief insights, sparks of creativity and interesting lessons that may or may not constitute further, more elaborate work. Below you can read the most recent ones!
Measuring our aspirations – the momentum framework
Often when we talk about setting goals, we do so from the outside-in. We look at ourselves from the third person’s perspective. We see where we are currently at and then where we would like to be in the future.
Maybe you want to run a marathon, or get your degree without a delay. Maybe the goal is as simple as getting up when your alarm goes off, or seeing your parents more often.
All these goals describe some state of ourselves and the outside world. While these goals are important, we should recognise that in the end, they are instrumental to how we wish to experience life. In a way, they are instrumental to the goals of our inner world—our aspirations for life. ⭐
Staring from the inside out
In a previous article, I described the process of developing your inner philosophy: an intricate structure that connects your goals, habits, and principles to your aspirations, and your aspirations to the values you cherish in life.
For example, I identified an aspiration to ‘enrichen my experiences.’ Contributing to this aspiration, I wanted to read the book ‘on having no head’ (goal), do something out of my comfort zone every week (habit), and live by the principle of having curiosity, and not fear, govern my decisions.
In the exercise, I touch on the importance of being aware of how your goals contribute to your aspirations. Knowing why you are pursuing some goal is a powerful intrinsic motivator to help you keep at it. This is especially pertinent when you have one goal contributing to multiple aspirations at the same time.
In a similar way, the absence of any goal-aspiration link could show that you’re pursuing a goal misaligned with your aspirations. In such cases, re-evaluating whether the goal is actually something you want is a worthwhile endeavour.
Obliviousness to progress on the aspirations of our inner world
Virtually any productivity book talks about the importance of making our goals SMART1. Keeping track of your goals in a systematic way helps you to see what seems to work and to see what doesn’t. It helps us to achieve our goals by enabling us to adapt our strategies in a timely manner.
Why do we not do the same for our aspirations? Isn’t it more important to measure whether all our ambitious goals, habits and principles contribute to the higher end—the aspirations and values of our inner life?
Meditating consistently, taking mindfulness breaks, listening to weekly readings in the Waking Up app… We can muster all the willpower and time to do these things perfectly, but what if, despite our efforts, they don’t make us feel any more mindful than before? Ignoring our aspirations will ultimately undermine our drive to persist.
But how do we assess our aspirations?
Unlike goals, habits, and principles, they are not really measurable. You do not ‘achieve’ an aspiration, you can only get closer or further removed from it. You may spend 100 hours on a goal related to an aspiration, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you are making any progress on the latter part.
Below, I want to pitch an idea for a new way of measuring progress, which is (maybe uniquely) suitable for aspiration-assessment.
Measuring progress towards aspirations: the momentum framework
Aspirations are, by definition, unachievable and vaguely defined. This makes it impossible to measure our progress on an absolute scale. We can, however, use introspection to see whether or not we are getting closer.
Let’s take the example of the aspiration to ‘be mindful.’ While I cannot pinpoint why exactly, I feel like I can always say whether I’m feeling more or less mindful than before. In other words, I can always say whether I’m in an uptrend, downtrend or plateau. Furthermore, the up- and downtrends can be gradual and steady or seemingly exponential. In the latter case, things are not just going better, but in some sense even reinforcing themselves; it is a compounded trend. 📈
So, what about assessing our aspirations, one-by-one, every 2–3 months using such a momentum-scale? When we put a lot of effort into habits, goals and principles without seeing even an gradual upward trend, shouldn’t we take a step back and re-strategise?
What do you think? How do you measure progress on your aspirations (if at all)? What ‘period’ are we talking about when we say we are feeling more mindful than ‘before’? Don’t hesitate to share your insights in the comments below! 👇
Footnotes
My only possession – a poem
Eyes are drifting never to rest, a frantic play of interest.
A life quivering and shivering small, under the spectacle on the bedroom wall.
At times a memory of a childhood past
with songs to sing and hills to hide
beyond the clouds that choke the light.
A fog so thick, the smell of nothing.
A life that lost the gold of loving.
Bony fingers, glistering eyes, tacitly seizing from behind disguise.
The fainting breath of my attention, the truth of life, my only possession.
