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Hmm. That wasn’t my synthesis of Atomic Habits as it pertains to this nuance. I agree with you the more refined guidance is closer to creating a new identity intentionally, so your habits are intrinsically tied to your sense of self, and feel less effortfully organically.

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.

Thanks for sharing this insight. I was not previously familiar with her research; interested to learn more. And I agree what I put forth is a narrower notion, perhaps reductive, I had not really considered a context in which “forcing others to believe some subjective account of your shared reality” would manifest other than via deception to whatever extent, but I suppose it could be of a different nature.,

The most productive feedback loop to cultivate deeper knowledge / intellect is to shatter any personal identity as a robust intellect, and actually internalize the limitations of one’s own knowledge and intellect to foster more growth. No one who thinks they know everything is inherently poised to learn much. On a social level it involves surrounding yourself with individual who constantly challenge you to grow intellectually which can literally feel like an attack on said identity.

I love this take. You hear a lot about non-linearity dynamics of complex systems in academia and even more practically in conceptualizing commonplace phenomena we tend to interpret linearly or assume it’s governed by complete chaos. but I could see how it underlies many soft skills as you ascribed. Do you happen to have any reading recs on the topic in this domain ?

I find the failure mode for this to have been pretty insurmountable when you’re not genuinely on board with said identity. A trivial example: the behavior you could make into your identity is the result of socionormative expectations and pressure. Doctors say one should exercise, all my friends are athletic and expect me to be, society values fitness, to espouse the exercise lifestyle is seen as a moral virtue, etc.—but what if someone personally doesn’t give a fvck about exercise beyond these external forces? For some people it will never naturally become their identity, even if they “want” it to be, on account of the exogenous pressure to fit this norm. For some it will feel contrived or even forced. It is possible for the inherent motivation to act in accordance with your identity, and how you choose to orient yourself in the world, to be at odds with what you “want” to accomplish, do, or identify with on the surface. For that person, they have to genuinely value being the person who exercises for the “need” to become implicit.

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.

Agreed the tourist POV center focus is bizarre AF. it’s almost like they were afraid to ask Parisians or even other French natives regularly frequenting Paris what they thought and so they just went with tourists are happy…

This is awesome. And wholesome. I feel like your recipe is the sort we’d all stand to benefit from if adopting even a part of it. Thanks for sharing,

I very much agree with how you’ve categorized the initial state condition that is amenable to LLM assisted SWE and works well to a greater state of beneficial order. And implicitly I also agree most of the complement to that set of applied contexts yields ~medium to not so productive results.

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).

Plot Twist AF… you could be a writer

Acknowledging you want a web-app browser based alternative and this won’t answer your question, feel free to ignore.

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.

incisive, if not optimally reductive, summary of the underlying reality.

YUP.

It’s also arguably the most beneficially productive imperative in those domains that are shaped by iterative change towards an idealized conception.

This response to should have all but conclusively ended the silly debate in outlining the semantic drift of the term “Ponzi scheme” to encapsulate the relevant spectrum of linguistic variations, and yet…