This www.radiolab.org/2010/aug/09/transcript/ is a fascinating hour long podcast all about language and words. They show how thought and language _are_ linked. For example, imagine a rectangular room with entirely white walls and an item placed in one corner. Your chances are 50-50 of finding it.
Then colour one of the side walls blue. You can then use that as a reference to always choose the correct corner to go to. However, if your language goes to "the white wall" or "the blue wall" you can't do it. Not until you can say/think "left of the blue wall" can you do it.
Anyway, podcast explains it far better than I can, well worth a listen. (Radiolab in general is excellent)
[9]This is a good plan for life in general. If you have two choices, choose the harder. If you're trying to decide whether to go out running or sit home and watch TV, go running. Probably the reason this trick works so well is that when you have two choices and one is harder, the only reason you're even considering the other is laziness. You know in the back of your mind what's the right thing to do, and this trick merely forces you to acknowledge it.
Fantastic pull quote. I'm reading this on my iPhone and felt too lazy to bring up this page on my phone to copy/paste the text to send to a friend, so I just voice dictated it. (Which I guess is a reminder that there's also the possibility that sometimes the harder choice is also simply the less efficient.)
To add some value to this anecdote, I'll share that I've been using voice dictation more often, both for convenience (as here) and also as a tool to help improve my diction. I tend to swallow my words and speak unclearly, so by having a computer check me I'm slowly learning to enunciate a little better and specifically figuring out which areas I need the most work. I am not speaking to the phone robotically, the only change from my conversational tone is the speaking of punctuation. (As for the pain of to/too/two and similar homonyms, the iPhone helpfully underlines these in blue and makes it a snap to tap and pick the correct version, a trick it took me a while to learn so I thought I should share.)
I think the key is in not seeing "being wrong" as a "failure"
"I've failed" != "I'm a failure"
No one gets everything right all of the time. Accepting that and seeing hard problems as a challenge to overcome rather than a potential failure waiting to happen is, in my opinion, the way forward.
It's not so much that you see yourself as a failure, in my experience--it's more that, without frequent successes (however tiny) to push you forward, you run out of steam--that is, dopamine--and find it hard to want to try the next thing. It's the opposite of getting addicted to something: with no bells and dings and coins falling out, you become apathetic.
Try amphetamines to plow through the occasional grinding. A colleague of mine the other day (half?) joked that Sillion Valley runs on caffeine, amphetamines (Adderal, Ritalin, Vyvanse, etc) and cocaine. I think the same statement applies to Academia (at least the first two substances, not sure about the last one..).
"His colleague Alfréd Rényi said, "a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems", and Erdős drank copious quantities. (This quotation is often attributed incorrectly to Erdős himself. The German original, "Ein Mathematiker ist eine Maschine, die Kaffee in Sätze verwandelt"[11] of the sentence is a wordplay on the double meaning of "Satz": "theorem" or "residue of coffee", lost in the English translation)[12]
After 1971 he also took amphetamines, despite the concern of his friends, one of whom (Ron Graham) bet him $500 that he could not stop taking the drug for a month.[13] Erdős won the bet, but complained that during his abstinence mathematics had been set back by a month: "Before, when I looked at a piece of blank paper my mind was filled with ideas. Now all I see is a blank piece of paper." After he won the bet, he promptly resumed his amphetamine use."
As they say in The Men Who Stare at Goats, "Amphetamines- Not to be abused, but very fucking handy."
EDIT / Disclaimer: If you (the reader) decide to try this, do your own, thorough research. It IS risky and it can end very badly for some people. You've been warned.
Focus XT has been nice for me (like a steady pot of coffee (which is inefficient with tolerance building) at a steady rate without any jittery crashes.
Dgrove, quick heads up: you're hellbanned, and most people can't see your posts. Your recent comments have been positive, so I'm letting you know. Try e-mailing PG about it.
Then colour one of the side walls blue. You can then use that as a reference to always choose the correct corner to go to. However, if your language goes to "the white wall" or "the blue wall" you can't do it. Not until you can say/think "left of the blue wall" can you do it.
Anyway, podcast explains it far better than I can, well worth a listen. (Radiolab in general is excellent)