# On Really Trying

> What are the true limits to motivation?

- **Website:** https://gwern.net/on-really-trying
- **Pricing:** unknown
- **Categories:** Writing & Content, Developer Tools
- **Tags:** politics, psychologyenergy, psychologywillpower, sociologysmall-groups, transhumanism, writing-content, developer-tools, productivity
- **Platforms:** Web
- **Last verified:** 2026-09-10
- **Canonical page:** https://linkrena.com/tools/on-really-trying

## About

Student : How can one realize his Self-nature? I know so little about the subject.

Yasutani : First of all, you must be convinced you can do so. The conviction creates determination, and the determination zeal. But if you lack conviction, if you think “maybe I can get it, maybe I can’t”, or even worse, “This is beyond me!”—you won’t awaken no matter how much you do zazen. 1

When I came across this quote, I was struck by its relevance to one of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s ‘beisutsukai’ posts about finding the successor to quantum mechanics, “The Failures of Eld Science” .

I meant to write an essay on how interesting it is that we intellectually know that many of our current theories must be wrong, and even have pretty good ideas as to which ones, but we still cannot psychologically tackle them with the same energy as if we had some anomaly or paradox to explain, or have the benefit of hindsight. The students in Eliezer’s story know that quantum mechanics is wrong; someone with a well-verified observation contradicting quantum mechanics knows that it is wrong (replace ‘quantum’ with ‘classical’ as you wish). They will achieve better results than a battalion of conventional QMists.

Brennan didn’t jump.

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