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But I disagree with the rest of your interpretation as stated here. The cart can’t come before the horse otherwise how useful is it to sparking motivation.
I understood the insight basically in the reversed, If your goal is to run a marathon, and you can’t find the motivation to train. If you orient towards an identity that being a runner (join a run club, buy running by apparel, watch track and field, research endurance training, subscribe to floTrack, peruse old LetsRun forum posts in your free time, talk about how great a runners high is, explore new locales during vacation by going for a run, decide you need to suddenly fix your pronation with custom orthotics your other runner friends swear by it, etc. etc.) you do that deeply enough and with genuine commitment that you start to think of yourself as a runner in earnest, why not you live it in every way other than racking up mileage. Now suddenly going out for a long run or going in a run every single day, or training for a race might just feel like the normal thinks to do because you’re a running and less like the effortfully endeavor to train for a marathon. Suddenly putting on your shoes and going for a quick tempo run sounds … not dreadful. maybe, even like something you genuinely want to do by then end. and the more you do it the more that is reinforced. you actually are a runner now. no pretending. going for a run isn’t a active decision each day—it’s what runners do.
What you describe seems like the converse to me. “You want to run a marathon, instead of convincing yourself that you are into running by weaving that into your sense of self… just go out for a run, or walk, of any length until—what if I don’t want to go for a run? don’t feel motivated. not even for a walk. besides, i’m not even a runner so what good would one random run do? I’ll do something else instead Id rather be doing, anything actually. … you’re probably never going to prove to yourself anything other than “finding motivation to run is hard” and certainly you’re not training for a marathon any time soon.
My point about failure modes was, sometimes you adopt the new identity for yourself and it goes like I outlined above. great… atomic habits. But sometimes you do it and realize in becoming that identify — you actually don’t like it, it’s not who you want to be (e.g. you hated flotrack, never showed up to run club, etc.) that becomes an impasse because you realize you don’t actually value orienting yourself in the world that way. In this case it wouldn’t work to motivate you any more than sheer willpower and effortful discipline. “I don’t want to be a runner, i just want to run a marathon.” ok, then put on your trainers and prepare for a slog.
For me this manifested on the intellectual plane. At times in the past I wanted to intellectually be “into XYZ”, like mathematics, for example, or some other subject matter. I had the aptitude and certainly the capacity to focus, enough to develop genuine expertise over time. But then I found that, in truth, I did not genuinely enjoy the subject matter enough to delve so deeply. I liked the idea of being someone who had cultivated rigorous mathematical expertise, but not actually being that person in reality, so it could never be my identity naturally, it would remain maximum effort as long as that were true.
It’s strange to me how we can convince ourselves to want something we don’t actually value intrinsically. But I suspect that’s a longstanding feedback loop in evolutionary psychology.
On the converse side of the story, I posit you can also get pretty far in stagnation of actual personal growth / progress by simply convincing everyone around you deceptively of a specific identity, and have that be validating enough to preclude cultivating that identity in earnest. Another trivial example: the “smartest guy in the room” effect. If you are sufficiently smart, or surround yourself with individuals who won’t challenge you intellectually and default to being deferential, you can certainly feel pretty smart, and have that maladaptively/falsely validate your sense of identity as the smartest-in-the-room type of personality.
TL;DR: I think the “make it your identity, then effort towards action comes naturally” is a powerful model for self-motivation, but it has meaningful failure modes—notably, it’s hard to force if you’re not genuinely into it, and sociodynamic feedback loops impacting personal sense of identity can collapse or even pervert the entire approach.
But what do you mean by “LLM prompting is on average much less analyzable” ? Isn’t structured prompting (what that should optimally look like) the most objective and well defined part of the whole workflow. it’s the lowest entropy part of the situation, we know pretty well what a good LLM prompt is and what will be ineffective, even LLMs “know” that. Do you mean “context engineering” is hard to optimize around ? That’s often thought of interchangeably I think, but regardless that has in fact become the “hard problem” (user facing) in effectively leveraging LLM for dev work. Ever since the reasoning class models were introduced I think, it became more about context engineering in practice than prompting. Nowadays from the very onset Even resuming a session efficiently often requires a non-trivial approach that we’ve already started to design patterns and built tools around, (like CLI coding workflows adding /compact as user directive, etc).
I’m not a software engineer by trade, so I can’t pretend to know what that fully entails at the tail ends of enterprise scale and complexity, but I’ve spent a decent amount of time programming and as far as LLMs go, I think there’s probably somewhere down the road where we get so methodical about context engineering and tooling and memory management, all of the vast still somewhat nebulous surrounding space and scaffolding to LLM workflows that have a big impact on productive use of them—we may eventually engineer that aspect to an extent that will be able to much more consistently yield better results across more applied contexts than the “clean code”/“trivial app” dichotomy. But … I think the depth of additional effort and knowledge and skill required by human user to do this optimal context engineering (once we fully understand how even) to get the best out of LLMs… I think that quickly just converges to — what it means to be a competent software engineer already. the meta layers around just “writing code” that are required to build robust systems and maintain them, the amount of work required to coerce non-deterministic models into effectively internalizing that, or at minimum not fvcking it up… that juice might not be worth the squeeze when it’s essentially what a good developer’s job is already. If that’s true then there will likely remain a ceiling of finite productivity you can expect from LLM assisted development for a long time… (I conjecture).
But as for general notion alternatives, and actually if you prefer to go in the other direction away from web based—Hands down would recommend Obsidian.md above any other open source alternative.
