The Science Of Keeping Going

Three ways across the Chasm Of Ughh

Hello! Welcome to Everything Is Amazing, a newsletter about curiosity that once asked, “If I stare at my own reflection hard enough, will I start to hallucinate?”

(As you’ve probably guessed already, the correct answer is, “Yes, but - I’m sure there are better ways to have fun out there, man.”)

When I started this newsletter just over a year ago, I thought I’d mainly be writing about the science of what makes us curious, including the neurological mechanisms of attention, wonder and awe. But along the way, I’ve found curiosity is also about three other important things.

There’s stupidity (the good, fun kind), which I’ve previously written a little about here.

There’s obsession (again, the good kind, exhibited by scientists and creative artists everywhere in a way that too frequently gets written off as “oh, they’re just super-smart”), which I’ll be diving into in future newsletters.

And there’s hopefulness - that incredibly motivating beneficial force that Cal Fyn writes about here:

”We need to be roused. We need to feel. We need a siren song that lures unsuspecting souls to the cause: a song to enchant us, to put us to work.”

So, more on all those things soon in the free part of this newsletter. But today, as a side-course, let’s talk about the bit in the middle - after your attention has been hooked and after you’ve decided to lean in for a closer look, but before that useful obsessiveness (which will carry you onwards) has worked its delicious madness upon you.

Let’s call this middle ground the Chasm Of Ughh.

(This is Monty Python And The Holy Grail’s Gorge Of Eternal Peril - actually the Glencoe Falls, Scotland. I imagine the Chasm of Ughh looking very similar, while being a lot less funny.)

What happens is: propelled by the excitement of discovering something fascinating, you launch yourself into the study and/or the doing of it - only to discover it’s frustratingly tough-going. Not only are the rewards few & far between this early in the process, you are also tortured by a very clear idea of what “good" looks like, and that just ain’t you right now.

With writers, it looks like what Ira Glass called ‘The Gap’:

With musicians, it often means teachers forcing you to learn scales, which is both useful in the long run and mindnumbingly boring, whyyyyy…

And with anyone following their curiosity, it’s a mountain of stuff in the way - the books, the papers and tutorials to fight through, the jargon to learn, the true experts to compare yourself with in a crushing sort of way, the imposter syndrome, and so on. It’s all just horrible - and for most folk, it’s the end of that story, because it’s where they get trapped, and where they give up.

I have the greatest respect for those who always seem to find a way to keep going. But Ira Glass’s “you just have to do a lot of work” really is not terribly motivating? I immediately feel bad about how naturally lazy I am - and that kinda makes me hate people who do a lot of work. Which makes me feel worse about myself. And so on. It’s a spiral, none of it upwards.

So here’s the question to myself here. Knowing my past tendencies to drop creative infatuations like hot potatoes when they actually show signs of turning into actual hard work, how can I get across the Chasm of Ughh to where I really fall in love with this thing, at which point it feels so much easier because it’s less something you’re doing and more something you just are?

For answers, I turned to the work of two behavioural economists, one science writer and one ultrarunner - and if you’re a paid subscriber, you can see my findings below.

(And if you’re on the free list, how about having a go at some of these, and all the other challenges that piece links to?)

1. Act Like You’ll Remember Nothing

In her book How To Change, Katy Milkman (James. G. Dinan Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and host of the always-insightful podcast Choiceology) notes that our ability to remind ourselves to do things is appallingly untrustworthy.

If you’ve ever said to yourself or someone else “Oh dammit, this is so embarrassing, I’m so forgetful,” you’re stating the obvious. Of course you’re forgetful: you’re human. If we didn’t forget huge amounts of things every single day, our minds would overload in no time. It’s as necessary a process as washing the dirty crockery that piles up in our sink.

This means it’s not something to be ashamed of, but something to manage. It’s all about making sure you’re forgetting the right things (eg. what a waste of time reading that tabloid news story was, or how much our big toe hurt when we stubbed it coming out of the shower) and retaining the actually-worth-remembering stuff, like meeting appointments, and anniversaries, and the PIN number for your credit card, and so on.

Only thing is: the important stuff is hard to remember too! Even if it’s important. We can’t just rely on our memory to rank this stuff in a sensible way. We’re too overloaded with raw information, too distracted and just too forgetful by default, and our minds are less like neatly-indexed filing cabinets and more like that warehouse at the end of Raiders Of The Lost Ark:

Milkman cites a study from 2004 by John Austin, Sigurdur Oli Sigurdsson and Yonata Shpak Rubin, ran outside a hotel & casino. 433 participants (who didn’t know about the experiment) were reminded to buckle their seat-belts as they came to collect their cars. The three test groups were:

- business as usual (no reminder given)

- a reminder given by the parking attendant, around 3-5 minutes before the drivers climbed into their car

- a reminder given while the driver was clambering into the driver’s seat.

In the business-as-usual case, around 55% of drivers buckled up before they drove away. So you’d expect the other two, where they’re being actively reminded, would be a significant improvement on this?

In fact, the group reminded minutes before driving away … had the same rate of buckling up, around 55%. Basically no change from the control group. The reminder had proven useless. But the ones reminded at the time that reminder was required? Their success rate shot up to 80%.

I am sure a little of this could be down to not wanting to look like a criminal (or an idiot) in front of someone who might report you to the police, but - was it generally just a way more effective time to remind someone? Milkman’s further research suggested it absolutely was.