A simple agent-based market model in AnyLogic
Today, I want to share a simple simulation model of a financial market. A financial market is a place where investors can buy and sell financial products. A good example of this is a stock market, where investors can buy and sell company shares (stocks).
To simulate such a market, I will be using agent-based simulation software: AnyLogic. Agent-based models only define the behaviour of agents (in our case, investors) and the environment in which they operate. Agent-based models can show how complex system behaviour emerges from simple agent rules.
You can download and use AnyLogic for free! If you want to follow along and tinker with the model as we go, you can download the software here.
Basic model structure
At the most basic level, the model needs to contain the following elements:
An investment or asset to trade (e.g. a stock).
A market where the asset is traded (e.g. the London Stock Exchange).
Investors that will do the trading.
These agents interact as follows: first, the value of the underlying investment changes. Investors then determine a price for which they are willing to buy or sell the asset. If they own the asset, they put out an ask-order. When they do not own the asset, they will put out bid-order instead.
After all investors have placed their bids and asks, the market will solve the order books. This entails transferring the assets between investors when they agree on the price. Price agreement emerges when the bid price of one agent is equal to, or higher than, the ask price of another.
Let’s take a look at what this would look like in the different model agents.
The investment-agent
Below you can see the core structure of the investment agent. It has three basic variables
Fundamental value: what the investment is actually worth.
Price: the lowest price at which the investment is sold.
Volatility: the number of investments traded (bought and sold) within a day.
In this first version of the model, the fundamental value of the asset follows a random walk. To do so, a function is called to update the fundamental value using the following code:
fundamentalValue = fundamentalValue + normal(0.5, 0);
The market needs to store each bid and ask for the investment. In the model, I do this in a collection of bids and asks. Each bid and ask contains two data points: price, and the corresponding investor.
In the price history box, I keep track of how the investment characteristics change over time.
The market-agent
At the end of each day, the market solves all the investments’ order books. While the code to do so is a bit more complicated, the principle is simple. First, it looks at all entries of the investments’ order books. When there is a bid that has the same price or is higher than the price of the lowest ask, a transaction is made. After that, the market removes both entries from the order books and repeats the same cycle again.
This process is repeated until the condition is no longer met. After that, the market sets the price of the asset to the lowest ask price.
The investor-agent
The investor agent is where most of the intelligence will be added later. For now, each investor only has a collection of investments that he or she acquired. To trade on the market, each investor has the same basic function for placing orders.
for (Investment a : main.market.investments) {
double futurePriceEstimate = a.fundamentalValue + normal(1, 0);
if (portfolio.contains(a)) {
//place ask when owning the asset
a.asks.put(futurePriceEstimate, this);
} else
//place bid when not owning the asset
a.bids.put(futurePriceEstimate, this);
}
Each investor goes through all assets on the market and computes a random price based on the asset’s fundamental value. When the asset is already in the portfolio, the investor places an ask-order. If not, a bid-order is placed instead.
This resembles a super-rational investor with a standard estimation error. It knows exactly what the asset is worth and does not pay attention to any other market indicators.
Model behaviour
Let’s run a simple simulation with 10,000 investors and a single market investment over 100 days time. At time 0, the asset is added to 20% of the investor’s portfolios. Since the bid and ask prices are normally distributed, we expect the price to exceed the fundamental value. If 50% of the agents were given an asset instead, the price and fundamental value would largely coincide.
We see that our model seems to display the expected behaviour. Note that the volatility is equal to one, indicating that every possible ask-order is fulfilled. This is logical, given that the demand greatly exceeds the supply.
Day-to-day mindfulness
The first week of life with full attention focuses on day-to-day mindfulness, on becoming aware of all the small things that make up a large share of our day.
It often involves remembering things; remembering to turn of the lights in the bathroom, to hang up our coat when we get home, to check our to-do list and agenda for tomorrow.
