Home

How Serious Are You?

Published 2026-09-08

And do your actions match the answer?

The Spectrum of Seriousness

In the context of achieving a goal, one end of the seriousness spectrum is complete unseriousness, where the player doesn't do anything to further their goal. On the other end is obsessiveness, where the player does the bare minimum in other parts of their life to maximize progress towards their goal—they may lose friends, suffer health issues, or enter financial straits in their pursuit of glory and greatness.

But actual seriousness (AS) and claimed seriousness (CS) can be, and often are, two very different points on the spectrum. Economists call AS a revealed preference and CS a stated preference. I'll call them AS and CS because it feels like a subset of preference theory. It also makes it sound like I came up with something original.

I suspect CS follows a normal distribution and AS follows a skewed-right distribution, i.e., the bulk of people have below-average AS. Put simply, most people are not as serious towards their goals as they claim. There are a few reasons for this:

They know they're not that serious, but claim to be so for status, fitting in, etc.
- Ex: Lydia doesn't like music that much, but it's gotten her respect, friends, and a paycheck, so she continues doing the bare minimum, which is far less than what she could actually be doing if she truly cared about music.
Their calibration is off, and they think their AS equals their CS. This mismatch can go both ways: they can bring their AS up to match their CS, or bring their CS down to match their AS. In the former, they may not know that they could be more serious. In the latter, the extra CS may be taking up resources, e.g., time spent trying to back up the CS, even when they know they don't care. The person would be better off just saying "I don't care as much as I said I did".
- Ex: Sharon says she is serious about music, putting her time and money where her mouth is by spending $1000 on a violin and practicing an hour or two a day. In reality, professional violinists easily spend five figures on their violin and up to four hours per day practicing. Sharon thought she was nearing the ceiling, when in reality she's nowhere close.
- Ex: Adam says he is serious about volunteering for a cause. He is on many mailing lists and regularly gets contacted to be asked to help or donate in some way. He doesn't enjoy this and eventually unsubscribes from all contact. He volunteers on his own terms and feels much better.

Both of these are issues. Intentionally lying to others corrupts the soul. How else could that time be spent if the honest path was taken and they chose to spend effort on something that was actually enticing? The miscalibration leaves plenty of progress on the table. What if Sharon learned that there are still returns to be had between the one- and four-hour practice marks? That's 15+ hours a week of potential gains she's missing out on!

The rest of this post attempts to help the reader gauge where their CS and AS points lie relative to one another, as well as serve as a reference for me to see how much more I could be doing in my seriousness studies.

Questions to Help Determine Seriousness

Any "no" answers to the following questions probably means you aren't as serious as you could be.

Are You Doing the Thing?

No, like actually doing it. Getting better at writing requires writing, cycling requires cycling. Fuckarounditis is a serious disease that afflicts countless serious people every year without them realizing it. The SAID principle is real.

Are You Incurring a Cost?

Cost being time, money, social life, opportunity, etc. Revealed preferences strike again, and if someone is serious about something, they should be willing to pay for it in proportion to how serious they are. Are you spending money towards it? Is your free time being taken up by it? Are you sacrificing social and romantic opportunities to pursue it?

Are You Learning and Applying Those Lessons?

Are you reviewing your work and trying to find ways to get better? Are you doing post-mortems, analyzing them for deficiencies, then finding ways to patch those holes quickly so the same mistake isn't made again? Are you seeking out ways to learn, whether online, in person, through books and film and podcasts and interviews? Are you actively trying to learn? Not just sitting there letting the knowledge go over you, but actively thinking, generating new ideas, testing them, refining them? Are you seeking out failures to learn from?

Are You Seeking Feedback to Get Better?

Are you asking others to give you raw, honest, constructive feedback and really accepting it and making the necessary corrections? Are you even open to feedback? Are you increasing your surface area for feedback to reach you, and then following up when it does to get even more?

Are You Competitive?

Are you trying to become the best? Are you trying to outwork your competitors or your past self? Do you have a way to rank yourself, whether on an absolute scale or against others?

If a Stranger Watched You For a Week With No Context, Would They Think You're Serious About This?

Or describe your day to a stranger in 15-minute increments and ask them "what do you think I'm serious about?". If their answer is different from yours, think about why that may be. Does your time and actions actually reflect your claimed seriousness?

Are You Looking at Serious People and Trying to Mimic Them?

Look at people you consider to be serious. How is their life different from yours? Are they really built different, or are they doing things you aren't willing to? Kobe Bryant practiced basketball for hours every day. Startup founders and their teams work 100 hours a week in pursuit of their mission.

Examples of Serious and Unserious People

Here are some fictitious examples of both seriousness and lack thereof across different fields:

Krista doesn't use LLMs for coding because "they're just stochastic parrots". She instead chooses to write everything by hand. She refuses to even test a model on principle and scowl at colleagues using it. Meanwhile, her colleagues use a hybrid approach, getting LLMs to do the bulk of the work while they check its accuracy and completeness, ultimately speeding up their deployment time immensely.
Olga doesn't have a way to measure cycling power because "it's too expensive" and "RPE-based training works just fine" and "analyzing power data is too time-consuming". While she's busy training on feel and not making much progress, her competitors are using data to guide their training, making leaps and bounds in both fitness and recovery. (RPE 7 will always feel RPE 7, so if you're not recovering enough you can't tell because RPE 7 = RPE 7.)
Francesca is trying to lose weight by eating less. But counting calories and weighing food is "too inconvenient", so she doesn't do it. Using a GLP-1 is also "cheating". Her friends, on the other hand, are more involved: Eliot obsessively counts and tracks calories, taking care to measure ingredients out carefully and asking restaurants for nutrition info if they have it; Andris got prescribed a GLP-1 and follows the prescriptions. Both of them shed pounds by the week.
Todd wants to spend less time on his phone, so he sets a non-password-protected screen time limit on the most distracting apps. This doesn't change anything—he blazes right past the gates through self-persuasion and habit. Scott takes a different approach: he purchases a phone lock box, removes the addictive apps, makes it greyscale, and stores his screen time password in an online locker that's guarded by 60 minutes of inconvenient, annoying work.
Whitney is a competitive athlete who wants to up her game, and everything points to needing to spend more time on recovery. She starts to eat a bit cleaner, get more sleep, and be less stressed. She makes some progress. Andris is in the same boat, but puts more effort into his recovery: he tracks macros to ensure he's hitting what he needs to, ensures he fuels within 60 minutes of the end of his workout, follows sleep hygiene practices, regularly foam rolls, prehabs his various joints and muscles, and actively recovers instead of taking an entire day off.

Deciding Where the Limit Is

Most of the examples above have no ceiling; there are more interventions and actions to take than the person has resources of time, energy, and money and can easily lead to burnout or other issues if everything is attempted at once.

While more is generally better, it isn't always better. Professionals know themselves and when to temper effort for long-term gain. An athlete who went hard for two weeks then didn't do anything for the following week would never be considered serious. Some proxies of seriousness—actually doing the thing, seeking feedback—are better than other types and should be prioritized accordingly.

Limits exist on a case-by-case basis. Determine them, test them, then raise them.