"Buckle up bucko, and get ready for multiple hard cognitive steps."
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Yup. This was something I probably didn't figure out until my late 20s, probably because a lot of things came easy for me, and because if I was really interested in something, I would obsess about it naturally. Natural obsession has a lot of the same benefits as "buckling down", but it's harder to trigger voluntarily.
The thing that really drove the lesson home was advanced math. I realized that sometimes, making it through even a single page on a day could be a cause for major celebration. I might need to work through complicated exercises, invent my own exercises, learn fundamentals in a related branch of math, etc.
So I propose there are several valuable skills here:
- Knowing when to buckle down.
- Learning to enjoy being bad at a new skill and experiencing gradual improvement.
- For certain goals, learning how to build consistent habits and accepting that real progress might mean at least 6-12 months of consistent work.
1You don't really mention <a thing that I think is extremely crucial> in this domain, which is that you do not have to (metaphorically) be an earthbender about everything. Other types of bending also exist. If you are not a native earthbender, you might be able to learn to do it (the real world does not have only one Chosen One who can bend all the elements), but as a meta-waterbender I personally recommend first looking around carefully, and trying to figure out how the most successful benders of your native element are doing it.
You do seem to see earthbending as maybe a "last resort" rather than the only way to do things, but it's not obvious to me that it's the correct last resort for everyone. The last resort of a successful airbender is probably more like "take even more steps back to see if there are any easier but more oblique approaches to this summit, or even other summits you'd actually rather climb";
1Sure; if it's not obvious they're from the universe of Avatar: The Last Airbender.
Earthbending is substantially about: facing things head-on, "just getting it done", "buckling down" (though I suppose this can be different than "buckling up"), being unyielding, orienting around "grit".
Waterbending is substantially about: Being flexible, responsive to the environment, and careful.
Airbending is substantially about: Freedom of movement and action, using an opponent's strength against them (which in PvE looks more like "doing what's easy and/or fun"), speed.
The other one is firebending, but I didn't reference it and I don't really understand it well enough to put it in the same terms; still, my best gloss attempt is that it's about focused and kinda bursty / lower-endurance intensity.
In the universe there are (usually) only these four elements, and most benders are pure specialists / only physically capable of learning their particular kind of bending; the main character (the avatar) is the only person who can / has to learn all four. In my analogy these elements don't really cover the space of motivational structures that well, and anyway people don't have to be specialists.
Thanks! (I knew enough about Avatar to know what you wrote in your last paragraph, but the rest is new to me)
For reference, here's Claude Opus 4's summary of the styles:
EARTHBENDING Neutral jing - waiting and listening before acting. Direct confrontation when the time comes - problems don't go away by ignoring them. Being immovable and unmoved, enduring through standing firm rather than through continuous output. Drawing strength from solid foundations and deep roots. Meet challenges head-on, but only after patient observation and understanding what you're facing.
WATERBENDING The path of least resistance is often the most powerful. Push and pull, give and take - everything flows in cycles. Flexibility can overcome rigidity. Draw strength from external sources and community. Change is the only constant.
AIRBENDING Freedom through detachment. The leaf doesn't resist the wind. Conflict is an illusion that can be sidestepped. Joy and play are valid approaches to serious matters. New perspectives emerge when you release fixed positions.
FIREBENDING Power comes from within - your drive, your breath, your life force. Act decisively from internal conviction and passion, maintaining intensity by continuously generating energy from within rather than standing firm. The sun gives life as well as destruction. Inner fire must be tended and controlled, not suppressed or allowed to rage wild.
I intended this disclaimer to at least touch on (what I think you) mean.
When you're bouncing around, and in particular, you don't feel like you're getting much value out of any of the things you're doing. (Sometimes structured-procrastination is a reasonable way for mull over a problem, but, in my experience, when I'm switching between a bunch of different versions of 'doomscrolling' or working on clearly low-value tasks, it's a particularly good time to "buckle up")
(I'm not really sure what you mean by "meta-waterbender" vs "airbender". I guess to be fair I was also sort of confused by the distinction between water and airbenders in the show. I could see the distinction if I squint but they seemed least-different of all the elements)
I considered adding more extensive disclaimers. I didn't do that for... uh, the maybe aggravating, maybe slightly-bad (but IMO not strictly bad) reason of "people don't really comment on posts that get everything right and are super careful to disclaim everything appropriately", and, uh, I selfishly/motivationally wanted more comments on my posts in this series so decided to lean in the direction of rushing it out the door less carefully.
But, I did just update the Triggers Section to make it a bit more explicit, and if you think there's a better way of phrasing The Thing You Mean To Be Pointing At I'm interested.
I think I maybe mean to say a slightly different thing than came across, which makes sense because I was leaning heavily into the metaphor rather than trying to be very clear.
I think the triggers are definitely hints in the direction that buckling up might be the right move. Yet I also observe that, when I imagine the median or even 80th percentile person-explicitly-buckling-up-for-something-big, a big part of me wants to shake my head and be like "ah well, it was nice while it lasted" about their chances of doing a hard thing, especially an unusual hard thing.