The first step in day-to-day mindfulness is to realise that all our actions—no matter how small—have consequences. While these actions may seem insignificant on their own, their cumulative effect can make the difference between a good day and a bad one. The effect is especially pronounced when they involve other people: showing up on time, replying to a message, saying good-morning when they arrive at work…
Day-to-day mindfulness is challenging because there are so many of these little things that demand our attention. Consequently, we need to be patient with ourselves and approach our practice with self-compassion. Sure, we’ll forget and mess up here and there, but when that happens should simply acknowledge our blunder—own it—and commit to doing better next time. Not paying attention to the fact that we failed to pay attention would be adding insult to injury. 🤕
Cultivating day-to-day mindfulness
This week of a life with full attention is therefore all about sorting out the small things. It’s about order and structure, so we create an environment for mindfulness to arise.
Think about the upcoming week. What are one or two positive habits that you want to (re)start doing? Perhaps you want to journal at least one sentence before you go to bed, or maybe you want to be sure you don’t eat an unhealthy meal more than one day a week. Pick something that is realistic, and write it down. ✍️
In a similar light: what are some routines you could start to implement into your day? Perhaps you want to end your workday writing a to-do list before you go home, or, when you get home, you want to put your keys and coat where they belong, and take a moment to say hi to your partner.
In this more micro-context, it’s good to pay attention to how you start things and how you finish. Doing so helps you draw a clearer line between your day’s activities, and make it easier to be mindful when doing them.
For example, we can make our life a lot easier when we are mindful that when we are finished with something, we put it back in the place where we found it. But also; that we make our bed after we get up, that we clear the table after we’ve eaten and our desk when we finished our work.
Think about motivation, too. In my article about the generative drive, I show how finishing something generative—something that feels productive—at the beginning of your day will give you a sense of agency and fulfillment that puts you in a more active (generative) state-of-mind. 🙌 Think about this with your routines as well, and recognise (be mindful of) when you did something generative.
All this becomes easier when we learn ourselves to do one thing at a time—to finish something before we start something new. An important aspect of this is to reduce our susceptibility to distractions by removing them from our direct awareness. This includes the WhatsApp icon in your taskbar or the music you have playing in the background. Again, we draw clearer lines between the things we do and experience, which makes being mindful of them a lot easier to do. We need to set up the conditions that allow us to get absorbed in things (again).
When you find it hard to remember certain things, such as turning off the light, it can help to extend your awareness to the consequences of (not) doing so. By making something trivial a little more important to you, it’s more likely that you’ll be aware of it next time the situation presents itself.
Furthermore, try to note down whenever you feel rushed, irritated, annoyed, demotivated, etc., and try to figure out what caused it. You’ll see that often, they are the consequence of a neglected habit or routine. This realisation too can help you to act differently the following day. ✍️
First practice week
For this week, I’d like to invite you to:
- Think of at least two habits you want to start cultivating this week.
- Think of at least two routines you want to start implementing this week.
- Whenever you experience a negative feeling—e.g. feeling rushed, irritated, annoyed, demotivated—take a moment to think about what caused it. You get double points for writing it down!
These are my habit and routine commitments for the rest of the remainder of the course: 👇
Habits
- Journal at least one sentence every day, before going to bed.
- Read at least one section or chapter from a book before starting my day.
- When I notice I started to feel some form of displeasure, recall what caused it and write it down in my pocket-book.
Routines
- Clean up dishes from the drying rack while cooking, and do the dishes directly after eating dinner.
- When I get home, put the keys in the door, put my coat on the hanger, put my shoes away, and clean up the contents of my work and sports bag.
- Before starting a new task at work, make sure there are no unnecessary programmes opened on my PC.
- Make my bed after waking up.
- Clear my desk/table after having done something there.
- Write a to-do list for tomorrow at the end of my day (already doing this).
- After using something (like my scissors) put it back where I got it from.
What will be (or should be) on your list? 🌻
Committing myself to a life full of attention
While preparing the readings for the self-organised silent retreat in which I participated last week, I came across a lecture by Maitreyabandhu on Mindfulness of Reality (link to video on YouTube). I found it a very open and inspiring talk about bringing mindfulness beyond our meditations in the busyness of an everyday context.
Personally, I’ve been looking for ways to be more aware of my experiences throughout the day. During the retreat, I already experimented a bit with a particular form of meditation that emphasizes our visual field and found its effects quite encouraging.
However, before I left, I also (somewhat impulsively I must admit) ordered Maitreyabandhu’s book: Life With Full Attention.
