2026-05-28
Why is my mind addicted to inventing new persuasion strategies?
Disclaimer
- personal
- target audience - strictly myself
Main
- How I am wasting time
- I wasted yesterday making a virtual art gallery. Also wasted time thinking about getting a Taiwanese visa.
- I seem to be wasting today thinking about how to run paid ads on insta of popular students in various campuses, or about organising a (peaceful) protest or banner outside these campuses in India.
- I wrote an article to try and compare "open rates" of billboard ads versus cold emails versus social media ads versus so on. I realised billboard ads are too expensive for example. I wrote an article on how to build email spamming infrastructure.
- To be clear, this is time waste.
- What is the point in generating so many hypotheses and ideas if I am not actually going to test them against reality?
- Not just that, if I want to work full-time on persuasion and I need to test hypothesis, I need to consistently do this multiple times, not just once.
- My earlier reason for not working on persuasion still holds. I hate talking to most people, therefore I will not be able to consistently test hypotheses against reality and iterate with time.
- I even have notes saying things like "write less code"
- If I know this is a time waste, why am I still doing it?
- I don't know man, some things just push my mind into overdrive.
- It is like, imagine your mind is a car and you are the driver. If you see a car overtaking from the left, you almost automatically start pressing the brake (because you know other guy doesn't follow rules). Or if you see green light you automatically start switching to first gear then second. There are like triggers and then conditioned responses.
- I think I have become conditioned to keep writing blogposts and this is bad actually.
- It's like, imagine I have conditioned myself such that whenever I see an empty road I just ram the accelerator fully, to the point where this is not actually good for the car engine or for driving safely.
- How do I solve this?
- Maybe I need to increase friction towards writing blogposts?
- Like, I have locked myself out of various accounts (insta, LW, etc) and increased friction, and this helps actually.
- Maybe I need to do this too, but with some sections of my website (not the full website).
- That is annoying. I know I can lock myself out of my website completely, but locking myself out of some sections not others seems a lot more complicated.
- Conclusion
- For now I will just try to more mindful and write less posts.
- If nothing else works, lock myself out of my website completely for a week or two.
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