While it's not 100% "batteries included" like proprietary apps (though this gap has narrowed considerably), Obsidian truly shines if you're even slightly inclined toward customization. It's "hackable to the core" — you can build practically anything on top of it, which satisfies open source purists. Yet for practical users not looking to build their own software, Obsidian still punches above its weight — it's highly functional and polished out of the box, requiring zero setup to be immediately productive.
The integrated community plugins library lets you extend vanilla Obsidian to match most proprietary software, including Notion's "databases" functionality (arguably Notion's best feature), LLM integration, and much more. Since these plugins are themselves open source, they too can be customized beyond their original design. It's the perfect blend of freedom with valuable functionality either built-in or one click away.
What initially drove me from Notion to Obsidian wasn't the customization aspect, but the need for local storage and non-cloud syncing for sensitive data. It's egregious that Notion still doesn't support this outside their Enterprise license. I almost overlooked this by simply not using Notion for sensitive data, but the final straw came when I lost access during Notion's service outages. Even though these were infrequent and brief, being unable to access my data when needed was unacceptable. Arguing with devs about local storage and offline functionality only to face that situation made me realize how absurd it was that Notion doesn't even provide a cached version when offline. Without internet, Notion is essentially a brick — your data exists somewhere in the aether, just not on your device. That's bananas.
After switching to Obsidian and solving the local storage "problem" in 30 seconds, I gradually discovered more functionality and have since customized it as my central organization and research tool. Couldn't recommend it more highly.
I'll stop my rant now — Obsidian speaks for itself and doesn't need my endorsement, just as Notion's shortcomings are equally well-established.
Over a decade on, still my favorite “checklist App” for raw simplicity, linear organization, and a thoughtful gesture based UI.
Free. No login. No AI.
the relative determination of finding the right balance is an important and worth doing carefully, regardless of the corporate culture. especially if the argument is that effective team collaboration is of SUCH high importance that companies are happy to let go of human capital that isn’t on board with their proscribed mandate around remote work on the basis of its impact to their work life balance… if thats the case, then surely something that important is worth determining a bit more scientifically than “3 days in person minimum or gtfo”— applicable for all teams. all employees. surely if it is in fact so important, then it’s not credible to be so rigidly unthinking in determining the "optimal" policy. any company that isn't inclined to fully consider that notion, and establish a mandate "just because" shouldn't get to imply the mandate serves them best on any basis related to team productivity and collaboration, because its wholly unsubstantiated andnot credible. they are however free to establish any such mandate of course, without need substantiate it, but then i think we all need to be transparent about the factthat is is entirely arbitrary... not some baseless idealized notion of "optimal"
FWIW my personal view (not suggesting it’s a universally established truth with consensus, just my opinion based on experience) is that ~some amount of in-person interaction is beneficial and optimal, even for experienced teams with well established workflows and a long standing track record of collective work. eventually if you never see one another in person, sosci dynamics will change, perhaps not always to the detriment of team productivity, but at least in a manner worth evaluating/considering. and I think the less time a team has spent together in person prior to collaborating remotely the more important it is to prioritize in person work. lastly i think the determination of the "optimal" policy mandate will necessarily be team-dependent. as such, i believe team managers should be empowered by the powers that be to figure out what the best strategy is for their team specifically, and be held accountable to the results perhaps... as a far more sensible approach than it being a universal corporate mandate from the top of the house.
Secondly, no one has disagreed with me on the matter, as I haven’t put forth a personal opinion, I’m simply impartially making referencing to the fact that Git is the de-facto standard. And from an intellectual perspective, was hoping someone might elucidate more into why that is the case, given my conception is an inferential deduction. at best).
While I’m personally relatively familiar with Git internals, by no means an expert, its the only distributed VCS I’ve ever used and I don’t know anything substantive enough about the alternatives to credibly make a relative value comparison here. They could be the bees knees for all I know, but it seems unlikely given the position Git holds as far as consensus standard choice.
I suspect the die-hard proponents of Mercurial, or SVN, or whatever else, these few pagan heretics that might exist out there wherever they’re hiding, have found themselves in a camp different to the Git standard likely on the basis of electing to be intentionally contrarian / anti-normative as the general catalyst, and rather not, as a function of struggling with Git to the point of being so disillusioned they call it quits and head out looking for greener pastures. I think in practice the most common result of encountering problems with Git is, fix the problems. And functionally I think that’s resulted only in furthering it’s supremacy over alternatives, despite there existing a handful of cultish weirdos who are _really_ into Mercurial and prefer not to fux with Git as a personal lifestyle choice haha)
Vim, *NIX (so Mac), monoliths, and lambda calculus all the way—FP!
jk, but FWIW I think sometimes, in rare instances, there does exist a pretty unequivocal consensus “right answer” to this sort of question … maybe such as like: Git vs any other distributed VCS ?
It was nevertheless a pretty epic journey of dialectic discourse plunging _deep_ into the esoteric and nuanced realm of expert-level technical minutiae. A mostly intellectual journey, albeit distinctly punctuated by an undertone of emotional angst that steadily progressed in its growing intensity in a manner proportional to the magnitude of your collective disagreement… epic indeed.
but IMO, I think it’s worth noting that occasionally, some rare unique and functionally superlative technology comes along that in practice transcends every alternative from the onset and indefinitely going forwards, sometimes even at a more prominent scale than the MySQL / Postgres projects topic of discussion (which are not small by any means).
something maybe like Git, most immediately comes to mind, as an example of the de-facto standard for distributed VCS basically since … 1995 when Linus decided to create it?