I was recently reading the book of Exodus, in particular where G-d tells Moses and the Jewish people about the construction of the tabernacle and the altar. The striking thing about the altar is the description of daily sacrifices that are required.
As a metaphor, this resonates to what we're talking about there. The nature of the universe is such that change happens much more through compounding than through one-time miracles (eg, if you want an extra 100K in the bank, the easiest way to do that is to have saved $27 every day over the last 10 years than somehow to wish for the 100K to land in your account in one shot, the way to lose 10 lbs is to cut out 100 calories a day for a year, etc.)
Back to Exodus - you can think of "$27/day" or "100 calories/day" as a form of sacrifice. You can always spend that money on something, you an always eat an extra treat - to not do that requires consistent, daily, sacrifice, albeit small.
That's why when someone does something consistently, we say he does it "religiously" - religion teaches you daily consistency in many ways. We don't sacrifice on the altar nowadays, but think about daily morning prayer for example - if you can be consistent with that you can be consistent with a lot of other things.
+1, fantastic comment. This really resonates. I was recently looking at the app I use to manage my workouts and realized I've done over 150,000 pushups using the app. I'm pretty strong for a middle-aged tech worker, and it's because of the consistency. Same deal w/ guitar - I try hard to play for at least 10m nearly every day (which sometimes expands to a much longer session) and it really pays dividends.
No, this is not really a fantastic comment because the comment initially supports the thesis of the article, which is "change is slow progress, not a burst of activity" and it does this quite well with a biblical comparison, but then it veers off to "daily praying, helps with success in other areas", which is a totally different thesis. That's proselytizing instead of commenting on the article.
And your "+1, fantastic comment" smells, too; because you do not address the content of the comment, but only the original thesis of the posted article. So it should have been "+1, fantastic article". You don't even say what's so good in the comment that you praise.
Is this an attack by missionaries with day jobs in marketing? :-)
(And it is not really a fantastic article either, because it has a nice start with the Rocky comparison and a nice ending (sans post script) that fits the start but the middle is a muddle just like this run-on sentence.)
I think you're trying to follow the analogy/point so maybe I can be more explicit.
Consistency is difficult - everyone knows that you "have to" save money consistently, or cut back on calories, or exercise daily, or whatever. The gap from "knowledge" to "able to do it" is quite big - as evidenced by the fact most people aren't able to be consistent about much in our lives.
And that's not because of some sort of "privilege" - people spend time on social media where they could be exercising, they are spending money on stuff they don't strictly need, etc. There's a large cohort of people who (1) know they can make their lives better through consistency (2) have the underlying opportunity to do it and (3) fail to actually capitalize on those opportunities constantly.
The connection to religion is that religious practice is by its nature consistent (you go to your house of worship weekly, you pray daily, whatever the case may be) - which is a great exercise in the muscle of consistency. I suspect that if someone is trained in ability to do religious things daily, they are much better positioned to apply this skill to other domains of their life (similar to how someone who is a trained weight lifter can apply their strength to other domains like carrying their kids or physical work.)
What takes my comment from "true" to "fantastic" (just kidding) is the connection to the applicability of seemingly arcane religious practice to a very-much-relevant modern day skillset, which I also believe is less available in society than it was previously. You may not resonate with this on a religious level, but perhaps there's some room to recognize ancient wisdom applicable to today, anyways.
So a ritual of saying the day’s name in a cartoon voice
Or burning a blade of grass
If religion is the indicator, the greater the difference from every day life the better
I have actually found that simply making a new choice daily, one that I can’t remember having made before, does wonders for my sense of possibility & curiosity
To paraphrase your comment: "Connecting the ritual of prayer to another task that you want to accomplish, helps in establishing consistency in doing that other task."
Yes, that is a useful tool, to achieve the daily consistency that avoids the "Montage Fallacy". (And it even can elevate your comment to fantastic ;-) )
Less religiously inclined people can easily adapt this concept to other things that they do daily.
Now you are not just promoting prayer but giving a useful analogy. I was a little bit fighty yesterday and perceived a manipulative ploy in your original comment, when it maybe was just a little bit of accidental omission, because coherently and concisely stating something in writing is hard. The latter is something I am also struggling with. And maybe I was going hard on you because you started off with a well stated argument.
This is going to maybe sound dumb, but hear me out: I've found a good hack to get around the montage fallacy, which is: the montage playlist.
For whatever thing you're trying to improve, which would be a montage in your personal movie, make a playlist. Stick with it: it's fine to swap songs in or out, but don't overdo it, maintain the continuity.