The book promises an 8-week course to further cultivate your awareness of everyday life. Building up gradually the breadth of attentive objects, the book contains assignments, reflections and tips that each help you to remember to be mindful—and track your progress in the ability of doing so.
Often, at least in the realm of meditation, the focus is primarily on observing our inner world. And while I definitely think this is a worthwhile endeavor, I feel that the real fulfillment comes from what we experience through our place in the outside world.
As such, I decided to give the course a shot.
Part of the exercises and reflections will involve journaling and meditation. Since I have been doing both on-and-off, I hope the course will help me further integrate them in my daily routine. Luckily, apart from these two elements, the course doesn’t have any ‘extra’ demands in terms of time. It is all about doing what you do, but with increased awareness.
My aims for full attention
In the introduction of the course, the author asks you to set three commitments or aims for the 8-week programme. They should be somewhat measurable, as they will be re-evaluated when the course is completed (or terminated for that matter). My three aims are the following:
- Complete the course by reading the book in its entirety. Never skipping exercises or journal reflections for two or more days in a row.
- Improve my overall score on the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS) by 1.5 points. This entails ending at 4.9 points (now, it is 2.9).
- I will share a weekly reflection on my (lack of) progress each week as a bit in my bits & pieces blog.
For those that want to hop along the awareness-wagon: after each bit of reflection I will share, in a nutshell, the aspirations for the upcoming week. Feel free to join and share your weekly thoughts and reflection in response!
My first self-organised retreat
Last Wednesday, I embarked on my first self-organised retreat. Initiated by the partner of a colleague of mine, it was a wholly new experience with (apart from my colleague) many unfamiliar faces.
The retreat was organised such that there was a daily programme with readings, guided meditations, a yoga session, and even an ecstatic dance finale on the final day. Apart from the ‘corvee-taakjes’ (chores), such as preparing breakfast, cooking and cleaning up that would occasionally be assigned to you, you were free to participate or draw your own plan.
As I shared in my last post on Wednesday, I decided to fill my day with reading and contemplation, much unlike the 10-day Vipassana retreat I did earlier this year. Just before we went into ‘silent-mode’ we shared our expectations for the weekend. For me, I was excited for the material I was about to emerge myself into, but also a bit afraid: what if I would use my reading, writing and reflection to escape the uncomfortable silence I so desperately needed?
Reading & contemplation versus silence & observation
Indeed, I ended up spending a lot more time in my book than I anticipated—but not as a means to escape. It turned out that the 144 pages of Carl Jung’s writings (The Undiscovered Self and Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams) were a lot more dense than I had expected. Particularly the first essay contained many great insights and a proportionally large share of lengthy phrases and (to me) alien words.
But I realised: a book like this I’ll only be able to grasp in a setting of absolute and pure focus, a setting I’ll probably be unable to recreate in the near-future. I also learned that all these insights allowed me to see things differently and understand things better: although I meditated a lot less than during the Vipassana retreat (I’d say my 12 hours were reduced to 3), I feel like I had just as many ‘transfromative experiences.’
Whether that means that an introspective silent retreat is better I don’t know. But I have come to realise that it does have some qualities the observing silent retreat does not. I know that for me as a person, I need to thoroughly understand something before I can ‘live it,’ so taking the time for some new knowledge to settle may work better for me than to hope I’ll eventually get the insight from practicing for hours on end. Furthermore, I also still have to find out how long-lasting the peace of mind from this retreat will be.
Illuminating insights
I was most surprised by the amount and gravity of the insights I gained from my read- contemplation sessions. Particularly while reading the The Undiscovered Self, I feel like I’ve developed a radically different perception of the conscious and the unconscious, which then enabled me to fall into a state of observation much more easily during the meditation sessions.
Furthermore, during these meditations, I also worked on a particular method to deal with my tendency to (over)identify. Here too, I feel like I’ve made significant progress which I will try to further develop in the upcoming weeks.
One realisation that I think captures my overall experience well is the following:
In the context of mindfulness mediation, the biggest difference between you and the Buddha is that to the latter, Buddha didn’t exist.
Walking my own path has shown to be so much more fruitful than trying to retrace and follow another one’s steps.
