Readit Newsblakewatters commented on Plus, Minus, Equals Success lsat-tutors.com/blog/plus... · Posted by u/blakewatters
Learn how the plus, minus, equals framework can be applied to hacking your way into law school
> My daughter started a practice of not buying alcohol for her home.
This has been working for me, too. For a few years in my late 20s I was doing 1-2 drinks per day on average, with a fair number of completely sober days in there as well. Never "problem" territory, but as I got into my 30s, I realized I felt way, way better on the days where I didn't have anything at all to drink the night before. So if I was ever waffling on whether to have a drink, I'd choose not to. Earlier this year I ran out of beers in the fridge and I've just not restocked it. We have some wine and stuff, which I drink with my wife when we have a nice dinner cooked, but it's probably one night a week now or even less. That feels OK to me.
Legit tactic
I listened to Annie Graces This Naked Mind and it helped me make a rational argument for why I shouldnt drink. I wanted to stop when I started the book mostly because hangovers started getting bad and I was spending too much on booze.
I told myself I was going to quit for 90 days. That turned into 6 months. Which turned into about 2 years now. At this point I dont get urges anymore. The first 90 days were the worst. The following 6 months were kinda bad. After a year it got a lot easier.
A HUGE help is having supportive people in your life. My wife still drinks but she was never a big drinker. My friends still drink but they are also really into doing things that drinking doesnt help, like sports where drinking doesnt really fly, or outdoor activities where drinking doesnt need to be involved.
I was pretty much drinking every night when I quit and it was my main social outing. The hardest part was retraining my brain to do things I liked without drinking. A big one for me was drinking while watching movies or tv. I could get drunk and watch shitty lifetime movies because when youre hammered enough those shits are fun. But without booze even great movies were boring for a while. It just takes time. It does get easier.
Check that book out. It helped a lot with building up enough arguments that I couldnt easily break them down when I wanted a drink.
The most concerning part of this post is that you could get drunk enough to watch shitty lifetime movies and describe "those shits are fun"
I've been sober for 4.5 years now - totally free from alcohol and cannabis (my first and biggest problem). I've also quit smoking.
First off, let me say that it took many tries for these abstentions to stick - that is normal, and you should remember that. Be kind to yourself. It's a skill and a habit you are building, and those things will take time. It took me years to finally gain real duration in my abstention.
Second, the fact that you are considering abstaining should be enough of a signal to you that something in you wants to stop - and this is enough to base the new behavior on. You don't need anyone's permission to stop. When I stopped I always heard about how "I wasn't enough of a drinker" to worry about it, etc. Many comments of this nature came my way. Just know that you know yourself best, and if these thoughts are arising, you should explore them.
And third, remember that if you are feeling unfulfilled in some aspect of life, substance abuse (of most types) will cloud this bad feeling, and give you an instant uplift. What happens then is up to you, but for me it led to a persistent drain on my ambitions. Thus I wasn't doing what I wanted, but at the end of the day, comfort awaited in the form of my drug of choice. This was my revelation that I eventually used as motivation.
Agreed. This is aligned with what I was throwing on another thread. Your behaviors were not aligned with your identity so one of them had to go. Sounds like you picked the one you really cared about. Kudos
The 12-pack-in-a-weekend part makes me think you’ve got a problematic relationship with alcohol. You might start with an examination of why you’d choose to do that on a particular weekend instead of something else. I spent a decade ramping up to about 5 beers a day, and it initially had a lot to do with anxiety and feeling trapped in a life that wasn’t fulfilling to me. Even after I addressed those things aggressively, the drinking remained. I failed to control it every day. Only until I could visibly see the effects it was having on my body was I able to quit. I quit because of vanity!
It is hard to offer universally good advice on this, but because I personally can’t drink moderately, maintaining an intentional and holistic relationship with myself is the way I’m able to stay off it. I try to remember that regular life as a goldmine far more rewarding than alcohol.
Last thing: self-hatred and alcoholism go hand-in-hand, so find ways to treat yourself well, whether you drank too much or not.
Good luck :)
I beg to disagree. Self-hatred is always negative and certainly does not correlate with any particular behavior. Does being hooked on doughnuts and ice-cream go hand-in-hand with self-hatred? What is so special about alcohol versus porn or sugar or Pokemon or Amazon Prime or Netflix?
I applaud your self-awareness and realization that you personally cannot drink moderately but must reject the assertion that there are such things as "regular life" and "alcoholism". Define these states of being...
... except you can't.
There is this lesson that keeps coming up in my life again and again that I believe is true, applies effortlessly to matters of substance consumption, and generalizes out to life in general: think in reverse.
What you want to do is have a clear vision of what the life you want looks like and then work backward to where you are right now, then walk that path.