Memory is episodic, and for my brain type at least, sound, specifically musical sound, really ties it together. Listening to music from bygone decades is the best tool I have to really put myself in my memories of those times.
The montage playlist works the same way: it compresses all the slow, repetitive, boring work that goes into improving yourself into a montage. It feels less like dozens to hundreds of hours, and more like the same hour but getting a bit better each time.
I think this is great! It may not work if you're trying to build a five-minute-a-day daily habit, it may not work for everyone, but there's def something to it! There's also a pattern of some pretty productive people making playlists of a few upbeat but simple songs they'd never listen to otherwise, and putting that on repeat when they go heads-down on something, see e.g. one of my favorite examples: https://ryanholiday.net/the-guilty-crazy-secret-that-helps-m...
It does not sound dumb. Ideas like this crossed my mind and I had even put a playlist together too.
However, mindfulness and being present is a huge part of the practice. You get a lot more out of something if you are able to be more present during the boring parts than your consciousness leaving.
Whether or not music takes you out of the present or not varies a lot by person. If you're the sort that finds it distracting then this isn't for you, and that's fine.
Sure, although the sensations themselves are not the cause of being present or not.
The idea of having music in the background to evoke a montage scene is a kind of fantasizing on what it feels like to be … montaging. My mind does something similar without a montage playlist. In both cases, the power of being present is partially siphoned off to sustain that fantasizing, rather than sensing and experiencing what is happening in the training.
There is an alternate thing that can happen — the use of music to artificially create a proxy for the external, social conditioning. That is also a support, and if that is what someone need, sure. However, there is much to be said when someone is able to tap into the internal drive and passion, without relying on an external social conditioning.
There are also skills that, you cannot develop without jettisoning supports like that.
While I do agree, I think there's another effect that runs in reverse of this:
I had a goal to get to a certain weight. I passed that goal, but I don't know when. I was putting forth real effort, I was doing all the things you need to do. It wasn't a montage, I wasn't skipping anything.
Here's what I think happened: Small effects are huge in the long term. Every day I was losing a few grams of fat, to the point that it was never a dramatic swing that I could say "I made it!". From day to day, the number on the scale went up and down, and at some point, it never went above my goal number again.
NOTE: I actually don't encourage losing weight to a certain number - this is just for simplicity. The number is a small part of the goal. I actually have goal pants and shirt next to the scale and lately the scale hasn't moved, but the clothes fit better.
If health is your goal, please track more than one thing.
Interesting, for me that sounds like exactly the montage thing, just without the set endpoint necessarily. But if you focus on your goal number too much, you may get disheartened by the slow progress there, or the brief setbacks along the way, whereas if you learn to enjoy the underlying process, you're just doing your thing and then before you know it your weight is sort of where you want it.
I recently noticed the narrative power of montages and just how "movie magic" they are, as opposed to being based in reality, when I watched the BlackBerry movie. There's a really great montage near the beginning of the film where they're cobbling together a prototype device in one night for an important meeting the next day. Watching it, I couldn't help but get hyped up and excited.
As a dev, I love watching other technical people do the impossible and create something great. At the same time, the logical part of my brain kept thinking, "This is really cool, but obviously this is total fiction. No way anybody, no matter how smart they are, can put together a device like that in one night." But I went along with it because it was fun and got the narrative going. So even with my critical brain, I couldn't help but "believe" the fantasy a little bit.
On the whole, it made me reflect on how movies really do present a fictional view of reality and that's kind of the power they have. And what about all those times where I watched a movie and didn't have a background in what they were presenting and just ate it up wholesale?
It was recently chosen as the greatest film of all time by the legendary Sight and Sound magazine, who conduct this poll among critics and other professionals since 1952. (“Citizen Kane” is still hanging on to third place after all these years.)
But cinematic fiction without its familiar causal trappings is a hard watch for most people, especially as attention spans get shorter and shorter in the age of TikTok. I don’t suppose “Jeanne Dielman” will suddenly be discovered by regular viewers.
The counterpoint to this is Greg LeMond's (possibly apocryphal) quote about cycling training: "it never gets easier, you just go faster." LeMond is the only American to win the Tour de France.
In regards to flossing, I used to never do it, until a new dentist told I oughta or my teeth would fall out in my 20s.
I was 16 when that happened, and I have flossed every single day since. Now I can't brush my teeth without flossing. The process just feels incomplete without it.
I get the why of movies using montages, but I agree with the author in that it can stylize/"sexify" the experience away so that susceptible viewers can think they can just dreamily get from one end to the other, when reality is much more sharp-edged/clunky than smooth most of the time. To me, progress is about consistency above all else- It's all about getting your ass to the gym on those days you REALLY don't want to, it's raining out, and all the music on your playlist is just not hitting for you that day.
