Lulie Profile picture
Oct 4, 2018 8 tweets 2 min read Read on X
'Self discipline' is a patch for being conflicted about what you want to do.

Often, productive people are interpreted as 'having discipline': able to force themselves to do the work even when it's unpleasant.

But creative productivity only ever works in *spite* of that.
"Discipline is remembering what you want."

When that works, it's not 'discipline'; it's getting less conflicted.
The real answer to productivity and motivation is to resolve the conflicts you have.

Once unconflicted about what to do, even hard work is effortless, motivation-wise.

(And fun. #ReasonIsFun)

It becomes effortful to *not* do it. It pulls you in and demands you keep working.
Discipline is fighting yourself.

Wasted energy. Wasted creativity.

Put that instead into figuring out what you actually most want.

Solve problems in doing what you want with reason, not force.
It sounds cute and simplicistic — like meaningless motivational self-help talk — but the world really does work this way.

Problems really are soluble. What's stopping you really is conflicting ideas. Force is trying to reach answers/truth using brute authority instead of reason.
"I've tried everything! Self-discipline, Beeminder, social media time-outs, Tony Robbins, waking at 5am... Nothing seems to work!"

Cool, have you tried reason?
h/t @Jediphone
On how willpower and escapism are two sides of the same coin:

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More from @reasonisfun

Jul 22
Self-improvement is self-aggression.
Intuition pump: Wanting a baby to improve.

I don’t want to “improve” my child; I want to help my child discover what he or she is interested in.

Ideas are improved. People are not their ideas.

“Let our theories die in our stead.”
— Karl Popper
The reason it often gets called “self-improvement” is based on a few misconceptions — on what the ‘self’ is, and on how epistemology works:
Read 10 tweets
May 18
How I personally made more thoughts thinkable:

🧵
1. I got out of my own way by learning the Nobes-Alexander Technique.

It is literally about being open to new information and choices.

It makes more thoughts thinkable by teaching you how to change from task-completing mode to creative-flow mode.


lulie.co.uk/alexander-tech…
2. I learnt to access inexplicit knowledge via Gendlin Focusing.

This meant my explicit thinking could talk to my subconscious drivers, it de-mystified my mind, and it made emotional ideas updateable.

Read 7 tweets
Apr 27
The reason self-love is difficult for so many is that there is a confusion about what the self is.

(Also it’s required for fallibilism. Read on.)

We think our conscious explicit thinky part is our ‘self’. But the voice in the head is often not very kind to us!

1/
There’s a bit of us that’s basically always talking to itself.

This is different from the more fundamental thing that we are.

Deutschians call it the creativity program.
Meditators call it the space of awareness.
I might call it one’s sensorium.

It’s all of these. But…
2/
The important thing is that there is a felt sense of it. An experience of what it’s like.

If you put on an act right now, act fake with yourself, that feels a certain way.

If you drop the act, that feels like something else.

We often have a bit of this act up by default.

3/
Read 13 tweets
Apr 12
The most important concept I’ve found in the philosophy of flourishing (aka psychology) is 𝗳𝗶𝘅𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻.

Other terms for this:

tanha, end-gaining, resistance, avoidance, being ‘grabby’, clinging, stasis, compulsion

You can be fixated 𝘵𝘰 or fixated 𝘢𝘸𝘢𝘺-𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮.

1/
Fixation is when you don’t want to look at something.

Often, this results in redirecting attention to something else — typically so fast that you don’t register it.

(Since if you register it, you might look!)

2/
Stasis can exist as a psychological state in a variety of ways.

3/
Read 9 tweets
Dec 10, 2023
There is a skill of how to access information from your emotions.

Most people don’t know how.

They literally cannot read their feelings, in the same way that illiterates cannot read words.

Intellectuals are often illiterate *plus* deny it’s possible to learn to read.

1/
I learnt this skill even exists as a thing in 2018.

(CFAR introduced Gendlin Focusing, then I heard the body is practically relevant to emotions ~somehow~, and that intellectuals like me have a blindspot about that. Humph!)

Sucked at it for 2 years.

2/
I found Gendlin Focusing very difficult at first.

First, it was hard to find sensations in the body at all. Or I’d catch one and it would flit away.

Words dominated my mind instead.

Then, the only way I could hold on to a feeling was intensify it until it was overwhelming.

3/
Read 11 tweets
Oct 24, 2023
Never mind particular frameworks, what are some the most fundamental concepts and skills for happiness and free thought?

Thread on some I’ve found
👇

[P.S. You can see why it’s hard to claim one framework will solve all your problems.]
1. Ability to think any thought, rather than have your mind flinch away from it.

Found in…
- Buddhism: equanimity
- Art of Accomplishment: impartiality; non-resistance
- Alexander Technique: expanded awareness
- Karl Popper: non-authoritarianism
- TCS: non-coercion
2. Not having your conscious explicit mind interfere with your subconscious inexplicit mind.

Found in…
- Alexander Technique: non-doing
- Kahneman: System 1/System 2
- write drunk edit sober
- life-threatening sports like BASE jumping
- improv
- Ian McGilchrist’s whole deal
Read 5 tweets

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