Why we are strong in some subjects and hopeless in others, why willpower is the wrong thing to spend, and why the only goal worth setting at twenty-two is keeping your options open.
Source · The Simon Learning Method
Forgive me — another clumsy title
— Reflections on The Simon Learning Method
Part One: Subject Aversion, Habit, and Goals
Many of the views in this book struck me forcefully, and not because the views themselves were especially subversive.
Rather, they made me realize that I had once thought this way myself — and had never managed to act on it. That is the regret.
The book is not short of lines that made me look up. For instance: “Yesterday’s regret is tomorrow’s opportunity.”
So beginning today,
every week, with every book, I will do my best to leave some trace of what I have read and thought.
“Learning is not the mere retention of memory; it is the practice of knowledge and its extension into creation.”
This, then, is my practice.
As for “why success is so simple” —
forgive me for keeping you in suspense.
I will set out the formula for why success is so simple in the next installment.
Before laying out the learning method and the formula, allow me to introduce the substance of this piece by discussing the account of subject aversion — the tendency to be strong in some subjects and weak in others — raised in the opening pages of the Simon book.
In the book, Simon holds that the principal cause of subject aversion is dislike.
In my own view, the most fundamental cause is the self-reinforcing downward cycle that dislike produces — which is more or less a faithful portrait of my own years as a lopsided student.
Because I disliked the subject, I could not concentrate on it; because I could not concentrate, I naturally could not produce good results; and the external pressures of the school environment (comparison among classmates, the expectations and criticism of teachers and parents) supplied further stimulus, which in all likelihood intensified my aversion to that subject still further.
And our initial aversion may well not have come purely from “dislike” at all. It may have originated in an evasion of social desirability — that is, in the stimulus of external pressure.
“I don’t think I could do well even if I studied,” “Even if I studied I still couldn’t match the others” — this too may be a root cause of subject aversion, and in my case perhaps more so.
I will set aside for now the methods for screening out social desirability and disregarding the opinions of others (I will take that up with you in a future piece).
The cycle runs as follows:
dislike / high pressure → lack of diligence → poor results → high pressure / dislike → deeper dislike → …
This bears a strong resemblance to what Lin Chao, in Kaiqiao, calls the “unlucky flywheel” — a flywheel that spins you further down rather than up.
To break the unlucky flywheel, Lin Chao’s method is: find the leverage point, and get the virtuous cycle rolling.
For me, this means identifying the governing constraint in the problem — the question underneath the question.
For example: I frequently complain that I cannot complete my planned tasks before going to sleep, which leads to procrastination and leaves me dispirited. Yet I keep a regular schedule and stay as alert as I can in order to finish what I have set out to do. The real issue is that I have set myself too many tasks — no amount of effort would let me reach the target. My ambitions exceed my hands.
The essential problem is that I have never had a sufficiently clear picture of how my own day is allocated:
Add together the time required by (2), (3), and (4). Can (1) cover it? Is 2 + 3 + 4 ≤ 1?
I suspect many readers have had the same experience: once I start, I cannot stop; once I want to do the thing, I cannot rein myself in.
So how do we get ourselves to begin, such that we then cannot stop?
Kaiqiao observes that large cycles are built out of small ones.
In my own case, once a small cycle is established, it grows of its own accord.
Newton’s first law tells us as much: in the absence of an external force, an isolated point mass remains at rest or in uniform linear motion.
To establish a small cycle, all that is required is a little of what Newton called external force. Even the smallest push will set it rolling.
I have found this enormously useful.
But after finishing The Simon Learning Method, I acquired another method for building cycles: the use of willpower.
As noted above, small cycles will roll on by themselves.
But in the act of establishing them, we inevitably encounter obstacles.
The book advances a view I found genuinely fresh: “What keeps us operating efficiently is habit, not self-management capacity.”
The text rejects the notion that self-management sustains discipline, and holds instead that discipline rests on habit.
Habit is precisely the cycle discussed above; and building a habit requires a certain amount of self-management and self-control.
Self-control, like our physical strength and our energy, is finite.
And it is precisely this finite self-control that can help us establish cycles and cultivate habits.
The book identifies the cue and three further dependencies of habit formation.
For my part, I use willpower to control the cue — I would rather call it the trigger. When we apply what willpower we have to controlling the trigger, we take the first step toward forming a habit: a little of Newton’s external force pushes us onto the track of inertia, and the habit gradually takes hold.
The two steps above can therefore be summarized as:
What follows is my current thinking.
For young people, perhaps, in an age still saturated with fantasy, making plans that “concern an entire life” is not altogether realistic.
“I haven’t lived to eighty — how would I know what kind of person I’ll become?” This interior monologue, steeped in resignation, is likely the voice of most of my young friends as well.
Allow me here to sketch briefly my analysis of why this phenomenon arises — that is, why young people (myself included) do not dare to, do not wish to, and do not want to make “life plans”:
Our own smallness is repeatedly underscored before one remote and grandiose “life goal” after another, leaving us leaving us as conditioned and as helpless as animals in a laboratory.
But having assembled all these “excuses,” can we really bear to pass an entire life in mediocrity — full of ambition, yet frozen before the first step?
Perhaps “five-year plans” and “ten-year plans” are too far beyond our reach, exercising too feeble a grip on our conduct; while “daily schedules” and “weekly plans,” once we have anchored ourselves to a lifetime commitment, appear too trivial to matter.
Then —
since we already know both long-range planning and short-term scheduling,
let us set aside the complaints
and define, rationally and clearly, what a goal is.
Unfortunately, “long” and “short” may be difficult to demarcate given individual variation, so I will not attempt to define them.
The Simon book holds that goals are the result of habit.
It is precisely because we are in the habit of setting goals and reaching them that we have goals at all.
Goals are not the reason we begin to study, to work, and to improve; they are the result of our being habituated to studying, working, and improving.
This connects neatly with the discussion above and returns us to the subject of habit.
In Simon’s view, it is “habit” itself that habituates us to setting goals — and for the cultivation of habit we may simply turn back to the discussion above.
But I hold one humble view I would like to share with you.
If I (or we) are still adrift and at a loss,
perhaps we should not set a long-range goal at all.
Yet “setting no goal” is itself a goal,
and that single goal is: preserve your optionality.
I once held great enthusiasm — and a one-sided view — about optionality.
I once wrongly used it to explain away my own indecision.
Allow me here to redefine it.
Optionality: the right to choose, at some future moment, among things that may prove beneficial to us.
As the old saying has it, opportunity favors the prepared mind. Optionality is the range of our preparation.
Take my own case: I studied a musical instrument from childhood. That was optionality my parents gave me. It created a right of choice when I applied to middle school, and it went on creating options in my transition to high school, in the college entrance examination, and even in my future career planning.
In the end,
optionality is our right.
It is the number of options still held in our hand.
It is the courage to say no to the temptation in front of us.
I only answer from what is written on this site.
Type a few words — I will show you where it says so.