My schedule and preparation for a 3-day silent retreat
From November 6–10, I will participate in a self-organised, 3-day silent retreat with a group of about 16 people. While I’ve completed a 10-day Vipassana course during spring this year, this self-organised retreat will likely be a completely different experience. There are no restrictions on reading/writing, no mandatory group session attendance, a free allocation of your time, and some chores that will have to be done (like cooking for the whole group). Furthermore, I’ll be in charge of preparing a recorded lecture for the theory-sessions during the the afternoon.
To make sure the silent retreat will be worthwhile, I decided to prepare a personal program (building on the group program) with a broad specification of what each session is allowed to entail. I want to avoid looking for distractions by reading or writing outside of dedicated meditation slots, and to make sure I’m not ‘all over the place’ with different theories and focus points.
Besides sharing my personal approach to the 3 days of silence below, this post is also to inform you that there will be no bits & pieces posted from November 7–9. Hopefully, I will return with many great insights to share with you afterwards!
The overarching theme
The overarching theme of the retreat for me will be overidentification, a concept that I have been writing and thinking about a lot in the past few months. At the core, I want to explore how the sensations and thoughts that emerge from identification differ from the sensations and thoughts that appear from ourselves within.
Part of this process entails recognising what emerges from deep down the unconscious mind. Something I’ve been curious about for longer and that ties to this perfectly is the exploration and analysis of my dreams, the second majour focus of my silent retreat.
Planning and activities
Below I’ve included a schematic overview of the activities that will occur during the three days of silence. Below the diagram I explain what the different activities entail for me.
Dream interpretation
Dream interpretation occurs directly after waking up. The goal is to write down observation and reflect on them. The observations I want to pay particular attention to:
- symbols, object and images
- feelings and emotions
- figures and characters, the (type of) people that appear
- unusual elements
- events: the overall story-line
On the reflective part, I will take with me the following points:
- are there recurring elements from previous dreams?
- personal associations: what do the observations mean to me?
- connections with recent life events
- are there archetypal themes? (e.g. a ‘journey,’ transformation, facing a deeply-seeded enemy or fear)
- anything that appears but does not constitute the aforementioned.
Ultimately, I will use my dreams to uncover aspects of the unconscious mind. Aspects to which I can pay particular attention in the silent meditation sessions during the day.
Silent meditation
Normal silent meditation is meditation without interruptions to write down thoughts or experiences that occur. Silent meditations are solely and specifically to observe.
As described above, I want to pay particular attention to the type of thoughts and sensations that occur: are they produced by the selfconsciousness (inside-out) or by the otherconsciousness (outside-in). Can I observe particular characteristics of either that can help me to discern the two?
Silent meditation+
Similar to the silent meditation, but here there is the possibility to welcome ‘trains-of-though’ and momentarily interrupt the meditation to take notes.
You will see that these meditation+ sessions usually follow a reading or theory session, which is often when thoughts about these sessions emerge. Writing them down can be useful later, but also helps me to clear my mind and make sure thoughts do not keep surfacing and cycling back continuously.
Yoga
Every morning a group meditation session is hosted. I’m not sure if I will (be able to) follow the group instructions, so I will see where I participate and diverge.
I think that doing yoga in the morning helps to open up the body, which makes the day’s upcoming meditations much more manageable and effective.
Book study
I will take 1.5 hours a day to read and study the work of Carl Jung. Specifically, I will be bringing a bundle with two of his essays: The Undiscovered Self and Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams. Here’s what has been said about this bundle:
These two essays, written late in Jung’s life, reflect his responses to the shattering experience of WWII & the dawn of mass society. Among his most influential works, The Undiscovered Self is a plea for his generation—and those to come—to continue the individual work of self-discovery and not abandon needed psychological reflection for the easy ephemera of mass culture. Only individual awareness of both the conscious & unconscious aspects of the human psyche will allow the great work of human culture to thrive.
Jung’s reflections on self-knowledge & the exploration of the unconscious carry over into the 2nd essay, Symbols & the Interpretation of Dreams, completed shortly before his death in 1961. Describing dreams as communications from the unconscious, Jung explains how the symbols that occur in dreams compensate for repressed emotions & intuitions. This essay brings together Jung’s fully evolved thoughts on the analysis of dreams & the healing of the rift between consciousness & the unconscious, ideas that are central to his system of psychology.
