/ Initially I asked this question through the “uncomfortable” lens…
What is the base level of discomfort for people, how does that vary between people, and how does that change over someone’s life?
This is a good question. It could have a post all to itself and searching for an answer would be a raw process.
Maybe a similar, more palatable, and perhaps more tangible question to ask could be…
What level of (motivation, prompting, realization) is needed for people to take some action (myself included)?
Differences between whether you organically learn/find something vs. someone tells you.
If you discover something, the context which you discover it could greatly impact how much you internalize it.
If someone tells you, that person’s level of “authority” or expertise and how much you value that.
And then thinking about in both scenarios, what percentage of conversions actually occur.
Example: 3 people of different “importance” in your specific life tell you the same thing. To what extent do you take what they say “to heart” and then do you actually change your behavior or do something based on what they say. I get that the answer always “depends” but still deserves some initial thought.
Like whether there is any point in listening to anyone or whether you are bound to just learn things on your own (through doing vs. through osmosis) and how you balance that.
This could be valuable in teaching because some people do best when told more precisely what to do vs. others prefer to be led/guided. Informative, not prescriptive.
Similar vein (this isn’t that great of an example but it works):
Say you want to eat a healthier diet. You could conclude that a dietician or someone who is in great shape would have better advice as to what to eat than someone who eats a less healthy diet or is in not as great shape, given in this universe the assumption that a healthy diet and a healthy body are correlated is true (at least for the sake of my example).
But then as you adopt behaviors and evolve, some of the behaviors which contributed to that change are still good to do and you continue doing that (like drinking more water is always a good idea in 99.9% of cases).
However it may be that after some level of evolving you want to adopt new behaviors, either because your old behaviors don’t apply or you reach a plateau. I have heard this occurs when you work out/exercise, you plateau and need to break through new strength ceilings.
Similarly this can occur with writers block. I’ve heard from a few writers that writing actually can be more difficult over time since you always want to explore new content but also elevate the quality of your content.
So now I’m thinking that some value can be seen in the journey of how people evolve and not necessarily the end result vs. it is conventionally all about the end result.
Product AND process.
But one could argue that that person who already met their goals could always be looking better, feeling better, becoming more healthy (no endpoint, all journey).
A derivative of this could be asking the following…
/ Miscellaneous thoughts
tl;dr I think process matters a lot.
Cheers,
Vish
Published on June 12, 2023.