First off, someone created an advertisement promoting my latest YouTube video. Whoever you are, THANK YOU!
On The Nature Of Habits
It would be helpful to read within the context of Practice Drawing This, because one common struggle is that we find it hard to find time to draw, but have no problem procrastinating by wasting hours on social media.
One fascinating insight they have is that we have a Planner part of the brain that reflects on things, and a Doer part that acts automatically. Our Planner part of our brain tells us in the evening that we want to draw in the morning. And in the morning, the Doer decides, as an automatism, to go onto social media instead. Or to write a newsletter article, as I am doing right now.
The book presents many fascinating examples of how governments or companies successfully “nudge” the Doer part of our brain to do the right thing.
The writers give one example: a nudge based on the fact that we hate losing something more than we like gaining something. An example experiment that shows this is one in which researchers gave half of a group a coffee mug with a company or university logo, and the other half got nothing. People who had a mug were asked how much they would take for it, and those who didn’t get one were asked how much they would be willing to pay for one. The people who had the mug wanted approximately twice as much as the ones who didn’t have one were willing to pay for one.
We hate losing things more than we love getting them.
This is the mechanism behind the “don’t break the streak” technique, where you mark a cross on a calendar each day you draw, and the trick becomes to not break the streak, to not lose it.
This is also the mechanism behind challenges. You start the challenge, and you’re on your way, and you’d hate to lose it.
This is all about your rational, reflective Planner brain controlling your impulsive, on automatic-pilot Doer brain.
Here is why I have a problem with this point of view: I don’t think it works in the long run. You eventually finish the challenge, exhausted and burnt out. You ultimately do break the streak as life happens.
And it works by trying to create a system where you try to avoid a negative emotion.
I want to repeat this for emphasis, because this is the central reason I think this is the wrong approach: it centers on creating a system that forces you to try to avoid negative emotions.
The ten-thousand-hour rule works the same. The way people seem to understand it is that you have to force yourself through ten thousand hours of deliberate practice, even if you hate doing it, and voila, you are a master.
Only, it doesn’t work that way for people who become really good at something. Yes, they did put in the ten thousand hours. But that is just what it looks like on the outside.
I have coded for maybe thirty to forty thousand hours in my life. The thing is, I didn’t force myself to. I was addicted. I got a dopamine hit from the results, from being able to make cool things.
I wasn’t avoiding negative feelings! I was actively pursuing positive ones! I was addicted to it.
I wrote earlier about Ronaldinho here . He is called Ronaldinho because he was small as a kid. I can see him on the field as a small kid, trying to humiliate the big boys. He is enjoying that thoroughly. Later, as an adult, he was an absolute master at humiliating other players on the field. His moves blow your mind. He is dancing as he is lobbing the ball over someone’s head or through their legs, meters past these pro soccer players before they even realize what happened, lobbing it into the net at an angle that should be completely impossible.
All the while, he is smiling nonstop. This is not a person who is avoiding negative feelings. Instead, he is probably addicted to the positive feeling, the dopamine hit, he gets from humiliating other players with his skill.
Andrew Bustamante, (former?) CIA spy has a great YouTube channel, often with interesting insights. I can’t find the video now, but in one, he explains how the CIA decides what you will do for them. They go look for the thing you love doing, the thing that if you did it all day, at five o’clock in the afternoon, you have even more energy to keep doing that. That is what the CIA will let you do for them, because they can plant you somewhere and leave you to your own devices, and you will keep going.
Not that I’d ever work for such an organization, but if I did, they would apparently have me coding for them. I literally did what he describes: I’d work as a software engineer all day, and then come home and keep on coding on personal projects in the evening. And the weekends. Addicted. Didn’t eat, sleep, shower, or spend money. Just coding.
The book “Nudge” presents ways to help people make the right decisions. Some of the nudges help by forcing them to avoid negative feelings. But I have a strong feeling that people who became really good at something, people like Kim Jung Gi and Ronaldinho, didn’t try to avoid negative emotions. Instead, they were addicted to the positive feelings the habit gave them. Feeling positive about the results was the nudge that made them want to do it again so much and with such intensity the next day that they eventually became virtuosos.
The interesting thing is that this is about training your Doer brain, which acts automatically. It happens without you being conscious of it. It might be the case that I, as a coder, Ronaldinho as a soccer player, and Kim Jung Gi as an artist, don’t fully understand the mechanism that makes us do that thing obsessively because it seems to be happening in the subconscious part of our brain, seeking the dopamine reward and the positive feeling afterward.
Scientists should study the few people who manage an addictive habit that nudges them forward through positive feelings of succeeding at things, because, from personal experience, if you can get that going, it is a way more powerful motivator than a nudge trying to avoid negative feelings.
I don’t know how to design a routine around any randomly chosen activity yet, how to construct it so that you are guaranteed to get a positive feeling from it, no matter what the activity is, how to train the automatic part of your brain, the Doer, to just love doing anything. I wish I were as obsessively addicted to cleaning things up, for example.
This would be a very cool and helpful thing for scientists to research.
Perhaps I’ll find the answer one day, and if I do, I will report back to you! And vice versa, if you know or find out, let me know! We’ll write that scientific paper together!
This Week
Someone shared this very awesome wall-mounted art desk this week , and it is pretty awesome!
Cartoons
So I am a member of De Kring, a Dutch artists’ society famous for having had many famous artists and writers among its members. And me!
They have a periodical in newspaper form, and I make a cartoon for that. I posted the cartoon a while back; here it is in print. As you can see, practicing freehanding ellipses came in handy!
A link to the article above is that I do get a dopamine hit from seeing a cartoon in print. I immediately feel the urge to start making cartoons again. A positive nudge.
I had to censor it a bit, as you can see; that one image is by the Dutch writer Jan Cremer, who became famous for writing explicit literary novels somewhere in the sixties. So you can guess what that image is. Top left is an illustration by the famous Peter van Straaten. Fokke en Sukke, also renowned over here, have a cartoon in the publication, and the famous Dutch comics creator Gerrit de Jager had a two-page spread in which he turned an interview with him into a comic. There is an illustrated centerfold by Gabriel Kousbroek, the son of the famous Rudy Kousbroek. There is an article by the famous Annemarie Oster.
And then there’s the cartoon by me. Haha! It’s surreal to see my name among these greats. Feeling like an impostor.
I can draw like Peter van Straaten, but they want me to draw in that style. Ah well.
Yours sincerely,
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