Become a person who Actually Does Things

I think this is a very difficult skill to teach people (I say this as someone who had to learn it myself). As a result this is a very heavily weighted part of my hiring process.

One thing I’ve found is that people who are naturally good at this almost never realise that they’re doing anything unusual - it doesn’t occur to them that other people don’t do it.

And the solution that worked for me, is to make it part of your identity to be an agent. Make it a point of principle to do things, not because the thing is necessarily the perfect action, but because I choose the life where I do things, over the life where I always wait for the perfect opportunity.

This seems like shifting from act utilitarianism to rule utilitarianism, where you don't try to calculate the value from each option in relation to all other options but instead act upon a principle (or core values in business speak).

Notice the small problems, and fix them. Notice when everyone isn’t enjoying what they’re doing, and be the first person to voice this. Notice when the jug of water is empty, and be the one to fill it. Notice when you say “oh, I can do this tomorrow” and do it today. Notice when you think “I should get round to this some time” or “I’ve always wanted to learn juggling” and actually do it. Notice when something is inefficient, notice the thing nobody is doing, and be the person who does it!

Maybe I'm overthinking, but with this logic I imagine this happening:

0. Imagine someone who thinks “I can do this tomorrow” or “this is not a priority”

1. Read this article and start to take action on all the things they view as wrong in their life, following their newly developed principle of action

2. Find that they don't have enough time to take care of all these things

3. Become disillusioned and conclude that they have to adjust their principle to only tackle problems that are worth it

4. Start shrugging off most problems as not being worth it

5. Frequently shrug off problems thinking “I can do this tomorrow” or “this is not a priority”

And the person has now ended in the same place they started... How would one avoid this?

It's surprisingly hard to consciously notice a bad thing as being a solvable problem, I agree. I will once in a while notice that I've been inconvenienced by X for a long time, but only now am I actively aware of it as a discrete entity. It's a skill I think would be particularly worth learning/improving.

Similarly, with opportunities - this has happened a couple times in my life, but the first I remember was that beforehand, I would hear about people volunteering at animal shelters, and I'd think "that sounds nice/fun"...end of thought. One day, all of a sudden, something clicked, and the thought occurred, "There's nothing fundamentally special about those people. That thing is a Thing I Could Do. There's nothing actually stopping me from doing it." And there wasn't; I did a Google and made a few calls, and in a few weeks I was cleaning kestrel poop out of a concrete enclosure XP. (These days I hand-feed baby squirrels/possums/rabbits, mostly.) But I remember how much of a revelation it was: those people on the other side of the screen are by-and-large the same kind of people I am - if I want to do what they do I can. If I wanted to drop everything and build thatch houses in a third world country, I could. (I just don't really want to, haha.)

It's still a hard skill to learn - I doubt I do it nearly as often as I could, or even perhaps should.

I think this is bad advice. Further, I think that the worldview the author espouses is inherently false, and that she acknowledges this in the opening statement, which is about as good an example of Satre’s “bad faith” as I can think of, on the internet.

A thought exercise, taken from a recent podcast- a guru tells her followers to ‘do something’. The followers, in their existential modernist angst, agree to do the something that the guru says to do. In doing ‘the something’ the followers pay tens of thousands of dollars to the guru, and some of them die in a trust-fall mishap. Question- who are the lives of these followers made any better at all, from ‘doing something?’ An easy answer is, of course, that they are not.

The missing virtue/value is moderation. The followers of the guru who perhaps only paid $50 for her initial seminar, received inspiration from vague universal platitudes that truly helped their lives, mostly by giving them gratitude for the things they had already accomplished, and the lives they had already lived. More is not always better, and when you’re inner John Hammond leans on his cane and tells you ‘do something!” listen to your inner Ian Malcolm, reminding you that even if you can do something, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you should.

I would base the justification of my response in regards to the validity of your argument on these terms:

1. In your opening statement, you admit to a false premise in order to grow the size of your audience.

2. In the body of your statement, you make many claims such as ‘some people’ and ‘more people ’, without any concrete example to cite- exactly how many people can or would benefit from doing more?

3. Your argument towards increasing ‘agency’ in others is thinly defined, without clearly stating whether or not this increased agency would also lead to increased happiness or production for the individual or society at large.

4. Your closing statement is an appeal towards personal emotions, and does not contain anything of substance.

5. Finally, your response to critical commentary contains most of these errors as well.

With all this in mind, I cannot personally agree with your argument that human beings should do more instead of less.