How to Get Persuaded
(This is a rough application of my theory to one pressing problem. The general theory will follow in later essays.)
Moving the Goal Posts
Observation: People in grad school seem to respect PhD more than MS (roughly speaking).
Observation: They also seem to respect people with assistantships more than people without.
Observation: Also, an RAship (research assistantship) more than a TAship (teaching assistantship).
Observation: Further, an MS with thesis more than an MS without thesis.
Observation: Somebody who has published a paper more than somebody who hasn’t.
Observation: Somebody who has a high GPA more than somebody who has a low GPA.
Observation: Somebody who has got a prestigious internship more than somebody who doesn’t.
Observation: Somebody who has got a good job offer more than somebody who doesn’t.
Observation: Practically everyone here who has spoken to me for more than two minutes has asked me if I had an assistantship. Everybody asked me if I was an MS student or a PhD.
Observation: Practically everyone has asked me which courses I’m taking.
Observation: Nobody has asked me if I’m figuring out the answers to the questions I really care about.
Is it any wonder that I’ve been worrying about my assistantship status, internship chances, course choices, job prospects, and GPA?
Is anyone surprised that I haven’t worried much at all about the fact that I’ve not spent any time trying to answer the questions I really care about?
Observation: Nobody was asking me these questions three months ago.
Coincidentally, I wasn’t worrying about any of these things back then.
There seems to be a strong correlation between the change in milieu and the change in my goals. It could be that what made me come here also made me change my goals. Or the change in my goals made me come here. Or coming here changed my goals.
Note that I had decided to come here long before three months ago. But my goals were different back then. So, the change in goals didn’t make me come here. In fact, my goals were pretty steady right up to the point I started meeting people here (or talking to them over the internet). Also, when I was alone in my room, without talking to anybody in person or over the net, I was focused on my own agenda.
So, it’s safe to conclude that talking to people here is what made me change my goals.
Inception
How does that work? How can people change my values just by talking to me?
What’s more, I don’t want to be worrying about a GPA or an assistantship or whatever. But I still am. What gives?
For now, I’ll note only that people kept bringing up these subjects and I kept paying attention to what they were saying (like an idiot). Next, I’ll note that they turned up their noses slightly when they found out that I was an MS student not yet doing a thesis, not having an assistantship, and not having any publications. And since I was paying attention, I felt bad about that.
I also observed people respecting those who were doing a PhD (sometimes considering them to be far better thinkers) and congratulating those who scored an assistantship.
Hypothesis: By paying attention to these things and noticing the disapproval and approval, I built a rule in my head saying that “MS, not having a thesis, … => not very valuable; whereas PhD, assistantship => valuable”.
And since I didn’t want to feel like I’m worthless, I started hunting for ways to get an assistantship and a thesis and a PhD. My old goals? Who gives a damn!
Note, by the way, that nobody was expressing any disapproval about my lack of progress on my real goals (we’ll remain vague about what they are). Nor was anybody praising me for whatever progress I’d made. Nobody was even paying attention to these goals, least of all me. So, I weakened the rule that “progress on my goal X => valuable”.
Therefore, despite failing at my old goal, I didn’t feel bad about it. Conversely, despite not really wanting an assistantship or whatever, I felt bad about it.
Carrot and Stick and Memory Stick
How can I resist external persuasion and bring my own goals to the front?
Observation: Right now, I’m getting punished (by disapproval) for not having an assistantship or thesis or whatever.
Observation: I’m observing others get rewarded (by approval and praise) for having an assistantship and so on.
Observation: When it comes to progress on my real goals, I’m not getting rewarded or punished at all.
So, it’s to avoid the punishment and to get the reward that I’m trying to get an assistantship and thesis and PhD and good grades and so on. Conversely, since there’s no reward for making progress on my goals and no punishment for failing, I have no incentive to spend time there.
However, it’s not just current rewards or punishments that matter. If I’ve been praised a lot for losing weight in the recent past, then I will get a surge of expected rewards - desire - when I think about going to the gym or doing cardio, because my memory of those rewards is strong. But if it’s been a while since I’ve been near the gym and I can’t remember the last time I heard anybody mention my physique or even saw anybody else get rewards for a fit body, then my mind won’t conjure any desire for a gym session.
So, my value for something is decided by the present rewards and my memory of rewards in the near past. Similarly, my fear of something is decided by punishments in the present or in the near past. There’s a reason I shy away from public-speaking - zero rewards and tons of past punishment in the form of embarrassment.
Corollary: If desire is caused by my memory of rewards, then a lack of rewards for a while should fade my memory and thus my desire. Ditto for fear.
That’s why it’s easy to get out of the fitness spirit when you have a small “injury” or when you take some time away from the gym. Getting your ass to the gym and doing an hour of (what now seems like) tedious and painstaking cardio seems inconceivable. You have no positive feelings about lifting to refer to. Those come after you actually go there and feel the pump.