I have worked out every day this year (after two years of effectively no exercise). I put it all in a spreadsheet, and glancing over the 58 exercise sessions, I see progress.
Had I not thought to memorialize it, I believe I would be sitting here thinking that working out is doing nothing. My montage memory finds no higlights.
I'm tired of this particular brand of Think Piece that seems to be en vogue right now, which attempts to attribute all manner of ills to external forces.
I doubt most people fail at personal transformation because movie montages and "marketers" led them to believe it would be easy, I think most people fail because it is really really hard to achieve. Getting permission to blame it on Rocky et al is more appealing than blaming yourself, but I would bet that in an alternate universe where training montages didn't exist very little would be different..
In the Chinese culture, there is a word for that — gongfu, 功夫, which means mastery accumulated over time. Although it is used these days in English to refer to Chinese martial arts (kungfu), it’s something that can be developed for any skill, and is closer to what people say when they say “10,000 hours of deliberate practice).
There’s a meditation teacher named Adyashanti. He used to be a competitive bike racer. In one of his talks, he had talked about winning races. The audience ate it up and loved the idea, so he said, no, you don’t really want it. He explained that, that feeling of victory and accomplishment from winning a race wasn’t just the race, but all the hardships that went into the training.
And just as the audience’s enthusiasm wound down, he told a story about that woman who was in the crowd for a marathon. She ran out into the street to cross the finish line; people were confused and kinda applauded here. There was a flash of anger from the audience. How dare she cheat? And then Adyashanti put her experience in context of how crossing that finish line came without all the experience of hardship in the training. The feeling of victory, and even being applauded for it was hollow. You can feel the audience shifting from anger to pity …
I like your Chinese culture comparison and the Englisch language has such a word, too. It's "experience". True, you also can have "an experience", but generally it is used in the sense of "having experience" which is having accumulated mastery over time. In German it is "Erfahrung" which maps 1:1 to experience. I like, that Chinese, Englisch and German have common ground, showing that the "human experience" is something quite universal across cultures.
The way "experience" is used in English and in modern American culture has a very different connotation, mindset, value, and frame. In its use in the hiring/HR world, and in the subcuture of wargaming and RPGs, "experience" is understood as a quantity and does not convey the depth of meaning as "gongfu". It's why there are some martial arts teachers who say, "Americans are no good at gongfu" -- not in the sense of not being good at martial arts, but that there's a cultural thing that makes "gongfu" easy to be misunderstood.
The closest term I have seen to "gongfu' in English is the ancient Greek loan word, "arete", which is usually translated as "excellance". What's important to note here is that both "arete" and "gongfu" are understood as quality, not quantity.
For example, you'll hear "Adam has 20 years of experience", or "Barbra has 5 years of experience", but "Adam has 20 years of gongfu", and "Barbra has 5 years of arete" doesn't make sense.
So maybe the German "Erfahrung" does not map 1:1 to the concept of "Experience".
But maybe it is not so much a lack of concept in the language, but something that is related to particularly American hire-and-fire culture, where every employee is an easily replaceable cog in a machine, whereas I think that the full depth of many tasks is not easily conveyed in a documented standard operating procedure, but often needs the actual experience in doing things often. (This is of course an over generalization, because we seldom hear form the established well run smaller companies. You hear much more about dysfunctional companies and dissatisfied employees on the Internet.)
Then there is a preacher friend of mine who is a big runner. One Sunday he was traveling in Greece and is route home from church happened to cross the Marathon (the original marathon route!) around mile 22, so he jumped in the race there ran a few blocks while making his way across the street and then continued on to wherever he was supposed to be. He can now tell people he has run in "the marathon". He didn't run the whole thing and since he is a preacher he will never have Sundays free (even on vacation he will be at Church somewhere) - but since he has put in the training effort he can claim to have run in the Marathon and we all feel amusement at his story (and maybe pity)
Agreed with the idea that no transformation is instant. This is called "movie time" by Nolan, if I recall. It happens with romances in showing people "get to know each other."
That all said... transformations can happen way faster than people realize. I remember in my 20s I could turn my fitness around stupid fast. Even as an older adult, things can change faster than I would anticipate. You have to treat it like a job, though.
I know this is not the point of the article, but my favorite movie montage is Netflix's "I Am Mother"'s initial montage showing how the AI "Mother" grows and raises a human embryo.
It plays with expectations about how montages work. If you've watched this movie, you know what I mean!
