Pseudo-Striving

by MulaiAzhagi Thu May 03, 2012 9:14 pm

The Pseudo-Striving Hypothesis
It’s significantly more pleasant to pursue a goal with a plan entirely of our own construction, then to use a plan based on a systematic study of what actually works. The former allows us to pseudo-strive, experiencing the fulfillment of busyness and complex planning while avoiding any of the uncomfortable, deliberate, often harsh difficulties that populate plans of the latter type.

For example…

For the aspiring writer, embracing National Novel Writing Month is pseudo-striving. It feels good to sit down every morning and throw a few hundred words on a page. But the reality of writing would tell you that getting your fiction chops to a publishable level requires the training that comes only in the form of writing for someone else — be it an MFA classroom or edited publication. You need the fear of rejection to push your writing skills. Then you still need to experience that rejection time and again during the period where your skills are just starting to improve. It’s much easier to sit on your deck with your MacBook and a cup of coffee and applaud yourself for your dedication.

For the aspiring grad student, seeking research ideas that fall comfortably within the scope of what you already know how to do, and then trying to convince other people that your work is important, is pseudo-striving. Reflecting on my experience, I notice now that academia is much more likely to reward the strategy of spending the 12 – 24 months of deliberate practice necessary to master an important emerging field. This is really hard. But those who persist end up doing work with impact.

For the aspiring lifestyle designer, dedicating hours to e-mail auto-responders, WordPress widgets, and social network engineering is also pseduo-striving. It gives you lots to do, nothing is really judged a success or failure, and nothing is really hard, but you feel engaged and active. It’s quite pleasent. Many of the successful entrepreneurs from Chris’s book, by contrast, had a reality-based fixation on actually making real money from real people before doing anything else (be it leaving their job or optimizing a web site). This is less pleasant, because you might fail time and again to convince people to give you their money, but ultimately it’s all that matters, so that’s where your initial energy should be focused.

http://calnewport.com/blog/2012/04/29/do-what-works-not-whats-satisfying-pseudo-striving-and-our-fear-of-reality-based-planning/#more-2044