When you think forward incrementally with thoughts like "I should drink less" or "Do not drink beer" you are prescribing a behavior that is detached from an identity. Who is the person you will be that behaves this way because these behaviors are aligned with who you are?
Consider the difference between eating less meat versus becoming a vegan. One is a forward looking behavior, the other is a backward looking identity. If you are a vegan, you cannot consume animal products because that is who you are and to be a vegan means that you cannot consume animal products. The behaviors and identity are intertwined in a self-reinforcing system. This is strategy versus tactics.
Veganism and other extremely well defined identities are useful for making my point but it need not be so extreme. You can create a custom identity built around a set of ideals, policies, and rules that you define. I am: "a vegan" is equally valid to "a guy who has 3 beers on Wednesday nights watching the game with his boys". Define your values, describe who you want to be, then figure out the delta from where you are at right now to where you want to be. Then do it or admit that it's not what you really want and who you intend to become.
Setbacks and fuck-ups are inherent to the human condition. They do not matter. If we are still on the path we can take two steps forward, one step back and still finish the race. Black and white thinking leads to shame and guilt, which undermines and destroys everything. Life is messy and happens in the grey. Yesterday might have gotten fucked up, tomorrow might be dope, more than likely it will be aight.
I hate to tell you this but you can swear off booze or smokes or bread or sugar or bowties or whatever now and forever but it is gonna come up again. You might get involved. That is not failure. That is life. Hating yourself is counter-productive. Notice when you get yourself off the path and course correct, keep rolling.
You cannot and should not ever expect that you can execute flawlessly and white knuckle your way through this mess we call life. Do not give up your power and agency by believing that some bullshit molecule has hegemony over you.
Be who you are. Do as you wish. Become what you want. Live the dream.
Your problem is very simple: you are working on bullshit.
Across your entire description of your situation you never once mentioned what it is you are actually working on but called out the income you hit and frameworks you are playing with. I humbly submit that your problem is that you have lost the plot.
Hate to break it to you chief but the libraries and frameworks and techniques you use to work are not the point. Creating stuff that people want to use is all that matters. Doing it with finesse and craftsmanship is how you go from good to great but if nobody gives a shit you will always feel empty.
Switching projects and doing something "harder" isn't going to fill that void.
Build something people want. I promise your drive and all the rest will follow behind once you are making them happy and get hooked on solving their problems and improving their lives.
That is what this game is all about.
There is no intrinsic value to being in a management, leadership, or even a founder role. It's really a shame that we have embraced this nonsense of uplifting and celebrating roles and titles over contributions and outcomes.
Nobody gives a shit if you are a director of engineering but they may well care very much if you solve their problem.
It's all vanity and ego run wild. The reality of business is that the only two things that actually matter are building shit and selling shit. This is how to easily differentiate between cost and profit centers and who is essential vs expendable in an organization.
You should only be driven to be a manager or director if your fundamental skillset is dealing with bullshit to enable other people to do value creating work by getting it out of their face.
If you think you are moving a bunch of JIRA tickets around you should take a hard look at what a legit engineering manager deals with. And then add in trying to resolve bullshit conflicts between grown ass men acting like children, talking people into getting involved with your high risk/low reward squad, forcing people to make a decision and start moving instead of arguing endlessly, having really uncomfortable conversations on the regular, firing people who have a mortgage and kids but have undeniably become a risk to the business even if you like hanging out with them, identifying, defining, and enforcing the processes and changes to keep everything from falling apart...
Your 25 years of experience don't necessarily have any impact on dealing with all that bullshit. You have to be fundamentally organized and passionate about driving others to succeed and absorbing damage so they don't have to in order to be a really legit manager. Unfortunately titles and position in the hierarchy has become irrationally coveted and rewarded in many organizations and people who are "senior" slide into these roles and fundamentally suck at it and create misery for their direct reports and commit unforced errors that put the entire business at risk because they don't know or really care what they are doing.
Do not envy and covet joining that squad.
The only thing that really matters is creating dope shit that people want to use and making money while you are doing it. What role you are playing in the organization isn't meaningful compared to whether or not it is winning or losing.
There are plenty of lone-wolf IC's out there pulling down ungodly amounts of money because they are just destroying it and the best way for them to create value is for everybody just to get the fuck out of the way.
Only become a manager if you can be an excellent one and crush it and don't think for a second that just because your former colleague slid into a lane when you didn't that he is succeeding and you are failing. He has a whole new problem now to make a bunch of other people successful and absord all their bullshit for himself to be successful. That's the job. You can only admire and envy him if and when he has crushed it and you are certain that you could have crushed it even harder and should have taken that shot.
And if that is where you are at start interviewing for management roles, grab one, and put the ball through the basket to prove it.
You haven't made a career mistake you are just ruminating on an insecure head trip. And fuck that, you don't need, want, or deserve to live that way.