Unfortunately, I am not going to share a full essay this week. Normally, I was planning to write about the three questions psychotherapy stole from medicine (and how we can use them in our lives), but my graduation is due in a couple of weeks, and I have some hard work waiting for me.
Anyway, the essay on my mind for this week was about the difference between efficacy (does what I am doing work in optimal conditions?), effectiveness (does what I am doing work in suboptimal conditions?), and efficiency (how efficiently do my methods work to accomplish something?). I managed to write this in Turkish but didn’t have the time to adapt it to English. For my Turkish readers, I strongly suggest you take a look at Psikoterapinin Tıptan Çaldığı Üç Soru. For this blog, I’m aiming to pick up where I left off on May 25th and write about this topic.
Instead of full essays, for this week (and probably next week), I want to share two (related) quotes or bits of information that I find interesting from the books or newsletters that I’ve been reading lately.
1- Never Casually Discuss Important Matters
This is from one of the most important names in Stoic history: Epictetus. Two weeks ago, I shared three of his quotes about freedom and happiness, but this one is more related to why you can’t keep secrets. Although I talked about secrets in that post, the same mechanisms can also explain why we sometimes overshare important things in social settings. Here is what Epictetus think about this topic:
Take care not to casually discuss matters that are of great importance to you with people who are not important to you. Your affairs will become drained of preciousness. You undercut your own purposes when you do this. This is especially dangerous when you are in the early stages of an undertaking. Other people feast like vultures on our ideas. They take it upon themselves to blithely interpret, judge, and twist what matters most to you, and your heart sinks. Let your ideas and plans incubate before you parade them in front of the naysayers and trivializers. Most people only know how to respond to an idea by pouncing on its shortfalls rather than identifying its potential merits. Practice self-containment so that your enthusiasm won’t be frittered away.
2- Your Brain Can’t Separate Between Talking & Doing
Although Epictetus was a little grumpy when he talked about people pessimistically, he had a point. Especially when he talked about how we “undercut our own purposes” when we overshare stuff. Neuroscience tends to agree with him. When we arbitrarily share our ideas or goals, we risk getting burnt out before we start doing things, primarily when the people we shareactuallysupport us!
Multiple neuroscience studies support this pre-burn-out stage after you share your goals publicly. When you share your intentions, and others acknowledge them, your later efforts become less intense compared to when you keep them private. This effect is more pronounced when you are more passionate about the subject. It’s because your goals are more related to your social identity.
The more your intentions (like building this company or doing that thing) are related to your identity, the more satisfaction you’ll get when you overshare your dreams. This is because your social identity depends on your goals, and you’ll feel that sweet dopamine hit when people you share are impressed by your aspirations. Your brain thinks this as if you have already become that person who has already succeeded. It’s basically a premature sense of having accomplished the desired identity.
In short, when you share your dreams or important aspirations, and people get impressed, you feel the rewards of being someone who has already accomplished that thing, built that company, or run that marathon. The more you feel the reward, the less likely you focus on the actual “doing” phase. The hard phase. The lonely phase, in which you quietly sit down and actually do the work. Do you want to be the person who talks or does a lot? Do you want to imitate an imaginary ideal version of yourself who did hard things or be the one who did the hard stuff?
Also, check out this short story about our ego for more on the difference between being someone and doing something.
Have a lovely week,
Bugra