I think this bundle fits perfectly with the goal of my retreat. Furthermore, the fact that it comprises only two essays (144 pages) makes it a manageable read that does not need to be rushed.
Walking meditation
The walking meditation after lunch is mostly to be outside, stretch my legs and get some fresh air. During the walk, I can continue what I explore during my seated (silent) mediations: observe which sensations and thoughts emerge from the selfconsciousness and which emerge from the otherconsciousness.
Lecture study
As mentioned before, my content contribution to the silent retreat is to the ‘daily readings,’ when the group comes together in the central mediation hall to together listen to a reading by a certified teacher. Fortunately, this places me in the unique position to select readings that area also contribute to my personal goals for the retreat.
With this in mind, these were the lectures I selected, ordered from day 1–3:
- The Wisdom of Impermanence by Joseph Goldstein (link to session in Waking Up)
- The Shape of Life by James Low (link to session in Waking Up)
- Mindfulness of Reality by Maitreyabandhu (link to video on YouTube)
Day reflection
What I really missed during the Vipassana retreat was to write down my overall experience of the day, such that I could re-imagine the experience later. During a day of silence, you really enter a different world, a world sometimes hard to get to during our day-to-day life.
As such, I will use the final hour of my days of silence to reflect on the day and prepare to go to sleep.
Hopefully on Sunday, I will be able to share with you what I liked about this approach, and what I would do different in the future. See you then!
How to be more productive by enabling your generative drive
Last week, I have dedicated considerable time and space to developing a qualitative system dynamics model showing the interplay between the pleasure drive, the aggressive drive and the generative drive.
In this post, I hope to show you the power of this model by illustrating its use in a number of relatable scenarios. By evaluating how your current behaviour and feelings fit within the model, you can more easily assess the underlying cause and work on resolving or further enabling them. In the end, it puts you in a position to have a higher capacity for generative behaviour: to have a higher generative output and a more fulfilling experience overall.
This article follows the line of argumentation presented in the model below. Important to note here is that I refer to ‘generative behaviour’ rather than ‘productive behaviour’ although they are seemingly synonymous. The connotation that people often have with productive behaviour is that it is productive to someone else, e.g. your employer (when working) or your spouse (when cleaning the house). Generative behaviour however is behaviour that is productive to you (i.e. aligned with your values and aspirations).
Managing resources more effectively
As we saw in the last post in the series, our ‘resources’ play an immensely important role in the mediation of our pleasure-seeking, domineering and generative behaviour. Each of those behaviours (taking a nap) requires resources (a bed), consumes resources (time), and creates resources (energy, focus). However these resources are rarely of the same kind (time vs energy).
The first and maybe also most important lesson of the model is therefore to become aware of your resources and how you can manage them.
As we will see later, it can sometimes be useful to engage in pleasure-seeking behaviour to increase our pleasure-drive and enable generative behaviour. However, when you’re already low on concentration, scrolling social media might not be the best pleasure-seeking activity, and going for a walk or listening to some music may be a better alternative.
In any case, it is good to be aware of the penalty we have to pay every time we switch between any mentally-demanding task. It takes our brain about 15 minutes to stop thinking about what we were doing before and activate the neural areas relevant for whatever it is that we want to do next. So, to make the model a little more complete, I will add one last variable to the resources sink in our model.
Start the day correctly
At the beginning of the day, resources that are often required for generative behaviour, such as energy, focus and time are still plentiful. This puts us in a perfect position to enable the empowerment and fulfillment cycles R1 and R3.
However, by the same token, we can also end up in the hedonic reinforcement or over-aggression loops R4 and R2 if the first things we do are of a pleasure-seeking or domineering nature. The only way to get out of these cycles later is through an increase in the generative drive, for which there are no natural dynamics within the model.
So, if you want to want to have a generative day, make sure to start it with a generative activity, in line with your values and aspirations.
Re-engineer your tasks to increase output
Coming back to the empowerment cycle R1, we see that the loop is activated by the fruits of our generative behaviour. The problem with this loop is that it may take a long time before our behaviour yields actual results.
In this case, it can be particularly helpful to set intermediate or side-targets.
