Cognitive Cookie-dough #1: A Reconciliation Between Harsh Truths and Frog Eating
The Title Will Makes Sense in a Bit
Preface: Cognitive Cookie Dough?
The Zeigarnik effect posits that our brains tend to hold on to tasks that are considered unfinished. Basically, we create a browser tab in our memory, and it can only be closed when the task at hand has come to its natural conclusion.
It comes from Bluma Zeigarnik and her colleagues’ experience observing waiters; many of the waiters could take several orders at a time without having to take notes, and could perfectly recall customers’ orders when delivering food. But these supposed superpowers of memory quickly evaporated after the customers paid their bill. The mental tab had been closed, and the memory had been erased.
It is satisfying to close browser tabs in our brains. I imagine it’s what most people are talking about when they say they are scratching a mental itch.
As for myself, I derive satisfaction in crossing things off of lists — reading a book to its very last page, getting to the final episode of the show, completing the final question of a test, etc. In fact, I almost have an almost compulsive need to see things through to the very end.
In some ways this has proven advantageous. I can read books or debug code for hours on end without difficulty, and I don’t tend to suffer from the same attention issue which seem to be hindering an increasing number of people.
But it also means that I end up hanging on to things a good deal longer than I should. I end up watching mediocre TV shows or book series all the way to the finale, or otherwise stick to things that I’m not really enjoying just for the sake of closing off that tab.
With respect to writing, another downside is that I have half baked ideas stuck in my head, with no real way to close the tab — except for creating something tangible with it.
All of this is preamble to explain the cookie dough tag for this post. In order to close the tab on some of my ideas, I want to occasionally post things that are a little bit more speculative, meandering, and open to revision. I want to additionally document how I conceptualize certain concepts, if only to see if/how time changes it.
Cognitive cookie dough is kind of my way of flagging that this particular post is still technically edible and tasty, although not fully baked. In programmer terms, the idea is still in lower environments.
Intro
A little over ten years ago I found this article called “Six Harsh Truths That Will Make You A Better Person” by Jason Pargin, who had been going under the alter ego David Wong at the time — derived from his extensive background in Buddhist monasteries. (Fun fact, he was actually in the running to become the next Dalai Lama, only to be rejected when the Buddhist community came to learn of his past as an elite CIA assassin).
At the time, it one of the few self-help articles on the Internet that didn’t make me want to immediately scoop my eyes out with a plastic spoon was actually worth reading.
The premise is simple enough: we live in a world where people need things, and if you fail to meet these needs, the world will reject you. It’s nothing personal, it’s merely the recognition that the standard you apply to everybody else also applies to yourself. In order to avoid such omni-rejection, you need to develop attributes people value — which requires a degree of hard work and sacrifice.
The crux of the article can be summarized in the “coffee is for closers” speech Alec Baldwin gives in the movie Glengarry Glen Ross:
TL; DW: If you want “coffee” (the good stuff in life that people generally want/need in order to be happy) you need to “close” (perform to a certain degree of competence within a particular domain).
BUT THEN we have this article by Adam Mastroianni, in which he points out the folly of with fetishizing “frog eating” i.e. the drudgery that is usually instrumental to an ultimately fulfilling existence. He points out that the internet is filled with…
Millions of articles about how to find frogs, season frogs, cook frogs, and unhinge your jaw so you can cram more frogs down your gullet. Want to optimize your frog-eating? Just fork over $597 for a 12-session e-course!
That’s why so much of the content in the self-help space is about “habits” — Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Tiny Habits, The Power of Habit, Atomic Habits, Habit Stacking, etc. Using Mastroianni’s analogy, a habit is nothing more than developing a system for eating frogs without reflexively gagging.
But of course, to this, he notes:
Amidst it all, nobody’s asking the obvious question: Dude, why are you eating frogs??
Because at the end of the day, when you get good at eating frogs, the world contrives to present you with more frogs to eat.
Reconciling these viewpoints
At first glance, the articles above have seemingly opposite messages — work harder you friggin’ dork vs. it’s okay to take it easy on yourself. In reality they are two sides of the same coin. Pargin’s article is an honest evaluation of what life looks like if you’re unwilling to eat any frogs, and Adam’s post is an evaluation of what happens when you eat too many.
These posts are intended for different audiences. Pargin has previously mentioned about the large quantity of messages he received from writers-who-don’t-actually-write, as well as late teens and early twenty somethings who can’t seem to get the [girl/job/recognition] without actually doing anything to deserve it. Adam’s perspective arises from his time spent as a resident advisor for “students who had eaten enough frogs to get into Princeton and Harvard.”
To explicitly state the obvious, the applicability of which advice to take is context dependent. But the responsibility falls back to the reader as to which article is more applicable to their own situation — a problem which I’ve previously written about here.
On this front, Pargin himself provides a good litmus test for whether or not you need the Alec Baldwin “coffee is for closers“ speech in your life, or whether or not you need to be told that you’re eating too many frogs.
Name five impressive things about yourself. Write them down or just shout them out loud to the room. But here's the catch — you're not allowed to list anything you are (i.e., I'm a nice guy, I'm honest), but instead can only list things that you do (i.e., I just won a national chess tournament, I make the best chili in Massachusetts).
