Digests of Aaron Swartz's posts

Lean into the Pain

In this post, Aaron argues that pain is a must needed process of growth, and frequently small pains are more helpful than painful.

Indeed, we come to see the pain as a sort of pleasure — it feels good to really push yourself, to fight through the pain and make yourself stronger.
The problem is that the topics that are most painful also tend to be the topics that are most important for us: they’re the projects we most want to do, the relationships we care most about, the decisions that have the biggest consequences for our future, the most dangerous risks that we run.

Pains exist in both physically and mentally. Naturally, they are indicators of limits.

Nature gave us pain as a messaging device to tell us that we are approaching, or that we have exceeded, our limits in some way.

Having an open attitude to pains is helpful.

Yes it’s painful, but the trick is to make that mental shift. To realize that the pain isn’t something awful to be postponed and avoided, but a signal that you’re getting stronger — something to savor and enjoy.
If instead of thinking of it as a scary subject to avoid, I think of it as an exciting opportunity to get better, then it’s no longer a cost-benefit tradeoff at all: both sides are a benefit — I get the benefits of being good at selling and the fun of getting better at something.
The trick is: when you start feeling that psychological pain coming on, don’t draw back from it and cower — lean into it. Lean into the pain.
Next time you start feeling that feeling, that sense of pain from deep in your head that tells you to avoid a subject ignore it. Lean into the pain instead. You’ll be glad you did.

Confront Reality

Aaron argues that picking a really hard goal regardless of the reality is useless as picking a really easy goal.

But being great isn’t as easy as just picking a hard goal — in fact, picking a really hard goal avoids reality almost as much as picking a really easy one.

However, setting a number of small goals is a better choice.

The trick is to set yourself lots of small challenges along the way.
Instead of pushing all your tests for success way off to the indefinite future, see if you can pass a very small one right now.

The most important thing is to execute right away.

Go out and test yourself today: pick a task just hard enough that you might fail, and try to succeed at it.

Believe You Can Change

Aaron explained two types of mindsets in this post: growth mindset and fixed mindset. People with growth mindset love challenges, and can adapt to them.

The successful kids didn’t just live with failure, they loved it!
The successful kids believed precisely the opposite: that everything came through effort and that the world was full of interesting challenges that could help you learn and grow. (Dweck called this the “growth mindset.”)

By pointing out the mistakes or asking for helps, people can grow from there.

But what I usually do is raise my hand, because if I’m wrong, then my mistake will be corrected. Or I will raise my hand and say… ‘I don’t get this. Can you help me?’ Just by doing that I’m increasing my intelligence.”
growth-mindset people feel smart when they struggle with something for a long time and then finally figure it out.
Growthers are afraid of not trying.

Changing the attitude to a growth mindset is very important.

The first step to getting better is believing you can get better.

Cherish Mistakes

In this post, Aaron indicated that mistake are our friends, as

Mistakes are our friend. They can be an exasperating friend sometimes, the kind whose antics embarrass and annoy, but their heart is in the right place: they want to help. It’s a bad idea to ignore our friends.
They’re actually giving us a gift, because they’re pointing the way toward getting better.

When we made mistakes, we need change our attitude to the mistakes, so we would view them from a very different perspective.

The trick is to confront the mistake, fess up to what went wrong, and think about what you can change to keep it from happening again. Usually just promising not to do it again is not enough: you need to dig into the root causes and address those.

Also, we need dig the root cause of the mistakes in order to fix the problems fundamentaly:

Only by digging all the way to the root cause did we realize we needed to move the box of belts. The mistake pointed the way to the solution.

And we should be honest to ourselves:

but even if they’re right that you shouldn’t tell the world about your mistakes, you need to at least tell yourself.

Fix the machine, not the person

Arron pointed out the problems are not the people, but we always missed this point. This kind of problem is defined as ‘fundamental attribution error’.

It wasn’t the workers who were the problem; it was the system.
The mistake is so common that in 1977 Lee Ross decided to name it the “fundamental attribution error”: we attribute people’s behavior to their personality, not their situation.

Yet the problems exist, and we need think out of box to fix the system, not the people:

True, sometimes you have the wrong gears and need to replace them, but more often you’re just using them in the wrong way. When there’s a problem, you shouldn’t get angry with the gears — you should fix the machine.
No, you can’t force other people to change. You can, however, change just about everything else. And usually, that’s enough.

Even if the system has only one person – yourself. Ask help if needed.