The Pinky Promise: Stick To Your Goals - Or Lose Some Blood

The Pinky Promise: Stick To Your Goals - Or Lose Some Blood

This seemingly innocuous children’s pact has a dark past: It’s said to have been used by the Japanese mafia, who would cut off the pinky finger of the person who broke their word.?

What are the odds that someone breaks that sort of pinky pact? I’m betting pretty low.?

Now imagine if you made such a strong commitment in your own life.

At its heart, the "Pinky Promise" reveals a precarious balancing act in our internal lives.

?It reveals how we can overcome the struggle between two constantly conflicting internal forces: the desire to avoid discomfort, and the desire to achieve our longer term goals.

?The Pleasures of Pain and the Pains of Pleasure

Behavioral Scientist recently published an article that gets to the heart of the above dichotomy.

We want to avoid pain, but seemingly paradoxically, sometimes pain can actually be the key to future pleasure:

"...the main idea is familiar: everyone knows that food never tastes so good as when you are hungry, lying on the sofa is blissful after a long run, and life itself is wonderful when you’re leaving the dentist’s office."

?Understanding the way "our minds seek balance, or homeostasis" in this way seems to be central to balancing our long term ambitions with short-term discomforts. The Pinky Promise is one tool at our disposal to help shift the balance of this struggle in favour of our longer-term aspirations.

But the same concept also applies to improving our productivity more generally. Another seeming paradox is that we require periods of daydreaming to balance out constant focus.

While the near-constant stimulation provided by technology is easy to blame for lacking attention spans, the author agrees with my common assertion that "..The issue is not the existence of this technology; rather, it’s how we’re using it".

As the author touches on, the key to improving our relationship to technology seems to come from better understanding what drives us to distraction in the first place. In both these cases, our own internal conflicts probably serve as more of a root cause for misuse than any external incentives.??

Turn Off Before Turning On

The above pattern doesn't just affect our productivity. It seems to also carry out on a finer level in our mental lives.

?For example, failing to balance our sources of personal validation between internal and external sources can also lead to overthinking and rumination that doesn't serve us:

"Ninety percent (of your self worth) should come from your self-acceptance and self-appreciation, and just 10 percent from that occasional sliver of external validation we all need. Overthinkers distort the formula, even reversing it by acting like 90 percent of their worth comes from what others think or say."?

Getting this balance right, as with hitting our goals and reducing distraction, again seems to come from developing an improved internal locus of control -

?While positive feedback may offer short term comforts for some, those who can develop an internal sense of self-worth ultimately free themselves from having their value determined by an external voice: "How can we get by without a steady supply of praise and support? "Learn to develop your own sense of self-worth so that you don’t depend on others to feel good about yourself,""

Happy reading!

- Nir?

PS - Thank you for making Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products and Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life into bestsellers!

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