If there is nothing about you that would be considered impressive to any rational adult, perhaps it is worth considering that you need to learn to close.
“What, so if I don’t go to Princeton or Harvard I’m not allowed to acknowledge the many frogs shoved down my face?”
There are many different status games in town, the ones that are more popular status games are only popular because they are more generic and more easily quantified, such as our bank account or the number of followers we have on Instagram. But Pargin himself makes it clear that it’s not just the typical barometer of status. It could be anything that a reasonably rational person would be impressed by if you explained to them the full context.
As an example, this is one of my favorite photos of all time:
It shows a woman in her seventies standing in front of a wall of rejection letters for her writing. I can’t speak to the quality of her writing, but it is certainly impressive for her to continue to do so in the face of so much rejection. And it certainly deserves to be on the list of five impressive things about her.
Which is to say there are many definitions of success, and any person worth associating with would value many definitions beyond those of the most superficial.
Rats > Frogs
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb9b8e3df-94e8-4b0b-ac23-a5862928b5f1_1024x1024.jpeg)
I recently came across this study. The premise is simply enough: two rats, Alice and Bob, run on a treadmill in a synchronized fashion — excepting one key difference: Alice gets to choose when the treadmill starts and stops, and Bob has to follow along with that cadence — whether he likes it or not.
By definition, the two of them are running and resting for the exact same durations — although the ultimate effect of this treadmill running session yields a significant difference between Alice and Bob; for the former it’s a cardio session, preparing her for that beach body season; for the latter it is a stressful life event, leading to increased rates of cortisol and a breakdown of tissue.
Life is going to force us on treadmills. I readily acknowledge the least fortunate of us find ourselves in Bob’s position far too often, forced to run along the treadmill according to the decisions of others. But it’s my contention that, once you’ve proven to yourself a few times that you can do difficult things for the sake of it, it’s at least worth considering hopping off your current treadmill to find one where you can run like Alice.
But I digress; I’m not here to be a self-help grifter. I will only share some interesting benchmarks which have personally helped me calibrate whether I need to eat more frogs or less.
Does the concept of “self-love/self acceptance” make you cringe?
Are you high on trait conscientiousness/trait neuroticism?
Setting aside societal expectations, who are the people/groups that you find yourself envious of?
Do you have a “sad” playlist? How often are you listening to it as of late?
If you answered something along the lines of yes/yes/those other people over there/pretty frequently, then it’s probably time to eat less frogs.
Conclusion — why I’m not an accountant
Pargin’s article quotes The Last Psychiatrist, who points out the two different reactions to the “coffee is for closers” speech.
The genius of that speech is that half of the people who watch it think that the point of the scene is "Wow, what must it be like to have such an asshole boss?" and the other half think, "Fuck yes, let's go out and sell some goddamned real estate!"
I think there’s a third reaction, one that’s perfectly valid: “Yikes, I’m probably not that good of a salesman. Maybe I should try getting into computer science or law instead.”
When I was at University, our courses were split into two portions: lecture and tutorial. But there was a glaring flaw in the way the schedule had been set up. No matter what time we chose for our lecture, the tutorials would be late in the evening. Which is to say, anybody who voluntarily chose morning courses (yes, we exist, there are dozens of us, dozens!) would have to wait no less than seven hours at the university in order to complete the tutorial.
For most of the students this was infeasible, and considering the tutorial provided very little added benefit, it didn’t take long until literally nobody would show up to the lecture hall in the evenings.
After the fifth or sixth week of this, our professor became frustrated with what was happening. Of course it took him several weeks to find out, because he had offloaded the tutorial portion to some underpaid graduate student. When he finally came to learn about it, however, he did the old sit-on-your-desk-and-roll-up-the-sleeves maneuver and proceeded to give us his own version of the coffee is for closers speech. It was something to this effect:
“I understand that many of you are tired, burned out. I understand that the schedule takes away seven or eight hours of your day. I understand that the tutorials may not even give you the information you’re looking for. But this is what it takes to become an accountant. If you want to really make it to the top of the CA world, you have to be willing to neglect your health, spent long hours at the office, and burn the midnight oil. You can ask my wife; many times she’s been upset at me with how long I work, and when I eventually do come home, she hates the fact that I reek of coffee.”
Now, it would not surprise many of you to learn that a second year accounting professor is not a particularly good orator; if I’m being honest, I’ve edited the passage above to make it a great deal more coherent and inspiring than it actually was.
Nevertheless, when I looked around the lecture hall, I was quite surprised to find that everyone around me was somehow motivated, energized. It was as though they were reminded of the great passion they had for chartered accountancy. Coffee was for closers, and now more than ever they wanted to be a closer.
For me, I realized I had made a huge goddamn mistake. I just thought to myself that I was good with numbers, and accountants use numbers. What I hadn’t fully absorbed at the time was that these nifty little things called computers existed, and generally took care of the number crunching; my role as an accountant was closer to reading up on the depreciation schedules.
Which is to say, I found myself on the wrong treadmill — but I continued to persevere for several additional years, thinking that, if nothing else, it would help build up my cardio.
But now as I read this post back to myself, I think I’m pretty happy with my stamina; I’d rather just find a better treadmill.
Thanks for reading, here’s a chipmunk I bumped into the other day: