The criteria for diagnosis with ADHD requires meeting a higher bar than most people who self-diagnose are actually able to meet, but that being said, I do have a restless brain that sits in a Goldilocks' zone on the "edge of chaos." All of which is to say that I function best when my mind is in a high speed flow state, that is, when it plays host to plenty of rewarding content to work with and time becomes less discrete and more fluid ("mental time travel," "sophisticated inference," "cognitive lightcone," etc). If I can provide it with high quality information to play around with and integrate into a broader gestalt, then everything tends to go well, problems become manageable, and insights flow freely. But the key is ensuring 1) that it has such information and 2) that this really is high quality content and not the empty calories of social media, pointless busy work, or simply stuff that was previously encountered. Now, I've had earlier successes with this method, which has uncovered some solid foundational work in philosophy and resulted in understanding other fields of inquiry, skills, etc, but those gains were not always easily reached. Taking this into new territory (that is widely perceived as difficult) will require reinvesting these earlier gains and employing some new methods to maintain progress. If the information I seek is either difficult for me to access or of low quality, I will not make progress. So I will do what is needed to maintain momentum with easily accessible, high quality, moderately challenging content. Toward that end, I will try to follow advice (use Anki flashcards and upload my own personalized spreadsheets) to propel myself into deeper engagement with the material.
I also came across a language learning video (user handle "Jozen") which emphasized the importance of psychological performance hacks such as the Ovsiankina Effect, which was first described by Soviet psychologist Maria Ovsiankina in 1928. She demonstrated that individuals feel a strong, inherent urge to resume interrupted or unfinished tasks. This concept acts as a complement to the 1927 Zeigarnik effect, which describes how we are able to better remember incomplete tasks. The study was part of research at the University of Berlin in the 1920s that was influenced by Gestalt psychologist Kurt Lewin (see his work on friction and affordances within psychological "field theory," which decenters the significance of willpower). Starting a task creates a "quasi-need" or internal tension that persists until the goal is achieved. So one can easily see how this can be leveraged to increase productivity, though with the possible caveat that salience, temporal and spatial proximity, and other factors are all aligned appropriately. Notably, recall that "just get started" is Timothy Pychyl's most oft-repeated advice, and though I haven't seen him mention it, the Ovsiankina effect provides a technical explanation for one aspect of why just starting tends to work well. Correspondingly, it may also explain why perseveration on tasks we'd rather not be engaged with (and ADHD does lead to the rapid proliferation of these) can be very difficult to address. Essentially, just as the "helper effect" can indirectly lead to personal growth for the one providing assistance to a "guest in need," the Ovsiankina effect essentially encourages us to "help ourselves" to achieve the same sense of closure or resolution, as if we were our own guest. You don't need to knock down every domino, just the first one. And maybe a few more here and there, but it's the first one that's the hardest. (And it works just as well for supporting a healthy, active lifestyle, which is the foundation for success with language learning.) So let us begin. "A pencil! A pencil! My kingdom for a pencil!" As "danwashere" noted:
"Mark Twain said "If it's your job to eat a frog, it's best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it's your job to eat two frogs, it's best to eat the biggest one first." The "frog" is the most important or difficult task that you have to do. And so, "eat that frog" means to do that task first before you get distracted or lose willpower. The first thing that I did each day was eat that frog, get it out of the way, and then I can go on with my day. I honestly do everything in the morning. That's why I like to get up so early at four in the morning."
Perhaps a union of the Ovsiankina Effect (just start, eat the frog in the morning) with the 80:20 rule (or Pareto Principle) can yield an effective strategy. You may have heard of hara hachi bu (腹八分目), a Japanese dietary phrase that translates to "eat until you are 80% full." Well, the 80:20 rule is a heuristic, a general distribution, not exact. There's many different descriptions of what it means and how it can be applied. One of these says that we should discard any heuristic we have that would suggest we can only act once we have arrived at a fairly comprehensive, or at least satisfying, relationship with whatever it is that is under consideration. Thus, any work ethic that appears to valorize the ideal of perfection should be carefully avoided. In place of that kind of approach we should instead be ready to move forward to the next step once we are only 80 percent of the way there. Whether that is 80 percent confident, complete, satisfied, or whatever. Here's the reason: getting to 80 percent only takes 20 percent of the effort, but finishing the last 20 percent takes 80 percent of the effort. Thus, if you only do 80 percent of everything, you are more than twice as efficient, and can get a lot more done. The obvious objection is that 80 percent of an airplane can't fly, so this doesn't make real world sense at all. The reply is that this only works when it is part of an iterative process. You do 80 percent of the work, then test. If you fail, then you do 80 percent of the remaining work. Test again. Eventually you will be able to move forward to the next step even though you assiduously avoided any illusions of perfectionism.