Anyone have an example of a "good" training montage? One that compiles micro-failures and doesn't gloss over the "ugh, raw eggs again" / "i don't wanna get out of bed today..." moments?
‘Stuck in a time loop’ stories are essentially extended montages where the point is to watch the protagonist repeatedly fail to get it, give up, look for easy ways out, until finally they figure out the redemptive path to escape. In fact the montage trope within such movies is generally the ‘repeated failure in increasingly awful ways’ montage. Groundhog Day culminates its darkest chapter in a sequence of suicide attempts; Edge of Tomorrow has montages of Tom Cruise doing stuff like misremembering whether to go left or right and dying messily. Both also feature days where the protagonist just doesn’t want to do it, and days they try to just sneak away from the challenge.
To be fair, some transformations are microwavable, in the sense that there's a well known process that gets you to the end, you "just" need the discipline to follow thru.
Ok but I was distinguishes processes for which a recipe exists vs processes for which is doesn't. For example, if I was to be fit vs if I want to be Mr Olympia. For the latter there's no process that guarantees that at the end you'll achieve it.
So in a sense, some transformations are microwavable.
I think his point was that "microwaveable" requires the magic pixie dust that is motivation, and ... things that require magic pixie dust aren't actually "microwaveable".
"I think The Karate Kid ruined the modern world. Not just that movie, but all of the movies like it (you certainly can't let the Rocky sequels escape blame). Basically any movie with a training montage.
You know what I'm talking about; the main character is very bad at something, then there is a sequence in the middle of the film set to upbeat music that shows him practicing. When it's done, he's an expert. ...
Every adult I know--or at least the ones who are depressed--continually suffers from something like sticker shock (that is, when you go shopping for something for the first time and are shocked to find it costs way, way more than you thought). Only it's with effort. It's Effort Shock.
We have a vague idea in our head of the "price" of certain accomplishments, how difficult it should be to get a degree, or succeed at a job, or stay in shape, or raise a kid, or build a house. And that vague idea is almost always catastrophically wrong.
Accomplishing worthwhile things isn't just a little harder
than people think; it's 10 or 20 times harder."
"The good news is what I’ve started calling reward shock. In some (not all) domains, it is more than enough to offset effort shock.
When you overcome effort shock for a non-trivial learning project and get through it anyway, despite doubts about whether it is worth it, you can end up with very unexpected rewards that go far beyond what you initially thought you were earning. This is because so few people get through effort shock to somewhere worthwhile that when you do it, you end up in sparsely populated territory where further gains through continued application from the earned skill can be very high.
Programming, writing and math are among the skills where there you get both significant effort shock and significant reward shock."
Hey thanks for pointing out this angle. I think it’s compatible with the idea that mastery of a thing is purchased at the cost of a shocking number of invested hours. This seems counter intuitive (hence the shock) and so people would rather believe in some mysterious innate talent that they can’t explain, rather than believe in innate motivation that enables one to invest the necessary hours.
I'm not sure how Rocky fits the same pattern as The Karate Kid. Even at the very start of the first Rocky, Rocky is a journeyman boxer, who's been in the game a while, and goes to the gym on a... ok, on a semi-regular basis at best. Yes, he's undisciplined and doesn't have an amazing track record, but when he gets picked by Apollo to get a title shot, it's *not* like he's learning to box from scratch. He effectively has a training camp with Mickey to get him in top fighting shape and mix up his form to throw his opponent's research off - but that's how a lot of professional fighters prepare for a fight!
(I mean, it helps that his fighting style is mostly "let the other guy tire himself out by punching you in the face for 10 rounds straight, and then get some decent haymakers in when they can't lift their arms any more" which any fool with an iron chin can try to implement, but even so, the implication is that he starts off with plenty of practice at it.)
If the Karate Kid ruined the modern world by learning Karate in a training montage, what are your opinions about the scene in The Matrix where Neo simply downloads his martial art skills? "I know Kung Fu!"
Failure takes persistence, too. Grit is no more the answer than wisdom is.
The real fallacy is following emotions (from movies?), which can be manipulated by time dilation or compression, attention/focusing/distraction, etc. And because there's value in what people do, systems evolve to control people, at times through emotional manipulation - not least through the enduring franchises of business opportunity, political control, religious faith, scientific mastery, and tribal belonging.
Existentialists called this the problem of "bad faith", where people allow their inner lives to be constructed socially. It's a problem because the person can't tell. So just as "God" can't be relied upon as an authority, neither can any pristine "self" -- even when it's reified as a task list or mantras or life commitments. An internal holographic universe. The ridiculous but inescapable truth of Socrates' private voice.
