Programming Your Mind
You can program your mind into doing anything. First, understand this is a powerful statement. It gives a lot of agency to the individual who believes in it. There is nothing you can't do. But how to do this programming?
The key is something called dopamine deprivation. I realised this when I went to Vipasna. It is a 10-day meditation course. They take your phone. You are not supposed to talk or look anyone in the eyes. You only eat the food at the ashram. No food after 5. Sleep at 10 pm. Wake up at 4 am. Meditate all day.
I remember being giddy with joy over my first phone call after the experience. How miraculous is this technology that i can talk over such long distances! The phone call was the same. Just my baseline expectations (ie: dopamine levels) changed. For many of us, the brain is used to different and higher levels of stimulation. So it resists the seemingly boring task you want it to do.
Let's take an example. I hate going through ill-maintained, horribly documented codebases. If I have to work with them I need a lot of patience to find the right things. A tedious task. For a personal project, I had to do this. So what did I do?
First, I told myself that this was just a skill issue. That I will just program myself to like doing it. Frankly, just this belief gets you halfway there and makes it tolerable.
The next step is learning to enjoy it. Saying things like " I am a cracked engineer, not some soyboy who needs things written out", "documentation is for pussies" and whatnot. Also just going over such codebases again and again changes the baseline expectations of your brain.
I did this for a project over 4 months and the next codebase I looked at was well documented and everything worked. Every moment of it I was screaming with joy and could not believe the wonder of humanity that is a well-documented codebase.
If you don't like something you can programme yourself into doing it. Just knowing it can be done is powerful. Adjust your baseline. Takes some willpower to get started. Keep doing it. Get used to it. The right belief and the right self-talk take you a long way.