Supposedly, advocates say that 20 percent of the effort normally put into tasks is really all we ever need, and that last 80 percent is primarily addressing our own emotional insecurities or tendency to needlessly perseverate. It's supposed to allow us to reach the same qualitative goals with less quantitative expenditures of time and effort, and thereby defeat Parkinson's Law, which is the boogeyman of all bureaucracies. Is there also a McGilchrist connection here? The left hemisphere loves perfection, of getting to 100 percent certainty, whereas to live life to its fullest we have to know when enough is enough. The Tao Te Ching says:
"To hold and fill a cup to overflowing Is not as good as to stop in time. Sharpen a sword edge to its very sharpest, And the (edge) will not last long. When gold and jade fill your hall, You will not be able to keep them. To be proud with honor and wealth Is to cause one's own downfall. withdraw as soon as your work is done. Such is Heaven's Way."
It is best to live with some level of imperfection to avoid getting bogged down in diminishing returns and stagnation. One can learn to leverage that low level of discomfort to make consistent performance gains. Act as soon as one is just 80 percent prepared. We see this in sayings like "ship at 80, refine later," also described as "80:20 execution." The core philosophy is keep moving, avoid the diminishing returns of perfection, and engage in iterative improvement through real-world feedback rather than trying to anticipate everything beforehand. But we need to use these tools that leverage asymmetry in the context of higher-order volition (Harry Frankfurt), yet another asymmetry, if we are to pursue higher-order value (Max Scheler). Why? Because if all desires are thought of as existing on a level playing field, then we are extremely vulnerable to distraction. The attraction of relatively impulsive "first order" desires primarily lies in appearing to be simple to start, and simple to finish, while yielding an equivalent reward. They provide a "supernormal stimuli shortcut." And once engaged, stepping away from them means sacrificing that relatively uncomplicated sense of completion (Ovsiankina) and perfection (Pareto) they provide. But to reach higher goals, we may find that sometimes we need to make the hard choice to sacrifice acting on first-order desires for the sake of acting on second-order desires. Put the other around, most distractions implicitly require sacrificing second-order desire for the simple pleasures of a first-order desire, whether we realize that or not. In the moment it can feel very good to make that sacrifice. It's only later, sometimes days, weeks, or years later, that we realize the true cost. Scheler described the ontological depth; he explains what is higher. Frankfurt (famous for his book On Bullshit) gives the volitional mechanics; he explains how we can will the higher over the lower. And we may say that Charles Taylor, with his notion of “strong endorsement,” effectively fuses the two, in that the reflective structure Frankfurt analyzed presupposes an ability to endorse the vertical qualitative framework that Scheler described.
These are all good - Scheler's higher values, Frankfurt's higher volitions, Pareto's power law distributions, and Ovsiankina's psychological tensions - but the motivation to eat the biggest frog doesn't come from any of those, at least not individually. That emerges from McGilchrist's process-relational, dual-aspect monism view of neurology: it comes from participating in a host-guest relationship. We get into the flow when we fully inhabit two separate roles, host and guest subpersonalities (see also Internal Family Systems Model). The host does its part. It can see those higher values and volitions on behalf of the guest. And the guest does its part. It can see those distributions and tensions on behalf of the host. Analogically, recall that the primary Bible verse where God decides to give man a helper is Genesis 2:18, which states: "The Lord God said 'It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper [one who balances him, a counterpart who is] suitable for him'" (NIV). This passage suggests that Eve was created as a perfectly matched, complementary partner or "helpmate" to complete Adam. (The Hebrew word ezer is used here, which often describes a strong, essential partner, and is frequently used to describe God’s own role in helping people, e.g., Psalm 115:9-11.) Although, if we take a more figurative interpretation, then 'man' refers to 'human' more generally, and 'helper' refers to the left hemisphere, which per McGilchrist is the essential, complementary partner for the right hemisphere. Is this interpretation really supportable? Later in the same chapter in Genesis we read "and the two shall be one flesh." (Genesis 2:24) While the term 'guest' is ethically ambivalent, making it very useful for exploring the implicit tensions and potentiality here, a 'helper' refers to how that relationship with the host can manifest in an explicitly beneficial form.
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