Mini Blog Post 2: Be Deliberate
One of the most important ideas I’ve ever internalised is to be deliberate about how I act in the world. Everything I ever do is an action, and my actions bring me further from or closer to my goals. Being deliberate is realising that this link is not automatic, and requires active attention and effort. I need to be aware of why I’m acting the way that I am, how this could be helpful to me, and to develop the skill of noticing when this stops being true.
This idea sounds completely trivial when phrased like that. “There are things that I want in the world, and I should take actions that get me more of what I want!” But I think this is surprisingly hard, and something really worth paying attention to!
First, empirically, a lot of people are not deliberate (this is one of the things that most annoys me about the world). For example, people often get into arguments, and are angry with each other. I think this can serve a legitimate purpose! Anger demonstrates that your preferences are strong and important. Demonstrating displeasure can help make the bad thing not happen again! But, the purpose here is not “retribution and demonstrating anger”, the purpose is “ensuring that future interactions are better”. Anger is only useful as a means to an end! And I think often anger is super counterproductive, and makes others defensive and less likely to listen to you. It’s often far more effective to clearly explain why you were annoyed, taking care not to give blame to the other person and to demonstrate empathy, and to try to constructively discuss how future interactions can be better. Since trying to internalise the idea that “disagreements are about making future interactions go better, not seeking retribution for past grievances”, I think my life has gotten a lot better. Future interactions do go better, I’m more pleasant to be around, and I often end up feeling much closer to my friends.
Of course, this is a lot easier said than done. It’s hard to step back from anger in the moment, and realise that it’s not helping you achieve your goals. When you feel strong emotions, or intuitions, these are often actually helping you achieve purposes, and it’s much easier and lower effort to just do the natural thing. Even if I know it’s counter-productie to follow the emotion, it’s super hard not to! And often this is the right strategy! But I think it’s also often not, and it’s important to notice when your emotions or intuitions are not helping you achieve your goals.
From an action-oriented point of view: You want to notice when previous natural reactions didn’t achieve your goals. And you want to ensure that, in future, you notice in the moment when you’re following that same natural reaction. This needs to feel important, and you need to ask yourself “is this helping me, or is it making things worse?”
That was a long, specific example, but I think this is really general. Another broad example: People have an idea of their Roles, and do the “normal” thing. For example, the maths student who goes to lectures every morning, even though they can never keep up, and spend the entire hour totally lost. Because going to lectures is the “done thing”. Here the purpose is to learn maths well, and possibly to do well in exams for future career prospects. And often going to lectures is not the right way to achieve this! I spent a lot of my first year or two going to lectures, because that was the done thing, and I think this was a pretty ineffective way of achieving my goals
The lesson to take from this is not “never be angry” or “never go to lectures”, it’s “do the action that best achieves your goals!”. There are a lot of people who get a lot of value from lectures! They lack the motivation to go through notes, they benefit from the structure, they like the social atmosphere, etc. But the point I’m trying to make is that it should feel like there is a question to be answered. Maybe lectures are the best thing to do, but you need to actually think about this, rather than just doing what everyone else does! Test things, run experiments, try out alternate way of doing things, think outside the box!
Ultimately, there are a lot of things I care about in this world, and it’s really important to me that I get as much as I can out of life. And this is a difficult problem, and takes a lot of work. But it seems incredibly sad to miss out on so much value because I never realised that this problem existed. You don’t need to have a perfect idea of your goals or values, which is also a really hard problem. But often there are such obvious gains to be made by being a bit more deliberate about your life, and I urge anyone reading this to think about the things they care about in life. And whether the actions you take achieve those, or if you’re stuck following a default path.