This part of me is clearly wrong sometimes: My head would have shaken well off my shoulders if someone had told me-transported-to-1986, "Andrew Wiles is going to spend the next 6 years trying in secret solitude to prove Fermat's Last Theorem".
But also I think it's clearly not entirely mistaken about such a person's odds. If a person is a native "airbender", i.e. they are deeply familiar with the "taking their situation lightly" stance, I don't think I want to recommend that they take a sense of "welp, I guess I have to finally buckle up for this one" at face value, especially in the context of it being a last-resort for one of their most challenging projects or goals. It feels to me like such a person is more likely to succeed by (a) deciding to stop flailing, (b) retreating to a safe distance, and (c) reevaluating whether this is the path they really want to follow, while in connection with their sense of fun.
I'd be interested in some of the mental moves your thinking of as alternatives, and what triggers distinguish when it's a more buckling-down-time than the-other-thing-benwr-is-imagining time.
(I realize a full version of this is asking to write your own sequence of rationality-TAPs, but, interested in a quick table of contents if you got it)
Also: the particular "buckle up" move I'm imagining is for things that are more like "1 to 16 hours of concentrated work". For things that are like months or years of work, there's some equivalent of "buckle up" but it's enough of a different move I'd probably write a pretty different post about it.
Yeah I can try to say some of them, though my sense of the crucialness here does shift on learning that you mean for this to be about hour-to-week levels of effort. I guess I may as well try to come up with element-bending-flavored ones since I'm in pretty deep on that metaphor here.
The biggest differences in which one I'd recommend as a "default last resort" depend on the person and their strengths rather than the situation.
- The thing recommended for the airbender above, i.e. "retreat to a safe distance and consider if there's anything that seems like a fun challenge instead of a grind".
- For a firebender: "Commit to doing it really hard for about [30 minutes]. See where you get. Wait [2 * 30 minutes] after that, and check if you feel energized or drained. If energized, repeat; if drained, [I don't know; this is the one I have the least familiarity with]"
- For a waterbender: Something like "Do naturalism to it". "When you make good enough observations, you can't help but make high-quality inferences" is one of my favorite quotes, and I think it applies especially well in this kind of last-resort setting.
Nod, those all seem like good moves.
I'm sort of torn between two more directions:
On one hand, I actually didn't really mean "buckle up" to be very specific in terms of what move comes next. The most important thing is recognizing "this is a hard problem, your easy-mode cognitive tools probably won't work."
(I think all the moves you list there are totally valid tools to bring to bear in that context, which are all more strategic than "just try the next intuitive thing")
On the other hand... the OP does sure have a vibe about particular flavors of problem/solution, and it's not an accident that I wrote a thing that resonates with me with that you feel wary of.
But, leaning into that... I'm a bit confused why the options you list here are "last resorts" as opposed to "the first thing you try once noticing the problem is hard". Like the airbender should be looking for a way for it to feel fun pretty early in the process. The "last resort" is whatever comes after all the tools that came more naturally to the airbender turn out not to work. (Which is in fact how Aang learned Earthbending).
((notably, I think I spent most of my life more airbendery. And the past ~2 years of me focusing on techniques that involve annoying effort is that the non-annoying-brute-force-y techniques weren't solving the problems I wanted to solve.))
But I think the first-hand is more the point – this is less about "the next steps will involve something annoying/powerthrough-y" and more "I should probably emotionally prepare for the possibility that the next steps will involve something annoying/power-through-y"
Right, I think it just seems like doing emotional preparation that matches this description is a kind of earthbender-friendly / earthbender-assuming move, while an airbender-friendly move would be more like "notice and accept that you'd have more fun doing it a different way or doing a different thing; that flailing isn't actually fun". The effect is kind of similar, i.e. both earthbenders and airbenders should come away less-clinging-to-something, but the earthbender comes away less-clinging-to "the locally easy and straightforward things will work if I do them enough" while the airbender is less-clinging-to something more like "This is what I'd choose".
Re the last-resort framing, I'm not sure why I said that exactly; I think it's related to the vibe I got from the OP: Like, "if you notice that you're not making progress, what do you do? Well, you could keep flailing or avoidantly doomscrolling, or you could [do the thing I'm suggesting], or you could give up in despair"; I think it feels like a "last resort" because the other realistic options presented are kind of like different kinds of death?
1What are earth and water benders? Is someone able and willing to paraphrase this with a different analogy?
The link doesn't work but think I know the comment you're referring to but I found those explanations too vague to be useful. I'd really like just another analogy.
Are they saying that once one has realized that they need to buckle up that one can either face it head on (what does that mean? "just get it done" - it's not getting done, hence the resignation to buckling up for a protracted process, how does this attitude change the completion or resolution of the problem?).
"Airbending is substantially about: Freedom of movement and action, using an opponent's strength against them (which in PvE looks more like "doing what's easy and/or fun"), speed."
I'm really struggling to think of a real world situation where I can use this analogy to solve a protracted problem. It seems like you either have "freedom of movement" or you don't - you can't opt in. For example, if you're in a hostile corporate take over the party with the most liquid capital likely has the most freedom of movement since they can outlast the other side... man I wish I had corporate takeover level cash...)
