It would be interesting to hear grandparent’s perspective. We learn from the experience of others. Otherwise, schools, best practices, or forums like HN would be completely useless.

For me personally, I read a blog post about motivation — and a quite silly one at that. I was young and struggled a lot with ADHD and motivation in general. I had a hard time in school because I just physically couldn’t work on an assignment. I’d set it down in front of me and stare at it, unable to start. I had kinda decided that I wasn’t good at those sorts of things, which made it harder.

But I found this random post online one day which has some ideas about trying to do small annoying things for no reason, to train your brain to be better at doing hard things.

The blog gave an example: go on a walk, but go out of your way to take on a pointless task. Like at the beginning, set out to touch 50 flowers. Then go on your walk touching flowers. When you get to the end, you’ve gotten practice doing something that you didn’t want to and which was a bit annoying. But now you’ll have a bit more confidence to do something else in the future.

I got in a habit of taking on these pointless goals a lot for a few weeks. Eventually I was sitting down and looking at my homework, thinking “I spent two hours touching flowers for no reason, I can spend a few minutes doing this” and would make some progress.

Looking back it seems ridiculous, but it was the advice I needed at the time, and it actually helped me make some changes in life. That whole process made me get into a habit of thinking about the end goal & how small little steps can help you do big things. And actually practicing and seeing that, took me out of the headspace of “I can never do that” to “maybe I can”.

And more interesting, I wrote about this on a forum back then, and more than a month after writing it I received a message from someone who said “hey, I just wanted to let you know that I started doing the annoying-little-task strategy after reading your post, and I feel it’s helped me a lot so thank you”

Maybe tomorrow I will touch 20 flowers on my daily walk. (50 seems like too much.)

Thanks for the idea.

I don't know if this is really similar, but maybe it's a bit related. One of my friends and I decided to write 100 words a day for 30 days. Two other friends ended up joining our little project. I kept it up for about 100 days, and it made writing much easier for me. Also, about 2 months ago, I decided to spend about 30 minutes a day writing. It is amazing how much easier writing became for me. (When I was young, I found writing to be very painful. The only C's I got in college were in English. Nowadays, I think of my self as a writer --- not a good writer, but a writer.)

Did you have a rule for choosing the topics to write about, or was that choice also part of the writing process?

A very basic one would be the realization that everyone else is more unlike you than like you.

Once this idea sinks in, it generally promotes empathy because you stop judging others by the "golden rule" (do unto others as you would have them do unto you), and start thinking about the (perfectly sane and logical) mindset and circumstance that could lead to a particular action or idea. Once you go deep enough you start to recognize the patterns within patterns.

It allows you to take others as they are, rather than as an imperfect you.

Instances are asked for the purpose of possible generalization.

One could read the comment summarised by "what's the point?" as itself an idea that could change a life.

Towards the negative mainly but also maybe towards stopping negative behaviour or thoughts. "Why care?"

Nihilism is an idea that has changed the world.

The rest of the comment is more of a modern idea where no one is able to know anyone else, prioritising the individual over all. This is most common in identity politics today.

It's worse than nihilism and it also changes societies and people as it encourages and demands the rejection of understanding and empathy.

In that case, we should all be viewing random sentences and hope something clicks.

No, that’s not what I meant. I’m talking about reading books and lasting life changing things from them, and GP is right, I can guarantee the thing I have in mind probably won’t mean anything to you.

I wasn't implying that's what you meant, or even replying to you directly.

Koans are kind of like that, at first glance.