> In sports psychology, as far as I can tell, you want to have positive
expectations to get motivated. But you still have to do the work.
fascinatingly - and this is a major off-topic distraction i know - a trick
taught by physiotherapists that train olympic athletes is to IMAGINE that
they are doing the whatever-sport-it-is-that-they-do, whilst relaxing at
night in bed. it turns out that merely IMAGINING doing the action - as long
as you *have* actually done it - can trigger tiny muscular twitches that
cause your muscles to gain around 70% of the benefits (increased muscle mass,
maintaining "tone") as if you were *actually doing the real exercise*.
so, as a tennis player, i tried this one day, lying in bed, half-asleep -
luckily there was nobody in the bed next to me - because i tried "imagining"
a huge forehand stroke, my arm jumped up involuntarily and smacked the wall
:)
but going back to the original study, imagine that you are the "gatekeeper"
on the brownian-motion "thought experiment", the one where you have to open
the gate at the time that the "atoms" are coming towards it. what if you
didn't *believe* that the pressure would be reduced by opening the gate, such
that when an atom came towards the gate, you *didn't take the opportunity and
didn't bother opening the gate*?
this is about the simplest most blindingly-obvious way to illustrate that our
belief affects the outcome, even when presented with "random chance aka
opportunity".
in treating every conversation on reddit - some times i am tired and don't do
it - but in treating every conversation on reddit as an "opportunity" i have
actually influenced individuals who would otherwise simply not have known the
difference, and would not have pledged on the campaign. the fact that i
answered their questions (promptly) has made all the difference. it's a
frickin lot of work but i have time, so why not.
