More ways to spot abysses

post by KatjaGrace · 2022-12-30T06:30:06.301Z · LW · GW · 1 comments

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I liked Ben Kuhn’s ‘Staring into the abyss as a core life skill’.

I’d summarize as:

1. If you are making a major error—professionally, romantically, religiously, etc—it can be hard to look at that fact and correct.
2. However it’s super important. Evidence: successful people do this well.

This seems pretty plausible to me.

(He has a lot of concrete examples, which are probably pretty helpful for internalizing this.)

His suggestions for how to do better helped me a bit, but not that much, so I made up my own additional prompts for finding abysses I should consider staring into, which worked relatively well for me:

1. If you were currently making a big mistake, what would it be?
2. What are some things that would be hard to acknowledge, if they were true?
3. Looking back on this time from five years hence, what do you think you’ll wish you changed earlier?
4. If you were forced to quit something, what do you want it to be?
5. (Variant on 1:) If you were currently making a big mistake that would be gut-wrenching to learn was a mistake, what would it be?

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