Intermediate targets arise from chopping up our output into smaller, tangible deliverables. For example, instead of writing a full article, we may want to focus on finishing one section or even paragraph at a time, so that the empowerment cycle is completed before we move on to the next.
Side-targets are additional outputs that we can pursue on the side of our project. To stick with the example of writing an article, you may want to set some word count objectives, or keep a check-box list on the side. These (superficial) side-targets are generative to the generative behaviour, and depending on how susceptible you are to them can make you feel like your behaviour is yielding results—giving you a sense of agency and enabling the empowerment-loop.
Making your behaviour fulfilling (again)
Do we have a similar mechanism on the pleasure side of things? To find that out, we need to look at our experience and see what has caused us to make our generative behaviour more pleasurable, without changing the behaviour itself.
Here an example from Atomic Habits by James Clear comes to mind2. Clear talks about how you can make tasks like taking out the trash more enjoyable by recognising underlying values, such as ‘tidiness’ or ‘order.’ Sometimes all it takes to get joy from doing things is recognising why you were doing them in the first place. To this end, an engaging conversation with a colleague or friend working on the same thing can be of tremendous help.
Increase your generative drive
A tricky thing about the generative cycle is that it is extremely difficult to get out of the hedonic reinforcement or over-aggression loops R4 and R2, because the only way of doing so is by increasing your generative drive. As pointed out before, there is no natural mechanism in the model that enables you to achieve this.
What can we do to increase our generative drive? Or in other words, what can we do to feel like engaging more in generative behaviour? There might be more than one answer to this question, and I’m inviting you to think along!
Footnotes
Looking back at the first 11 bits & pieces
It’s now been 11 days of consecutive writing and posting on the bits & pieces blog on this website. I was originally inspired by Itching for Growth to do a 100-day posting ‘challenge.’
What drew me specifically was that when you publish daily, you will at some point, publish something that isn’t quite (or often quite far from) perfect.
I’m a bit of a perfectionist myself, and as you will see in the articles in my other blog sections, I usually take my time to write them.
Posting something that I’ve not been able to think through, research and write out nicely is definitely out of my comfort zone. The first few posts all took me at least 2 hours to write, but as the last few posts have shown, this isn’t really sustainable in the longer-term. That would be the first lesson from those first 11 days: you cannot post something completely thought-through every single day.
Although you have to stay a bit more superficial every now and then, you do think seriously about something every single day. To me, this brings a lot of satisfaction. Taking a moment to step out of the rush of the day and reflect a little makes every day a little more ‘pronounced.’
Also, there’s just some genuine satisfaction from producing a finished product every single day. We will actually get to this in the last post about the model of the drives (hopefully tomorrow), but having a result, any result, can keep you motivated to do whatever you’re doing. To use the ‘model of the drives’-posts as an example: I’ve had this idea for about half a year but never really started on it. By now, it’s virtually finished and all that’s needed is an interpretation of the end-result, the most interesting part of the exercise! I don’t know if I would have ever gotten to this point if I would only publish it as a full-blown 10/15-minute article. What’s more: I can also publish a longer in-depth article, but now I already have some scaffolding to get started.
I want to end with the biggest struggle I still have, because I am curious if this will change over the course of the remaining 87 days: is hard to come up with something of sufficient value every single day. What I found so inspiring about itchingforgrowth’s blog is that everything seems to be a nicely rounded of package: light enough for a 2–5-minute read, but still a topic completely covered.
This will be my learning goal for the months of blogging ahead!
Embrace the you who is to become
Sometimes, we might get lost in our endless pursuit of self-improvement. It might feel like we have been trying to become better, or supposedly ‘fix ourselves,’ forever, without any end in sight. After a conversation yesterday, I too realised that actually, I feel as if in a way, I am still preparing to start living my life. I need to fix this and that before I can really start ‘being.’
For me, I think life is about finding out who I am, and then to embrace and become that person completely. We should not stare ourselves bind on the first part and forget about the next, even though they occur consecutively. We should not wait to start living—to be who we are—when we haven’t quite figured out what that means yet.
So maybe this is less of a post than a note to myself:
It’s okay to be who you are, even if you’re uncertain about who you’re becoming—don’t wait to live fully until you have it all figured out.