So here’s one way to stick to a good intention, and keep clambering your way up the other side of the Chasm of Ughh. You don’t just make normal reminders for yourself, in that list-tacked-to-the-bathroom-mirror way that we all do, promising ourselves that every morning we’ll refresh our memory of what to do for the rest of the day, and that’ll be enough. Nope! That won’t work.

What you need is to be reminded to do something at the precise moment you should take action on it.

Maybe this is in an app. Or maybe, if you live out of your email Inbox like I do, you can send a timed email to yourself, designed to arrive at exactly the right moment. (This is why those “The Webinar Starts In 5 Minutes!” reminders work so well.) Or maybe you can buy a dozen alarm clocks and litter your house with them, slowly turning yourself into a trembling nervous wreck. Whatever! I firmly encourage you to do you.

Just make sure you’re constantly treating yourself like someone who never remembers anything - because that’s probably a lot closer to the truth than you’re currently aware of.

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2. Align Your Actions With Your Goals (ie. ‘Cheat’)

If you read the interview with Brendan Leonard in the last newsletter, you’ll know he’s really smart. And in his book from last year, I H❤️te Running And You Can Too, he proves it by confessing he cheats at running all the time - like basically everyone else does:

“If you explore ultramarathons, you’ll discover how much walking ultrarunners do - even elite runners in mountainous 100-mile races. The terrain, the long hours, and the calorie consumption required to finish necessitate walking. In order to keep moving and actually finish (instead of blowing up partway through), a common strategy is to walk the uphills and run the flats and downhills.”

This is fine, because the goal of an ultramarathon is to finish the race without getting disqualified (ie. while not breaking the official rules). There’s nothing in the rules against walking some of it - because that would make those rules absolutely insane - so why make it even harder for yourself?

But we do, of course. Any new endeavour undertaken with enthusiasm has loads of “I have to prove my worth by doing this the right way!” energy. Some of that energy is idiotic and needs earthing, or we just make ourselves explode. And you can do that by looking hard at what you want to achieve, allowing yourself to do it in any way that works (including ways that don’t look much like what other people are doing) - and just cracking on with it.

To return to the learning-piano analogy: scales suck all the fun out of it. Why not start with learning to play that special song that got you hooked on the idea of piano in the first place? You know the one! (Here’s mine.) Why are you waiting? Throw yourself in! So what, it’s painful as hell and you’re learning to play the really inefficient and messy way, but - isn’t it more fun than doing it “properly,” at least until you’re getting used to playing? Isn’t it much more fun to cheat?

This kind of cheating is like a ladder out of the Chasm Of Ughh, built of your enthusiasm, and helping you reach your obsessive curiosity’s tipping-point.

(Are ladders cheating, you say? You know even professional mountain-climbers use them, right? There’s no law against it. STOP TRYING TO MAKE A BAD LAW. Thx.)

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3. ROPE IT TO SOMETHING FUN

During his senior year of high school, behavioural economist and author Dan Ariely was involved in a horrific accident. While preparing a ktovet esh (fire inscription) nightime ceremony for the Israeli youth movement he was part of, the flammable materials he was mixing exploded, causing third-degree burns over 70 percent of his body.

He spent the next few years in hospital - and after a bad blood transfusion, he developed a particularly stubborn form of hepatitis. It later turned into Hepatitis C, a virus that affects the liver. At this time, interferon was just entering trials as a treatment for Hep C, and Ariely was offered a course of it.

This took the form of self-administered injections, three times a week for 18 months. He had to complete the full course to have his best shot at not having liver cirrhosis a few decades down the road. Except - each injection would make him feel really, really bad. Headache, trembling, vomiting, sweats. The kind of illness where you’re just hanging in there, waiting for the storm to pass.

And he had to inflict this misery upon himself, three times a week, for a year and a half.

But not only did he end up completing the programme, he was also told he was the only person in the entire trial to always take his medication on time, without fail.

How?

Simple. Dan Ariely is a film nerd. He loves movies! And this was back in the days of Blockbuster, where you’d go to the shop and physically collect your movies in grubby plastic boxes.

In getting films to watch, he rewired the whole experience for himself. It wasn’t Crappy Injection Night - it was Film Night. Ariely used the enticement of an evening on the couch watching movies to really look forward to those evenings - and to regard the injections as a necessary part of allowing himself that enjoyable luxury. (He took the injection and immediately popped the first movie in the VCR, so the nasty side-effects of the medicine kicked in when he was already enjoying the film.)

In this way, he tricked his brain’s preference for a reward in the short term to one he’d get years hence. In other words, he conquered impulsive thinking - that thing that derails most of our efforts to stick to an uncomfortable task, when we suddenly discover new reasons to “write off today” and catapult our virtuous planning into tomorrow or next week (when we promise ourselves we’ll work twice as hard to make up for today’s failure).

So - the lesson here is really to find a way to make it fun. Not the kind of fun where you actually don’t do the thing! (Nice try.) The other kind. If there’s a way to tie this relatively onerous task to something else that’s pleasurable, so that getting the one means you get the other, it’ll be easy to stick to. You’ll really, truly want to keep going.

(For example: how my friend Tasha got herself writing again by doing it at the back of a ski lodge, instead of at her desk at home. This follows the research of Annie Murphy Paul, which suggests that your surroundings can be a hugely important part of your cognitive process.)

Making it fun gets it done. Who would have thought? (Apart from maybe all of us, if we all stopped and thought about it?)

BONUS!

Keep your enthusiasm fresh by continually finding new perspectives on your chosen thing, so you don’t get bored by the overfamiliar whirl of your own thoughts. This brilliant book may give you a few ideas.

Thanks for reading, and good luck!

Mike

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