Cipolla's Shortform

Okay, so I would say that I atleast have some experience of going from being not that agentic to being more agentic and the stuff that I think worked the best for me was to generally think of my life as a system. This has been the focus of my life over the last 3 years.

More specifically the process that has helped so far for me has been to:

1. Throw myself into high octane projects and see what I needed to keep up.
   1. Burn out and realise, holy shit, how do these people do it?
      1. (Environment is honestly really important, I've tried out a bunch of different working conditions and your motivation levels can wary drastically.)
2. Started looking into the reasons for why this might be that I can't do it and other can.
   1. Went into absolutely optimising the shit out of my health by tracking stuff using bearable and listening to audiobooks and podcasts, Huberman is a house god of mine.
      1. (Sleep is the most important here, crazy right?)
      2. Supplement and technique tips for sleep:
         1. Glycine, Ashwagandha, Magnesium Citrate
         2. Use a sad lamp within 30 minutes of waking
         3. Yoga Nidras for naps and for falling asleep faster.
      3. Also checkout my biohackers in-depth guide on this at https://desmolysium.com/
         1. He's got a phd in medicine and is quite the experimental and smart person. (He tries a bunch of shit on himself and sees how it goes.)
   2. Started going into my psychological background and talked to CBT therapists as well as meditating a lot.
      1. I'm like 1.5k hours into this at this point and it has completely changed my life and my view of myself and what productivity means, e.t.c.
      2. It has helped me realise that a lot of the behaviours that made me less productive where based on me being a sensitive person and having developed unhealthy coping mechanisms.
      3. This lead to me having to relive through past traumas whilst having compassion and acceptance for myself.
      4. This has now lead me to having good mechanisms instead of bad ones, It made me remove my access to video games and youtube (willingly!)
      5. For me this has been the most important, Waking up and The Mind Illuminated up until stage 6-7 is the recommendation I have for anyone who wants to start. Also, after 3-6 months of TMI, try to go to a 10 day retreat, especially if you can find a metta retreat. (Think of this as caring and acceptance instead of loving-kindness btw, it helps)
   3. Now I generally, have a strict schedule in terms of when I can do different things during the day.
      1. The app appblock can allow you to block apps and device settings which means you can't actually deblock them on your phone.
      2. Cold turkey on the computer can do the same and if you find a patch through another app you can just patch that by blocking the new app.
      3. I'm just not allowed to be distracted from the systems that I have.
   4. Confidence:
      1. I feel confident in myself and what I want to do in the world not because I don't have issues but rather because I know where my issues are and how to counteract them.
      2. The belief is in the process rather than the outcomes. Life is poker, you just gotta optimise the way you play your hands, the EV will come. 

Think of yourself as a system and optimise the shit out of it. Weirdly enough, this has made me focus a lot more on self-care than I did before. 

Of course, it's a work in progress but I want to say that it is possible and that you can do it. 

Also, randomly, here's a CIV VI analogy for you on why self-care is op. 

If you want to be great at CIV, one of the main things to do is to increase your production and economics as fast as possible. This leads to an exponential curve where the more production and economy you have the more you can produce. This is why CIV pros in general rush Commercial Hubs and markets as internal trade routes yield more production. 

Your production is based on your psychological well being and the general energy levels that you have. If you do a bunch of tests on this and figure out what works for you, then you have even more production stats. This leads to more and more of that over time until you plateau at the end of that logistic growth. 

Best of luck!

Long term performance is a result of many skills / memes working together. I suspect you may have noticed that the children of white collar workers are more prepared for white collar work. It would make sense that they have inherited a set of memes that help with white collar work.

Academic performance isn't the only thing, consider your fail conditions. There's lots of things out there to be good at.

If you'd still like to keep going, I would say just keep practicing, I reckon it's taken me about four years to get good at my job. Look at what works and what doesn't for you.

I found that tracking my time helped with focusing on one thing at a time, having a prioritized to do list helped me focus on the right thing, having a study group helped make learning fun, easy and consistent. Trying to fit all the knowledge I needed for a class on a single a4 sheet helped me memorize what I needed (something about the refining process).

Otherwise get good sleep, lay off the substances, get some exercise in the sun and time with friends and family and you will be right as rain.

Is this selection bias? I have had people who are overconfident and get nowhere.

I don't think it's independent from smartness, a smart+conscientious person is likely to do better.

I’m not quite sure how to answer your question, but at least I have similar feelings: that my conscientiousness is relatively low ; and that many people who do cooler stuff than me appear to be more driven, with clearer goals and a better ability to actually go and pursue them. I have various thoughts on this:

• To an extent, it’s just an impression. Many people will struggle to do more than a fraction of what they wanted, and yet because they still do quite a lot and remain very upbeat, you don’t notice than they achieve relatively little compared to what they want, but they certainly notice that. Similarly, many people are working on cool projects and apparently having tons of fun doing it, but if you asked you’d learn that they have no clue  about "what they want to do with their lives" or similar super long-term goals.
• In fact, I suspect that most people feel at least a little like that at least sometimes, and that we grossly underestimate how likely others are to feel that way.
• Yet, some people genuinely are better able to get stuff done and stay relentlessly focused on tasks than others. It can be built from habit, it can come from being really really into the one specific thing you’re working on, etc. If you struggle with that anyway, it might be something to do with mental health: famously ADHD, but also autism, or depression/anxiety can impact conscientiousness, and all these seem somewhat more common among LW readers than in the general population, so I dunno, maybe?
• And some people are also better than others at being optimistic, enthusiastic, eager to do cool stuff. I guess there are many causes, and therefore many potential ways of dealing with it, but I personally like the explanation from low self-confidence, fear of failure, etc., making you less willing to try ambitious stuff (notice how you said "it’s like they’re already taking their success for certain", when, yeah that might be the case, but it might also be that they’re aware they can fail, but they think it’s likely they could easily recover from that failure anyway). It’s quite well described (imho) here.
• But I’m pretty sure I’m covering only a relatively narrow part of the space of all the things that could be said on that topic, so I hope other people write other replies with completely different takes on the problem :-)

Could you maybe elaborate on "long term academic performance"?