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

Dec 22
Projections work is an epistemology practice 🧵

If you cringe, recoil, contract around something you’ve done (like Brett’s old video example here), that’s 1) a retreat from reality, and 2) a type of coercive education.

1/
It cuts you off from certain ways of being, which limits the creative space for something new.

This is part of why unconditional love is so important for children:

It’s not just that love means safety/survival—unconditional love or acceptance means learning is unrestricted.

2/
The same applies to unconditionally loving (accepting, not recoiling at) yourself.

Here’s the kicker: it also applies to others.

Not for their sake, but for yours.

If you can’t be with something in another person, that suggests you couldn’t accept it in yourself.

3/
Read 13 tweets
Sep 12
🧵 What learning is

+ Popular confusions about reinvention, tradition, copying, revolutionary epistemology.

+ home-education story
The phrase "reinventing the wheel" means not looking at existing wheel solutions, and starting over from scratch.

Starting over from scratch often introduces more problems than it solves.

This is why Karl Popper criticised revolutionary epistemologies:

All knowledge is built on existing knowledge.

That's the structure of how epistemology works: you start with a problem—which is inherently based in existing knowledge—and you conjecture variant theories, which are also based on (refer to) existing theories.
Read 17 tweets
Sep 2
My favourite personal development course I keep going on about is AOA’s Connection Course (VIEW).

I’ve done it 10+ times and it keeps improving every aspect of my life.

Three years since I first took it, here’s my attempt to synthesise why. AMA.

🧵
1. It’s very hard to be actually-rational.

Very few of us have minds like bicycles, free to think anything, free from psychological barriers.

We have dissatisfactions we’re not sure what to do with. Vague problems in relating to people. Stuckness.
What actually helps most is what’s tuned for a particular person in a particular situation.

But some approaches are more fundamental and have reach. The Connection Course is one of those.

‘Impartiality’ is massive for rationality especially.
Read 10 tweets
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

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