Winning doesn't have to look dignified
Years ago, I was in Vegas watching a Smash Ultimate match at EVO, the biggest fighting game tournament in the world. There was nothing special about this match except that it was being shown. During qualifiers, random player pairs in the bracket would be brought to the main stage, and their match would be projected onto a screen so the audience would have something to watch. Sometimes they would be professional players, but neither of these players made it anywhere near the grand prize.
By spectator standards, it was a terrible match. The Pac-Man player spent the entire game at a distance, throwing out projectile attacks, and the other player failed to find a way to approach. There were no flashy combos, no tense moments. We watched Pac-Man throw fruit for a while and then it was over. The crowd hated this, the Pac-Man player was booed the whole time. He still advanced to the next match.
I think about food a lot. A nontrivial amount of my daily willpower points are spent on not snacking too much, not overeating, and not being distracted by food in between for long enough to be productive. Some days this is harder than others.
One of the tricks that I've learned works on me is to prepare a snack for myself, then set it next to my keyboard. I don't even eat it! It just sits there! This is somehow enough to quiet my brain.
I discovered this on accident after grabbing a snack a few times and then later realizing I hadn't eaten any of it after I sat back down. It sometimes feels a bit lame. It works anyways.
In 2016, Mark Zuckerberg sent an email to some of his exec team about Snapchat analytics:
Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted we have no analytics about them.
Given how quickly they're growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them. Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this.
About a week later, Project Ghostbuster allowed Facebook to install a man-in-the-middle attack that would let them intercept otherwise encrypted user data. They got the user analytics they were looking for.
We automatically fabricate and attach rules to a goal we're chasing that aren't actually part of the goal, "dignity" being a common one. This is a low agency move, you can just do undignified things.
That's not to say you should ignore your honor all the time – I don't endorse Project Ghostbuster for example – but sometimes winning looks like deciding that you don't give a shit. Notice when the rules you attach are fake and don't hobble yourself when they are.