Yeah this is relatable and familiar. When I do this my next step is usually some flavor of "set aside some time for the task" - can be "I will work on this for the next pomo" or "I will set aside a day to work on this specifically" or "welp I guess I need to make an entire project of this/I think I will not make progress on this unless it is the ~main thing in my life". For the medium- or larger-scale things, also "see if I can get other people in the loop".
Will also note that one less intuitive type of task this can apply to is "deal with my emotions about this thing I'm trying to do". Ideally this would happen trivially and I could just do the thing, but sometimes I notice I am stuck and then I need to add an action item of actually looking at the emotional blocker before I can proceed. (And sometimes the emotional blockers are large enough to turn into their own project.)
Will also note that one less intuitive type of task this can apply to is "deal with my emotions about this thing I'm trying to do"
oh yeah, mood. in particular when you got 5 knots in your heart that have cyclical dependencies for unraveling.
oh also, another next step is "see if I can make this task more pleasant/tolerable". (sometimes "assign this task more time and recruit help" helps achieve this too. but there can also be separate steps like "fix any current sensory annoyances" and "make some nice tea")
1Reminds me of the post "Software Engineers Solve Problems", which similarly is about buckling down as an attitude in software engineering, and how about everything in the problem domain is in one's sphere of influence and responsibility.
I commonly make a similar transition that I describe as task orientation versus time orientation.
The transition happens when there is some project where there seems to some number of tasks to do and I expect it to be done (or get that step done, or whatever). This expectation then turns out to be wrong, usually because the steps fail directly or I didn’t have enough information about what needed to be done. Then I will explicitly switch to time orientation, which really just means that I will focus on making whatever progress is possible within the time window, or until complete.
One difference is that my experience isn’t sorted by problem difficulty per se. I mean it correlates with problem difficulty, but the real dividing line is how much attention I expected it to require versus how much it wound up requiring. Therefore it is gated by my behavior beforehand rather than by being a Hard Problem.
Counterintuitively I find time-orientation to be a very effective method of getting out of analysis paralysis. This seems like a difference to me because the “time to do some rationality” trigger associates heavily with the deconfusion class of analytical strategies (in my mind). I suspect the underlying mechanism here is that analysis in the context of normal problems is mainly about efficiency, but the more basic loop of action-update-action-update is consistently more effective when information is lacking.
I think there’s something to time orientation having the notion of bash-my-face-against-the-problem-to-gather-information-about-it which makes it more effective than analysis for me a lot of the time because it has the information gathering step built in explicitly, whereas my concepts of analysis are still mostly just received from the subjects where I picked them up, leaving them in separate buckets. This makes me vulnerable to the problem of using the wrong analytical methods because almost all presentations of analysis assume the information being analyzed, and I have a limited sense of the proverbial type signature as a result.
I've been thinking about this mental shift recently using toy example - a puzzle game I enjoy. The puzzle game is similar to soduku, but involves a bit of simple mental math. The goal is to find all the numbers in the shortest time. Sometimes (rarely) I'm able to use just my quickest 2-3 methods for finding numbers and not have to use my slower, more mentally intensive methods. There's usually a moment in every game when I've probably found the low hanging fruit but I'm tempted to re-check to see if any of my quick methods can score me any more numbers, and I have to tell myself "Ok, I have to try something harder and slower now". It's been interesting to notice when the optimal time to do this is. Certainly there have been games where I've spent far too long procrastinating the harder methods by checking and re-checking if any of the easier methods will work in a particular situation, and I end up with a poor time because it took me too long to switch.
I've also noticed this is a pattern when I'm looking for a lost item - it's easy to get stuck in a loop of checking and re-checking the same few locations where you initially guessed it might be. At some point, you need to start tidying up and thoroughly checking each location, and then the surrounding locations, even places where you think it's very unlikely to be. I see a lot of people (maybe even most people) follow this pattern, contining to check the same 3 locations far beyond the point where it would be sensible to begin checking other locations, getting frustrated that it's not in one of the places it "should" be.
One thing I'd like to say is that it's not just that for some tasks "buckling down" is the correct approach, it's more about noticing when the correct time is switch from the low-effort quick approach to a high-effort slow approach. Most of the time it IS in one of the 3 locations you initially thought of. If you briefly checked them, it may genuinely be worth checking them again. But it's also important to calibrate the point at which you switch to a slower approach. For finding lost items, this point is probably the point where you find yourself considering checking the same location for the third time.
I'm legit unsure if the title of this post should be the current one, or a more clear-at-first-glance one like "Buckling up for a lot of cognitive steps". I notice when I imagine linking to this post in future posts I'd maybe rather it have a self-explanatory name. But the current one is so fun.
1I've updated the post title to "Buckle up bucko, and get ready for multiple hard cognitive steps", because its what I expect I'll usually want the link to be when I link to this (so it's easier at a glance what it means in the context I'm linking to it. (I am considering making slightly more use of "initially name a post something more fun and attention getting while it's on the home page, but change the name slightly to something more linkable")