Collecting and hoarding crap, useless information

I do this a lot. It's probably because gaining a broad understanding of a topic feels a lot more like "fun" than it does "work," while gaining a systematic and deeper understanding feels a lot more like "work" than "fun." Also, gaining a systematic understanding of a subject involves a lot more memorization and mental effort, so it is more cognitively taxing than just reading introductory books for enjoyment. Lastly, systematic research and learning often involves studying the parts of a particular subject that you find boring (which you would skip over when doing cursory reading).

This is what it is to be serious about something. Suddenly, you are doing the work instead of going for a pleasant stroll. There's nothing wrong with the pleasant stroll in itself, but some purposes require a different attitude, what I am calling seriousness and the work.

Likewise business and entrepreneurship - I read lots and lots on technology, financing, market research, marketing, etc. But now that I'm really nailing down one aspect for my next business, it becomes almost strenuous to work on that.

It is strenuous. That's what makes it work -- in both readings of that sentence. If someone is unaccustomed to doing the work, it can look like nothing but a burden, or a wall of Ugh.

A few examples.

One of my colleagues served as head of department for a few years, and in that capacity he would have to see students who were failing in their studies and give them a talking to. He developed a routine for this. He would see them in batches of a dozen at a time, and he would ask them, "How many hours of studying did you do last week?" Already to say "hours", plural, was optimistic. Some of them weren't doing anything at all but turning up for lectures, and some not even that. So then he would ask if any of them did something like playing in a band that got gigs, or in a competitive football team. In a group of that size there would usually be one or two, and he would ask how much practice they put in. And the answer would be something like, "we've a training session on Tuesdays, and a practice game on Thursdays, and then league games on the weekends--" they were, in other words, doing the work on these things, because they were serious. And that, he would tell them, is what they needed to be doing in their studies.

I've had an amateur interest in artificial languages for a long time, and then a few years ago I was invited to write the article on artificial languages for a linguistics encyclopedia. And there were all these things that I sort of generally knew about, but now I had to seriously read up on and think about and get critiqued by contacts in the conlang community, in order to write a professionally informed exposition in an academic book. So, after getting over my initial reaction of "What? Who? Me?" I started on the work.

My brother is a professional classical musician, as was my father, and they've both said that the biggest difference between amateur musicians and professionals is not that one does it for love and the other money, but the seriousness that the professional brings to it that most amateurs don't (with rare and wonderful exceptions). Of course, the professional must have a certain level of seriousness, because it's the food on his plate and the roof over his head, but to be an outstanding musician takes even more than that, or he's just "digging his daily trench of Mozart" (as James Galway once put it in an interview), or doing the job instead of the work (Seth Godin).

Another concept in the area of being serious about something is being a geek about it (as long as it's not just intensely focussed work on trivia).

Or cargo cult planes versus the real thing.

You might want to include the Second Boer War, the Philippine-American War, and the 1991 uprisings in Iraq in your study of asymmetrical warfare. All three are modern-day examples of insurgencies that were successfully and dramatically defeated by a conventional army.

Asymmetrical warfare is a lot harder when your enemy is willing to "make a wasteland and call it peace". Guerrillas can't hide among civilians if all the civilians are dead, enslaved, or in internment camps.

I wouldn't have thought to use that analogy, but I'm all too familiar with Ugh Fields. What's a shift in context for the same task? You re-weight the value of success and failure. When the activity was for fun, there was no real way to fail! Even naming the value of success can be hazardous - sometimes a person focusing on the "prize" of success will notice the other positive aspects of the activity less.

Personally, I've often found myself focusing on the prize most associated with the greatest potential losses. I went so far at the end of college as to identify success as the negative of failing. Perhaps it's something that happens when you fail a lot in sequence, and don't have time to re-evaluate goals. Making a desperate effort is not the best way for every person to be motivated. You build up negative affect for the activity or topic, if you don't get a good reward fast enough. Easier to think about the things that matter less - no loss, no stress.

If this rings true, then I hope you find an optimal strategy for dealing with it! I mentioned narrowing down the prize. When it's "work", I often find that I stop thinking about means as ends - the finish line is stuck in my mind, and the beautiful mountain trail is defined only by how inconvenient or hard it is. This might sound crazy, but I'd recommend making a solid plan that's much more ambitious than you need for your end goal, and then think about the end goal less often than you would normally.

In the one case you're constraining yourself to look at info that's useful to the task at hand, in the other not. It stands to reason that when you have more freedom to look at whatever is appealing at the time and skip over what would otherwise be necessary difficult steps, you'll have an easier and more fun time of it. But you pay for that by not having a systematic analysis.

Hi,

My name is Prakash, I post as blogospheroid, and I am a useless information addict.

On a more serious note, I face huge ugh fields when I try to systematically set aside some time to marshall my thoughts into a letter to the editor or a blog post. I never even went ahead and created my own blog.

But Tsuyoku Naritai. I want to get better here and am slowly applying anti-akrasia techniques and am starting a course of meditation.

I suffer from this ailment, I don't have much physical "stuff" (well I do have a fairly decent number of books, but they don't take a lot of space). I do have a large collection of very useful, but not-yet-studied/read electronic material. Mostly I find it a clever form of work avoidance. I go out and find something shiny and new rather than focus on what I need/feel obligated to work on.

Any progress or changes to report, lionhearted, over the 6 months since you posted this?

I agree with caveats. I mean I just looked up what the hell is a 'g6' - it turns out it's a twin-engine airplane manufactured by Gulf Stream. (They will finish production in 2012 - it's said. Price tag is $58M.)

Now I surely for hell didn't need to know that but I couldn't help myself... like a g6... so fly like a g6...

My caveat is that it may be good to accumulate seemingly useless information. You can't after all predict when it'll be handy.