So, to resist the values of the people around me and get back on my desired path, I need to reward myself for making progress on my goals and remove any punishments in the form of self-criticism and perfectionism. That way I can push past my initial resistance and pick up the rewards that naturally come up on my path and keep myself going for long after. On the other end, I need to avoid any rewards or punishments for things like assistantships or grades so that I feel less of a pull and weaken my future desire for them.
Attention
Question: Why did I start to feel these “rewards” and “punishments” for assistantships, etc. after coming here? There were always people who praised and respected those things. What changed?
Observation: I started paying attention to those people.
More specifically, I started talking to them. And, boy, does that sound innocent. What harm can a simple conversation do?
Well, it can turn your attention to the subject that the speaker is talking about. And it can make you feel the praise he is offering it or the ridicule he is heaping on it.
You don’t have to experience rewards or punishments by yourself. Just observing somebody else get them can stir desire or fear. I didn’t have to sit through a particular course at my university to realize that the professor was boring. I heard enough scare stories from friends to avoid that professor right away. And most scientists in the world haven’t got a Nobel prize. But you bet it still drives a lot of them.
Leonard: You ok?
Sheldon: Leonard, I am on a lifelong trajectory that includes a Nobel prize and cities named after me. All four wisdom teeth fit comfortably in my mouth without need of extraction, and my bowel movements run like a German train schedule. Am I OK?
– S05E10, The Big Bang Theory
Rewards and punishments don’t just pop up out of nowhere. They come up because the conversation touches on specific details. The barber at my nearby salon made me paranoid for about an hour by pointing out Everything Wrong With My Face in 60 Seconds or Less. Blackheads, whiteheads, dark circles, white patches, dry skin, oily skin - you name it, I had it! Why do you think he did that? I don’t really know. Two minutes later, though, he offered me a Rs 1200 facial package that would instantly get rid of all of the above. I’m sure that was a coincidence. At one point, he pinched hard on the area to the side of my nose and asked me to peer into this mirror he’d pushed into my face. Holy crap! There were white flakes that had squeezed out of there. “See?” he said, triumphantly. “Your face is completely and irreparably damaged. (Unless of course you take this Rs 1200 package, in which case your face will be back to its pristine condition within one hour.)”
That’s what you can do with a simple five-minute conversation. (Did I finally take the facial package? … I don’t want to talk about it.)
I’m not the kind of guy who obsesses over his face (at least I wasn’t before that conversation). And yet it kind of shook me. By the end of that barrage, I was left feeling like a low-life loser whose only hope of salvation lay in that Rs 1200 package. This despite having a decent academic plan for the next two years and a solid line of attack on my chosen problems and enough money in the bank to cover my needs. In that moment, I was nothing more than a pimply-faced, dark-circled, oily-skinned loser whose nose area would always secrete weird white stuff which I’d never seen before in my life and which would surely be noticed by every girl I ever met (even though it only came out after the guy had squeezed till my eyes watered). That kind of image sticks.
Moral of the story: Be careful what you talk about. You could get emotionally scarred for life.
So, just listening to people casually discussing assistantships and internships and grades over a week or so ingrained the rewards and punishments of a grad student into my mind. Nobody came over with a flashing sign or captivating marketing pitches. That’s how subtle it can be. A few conversations here and there with senior students, a couple of hints dropped by the grad student coordinator, and a handful of chats with some other new students. That’s all it took to make me work hard towards an assistantship. It didn’t matter that they needed it badly and I didn’t or that I had my own agenda to pursue. Whether I liked it or not, I ended up absorbing their values.
Insulation
There’s a reason why people from one field don’t usually talk to people from other fields. A PhD student slaving away in his lab all day long might hear undergrads bragging about all the parties and girls and booze they’re enjoying, and come to the conclusion that there’s an easier way to find happiness in life than to work for six months to publish six pages in some thick-ass journal that nobody may read. That’s probably not a comparison he wants to encourage in his mind, especially when he’s stuck at night debugging bullshit code that somebody wrote years ago and is minutes away from giving up. His research is ultimately worth way more than any temporary fun he might or might not have at parties - that’s why he took up a PhD. And to keep that light alive in the face of tempting alternative life choices, he has to forbid the aforementioned alternative life choices. Hence you find that most PhD students describe undergrads as snotty little entitled brats and rarely deign to engage them in conversation.
This is why each field creates a physical space for themselves. New York City is for finance and art, Silicon Valley for startups, Cambridge for intellectual stuff. Paul Graham as usual sums it up beautifully:
Because ambitions are to some extent incompatible and admiration is a zero-sum game, each city tends to focus on one type of ambition. The reason Cambridge is the intellectual capital is not just that there’s a concentration of smart people there, but that there’s nothing else people there care about more. Professors in New York and the Bay area are second class citizens - till they start hedge funds or startups respectively.
– Paul Graham, Cities and Ambition
Lesson: Separate yourself from people who talk about stuff other than your desired goals.
Or else they might start praising parties or ridiculing your blackheads. And we all know where that ends. (Yes, I bought the package.)
PS: What if you have to talk to somebody? You can’t avoid people forever. And if your goal is rare, then the goals of practically everyone you talk to will be different. How can you still preserve your identity?
Coming soon.
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