Yes, you can be productive, by your own measures. But by the above-mentioned principle of exploitation, your measures will also be exploited, and you'll be polishing a turd. When you realize it (as most do when they lose productivity due to age or opportunity loss), you'll have a crisis of meaning.
The problem lies in simplistic thinking driving towards hierarchical principles and valuation. Any single goal - feelings, money, goodness, control - when unchecked leads to totalitarianism.
It's just not how nature actually is, as far as we can tell.
A field theory instead incorporates all factors -- all kinds of knowledge and values. It's chaotic without some consistency, but consistency invariably induces suffering due to the incompleteness of understanding. The closest thing to a principle in a field theory is an intersection of Nietzsche's "only as aesthetic phenomena are things eternally justified" and Vonnegut's "and so it goes": you know it when you see it. As you decide, your character as the decider presents.
So if you want to get better, the main practice is something like Zen+philosophy, observing everything with love, and heartlessly pruning bullshit. Practice seeing+deciding+doing.
The great learning, attributed to Confucious, should be read ideographically, but the first four lines can be translated as something like this:
- the activity of great learning (liberal education, good person) consists of
Watching Rocky run up the stairs every day might well be boring for long stretches, especially to people not used to looking closely and patiently at the world, but that's fine. It would elevate the movie into something fundamentally better than what it is. A movie need not be entertaining to be good; in trying to be entertaining, it often makes itself worse, and worse, makes its viewers worse.
You seem to be mixing documentary and movie. To me at least they are different.
The purpose of a documentary is to educate viewers. If people are not entertained that is okay, but if the don't go away educated in some way it failed.
The purpose of a movie is to entertain, so it if isn't entertaining it also isn't good. It might also be educational, but that isn't the purpose.
What documentary directors know is that if you are not at least somewhat entertaining viewers will not watch and so they put in some entertainment aspects even though that isn't the purpose. Movie directors know that they need not tell the truth, though often they will just because viewers will believe the movie and potentially change behavior despite that not being intended and so morally they sometime feel a need to show someone doing something that works even though it isn't required and some do not.
Of course where the line is, is often blurry. Some movies are intended as documentary except that they are propaganda and so we would call them fiction. Many documentary are primarily entertainment, with the minimum education to claim documentary.
Rocky was clearly intended as an entertaining movie. The directors put enough effort into finding truth about boxing training that you won't go too wrong treating it as a documentary - but if you really want to be a boxer there are better sources to learn how and you will discover some things they got wrong for plot reasons.
No, I confuse nothing, you have Hollywood-induced brain rot :)
The purpose of a movie is not to entertain. Or rather, that is one possible and valid and fine purpose, but it is certainly not the only such purpose. To believe that it is, THAT is the real confusion.
The difference between a documentary and a movie isn't about purpose, it's about method: how they try to get at the truth. The documentary tries to do it by looking at a specific case; the movie (and fiction in general) tries to get at truth via an imagined aggregate (although of course usually embodied in a single fictional character, like Rocky).
The first line of your comment doesn't seem necessary to make your point.
There is a guideline that says "don't be snarky"[0] and I think it applies here.
Having produced a documentary (and being in the process of creating another one), I can't say that I agree with your view on purpose at all.
The purpose of either documentary or fiction movie is whatever the movie maker aims at. There is no reason for anyone to abide by your standard of "trying to get at the truth" when writing the scenario for Once Upon A Time in America, Jurassic Park, The Simpsons (the movie), or Bowling for Columbine.
I'd say most movies have an intent behind them. Further than that, we're art amateurs trying to interpret the meaning of abstract paintings in a gallery. Maybe the painter wanted to denunce the patriarchy. Or maybe they had food poisoning that day. Who knows.
As a metaphor, this resonates to what we're talking about there. The nature of the universe is such that change happens much more through compounding than through one-time miracles (eg, if you want an extra 100K in the bank, the easiest way to do that is to have saved $27 every day over the last 10 years than somehow to wish for the 100K to land in your account in one shot, the way to lose 10 lbs is to cut out 100 calories a day for a year, etc.)
Back to Exodus - you can think of "$27/day" or "100 calories/day" as a form of sacrifice. You can always spend that money on something, you an always eat an extra treat - to not do that requires consistent, daily, sacrifice, albeit small.
That's why when someone does something consistently, we say he does it "religiously" - religion teaches you daily consistency in many ways. We don't sacrifice on the altar nowadays, but think about daily morning prayer for example - if you can be consistent with that you can be consistent with a lot of other things.