Though, like you said, I’ve heard of these ideas in startup land before, I found your post particularly lucid. Last spring when I tried a TAP a week, I had the learning-intention and also had a hard time articulating that.
I notice there’s also an uncomfortable sort of suffering I experience when I approach a task/project/goal that is fundamentally a learning/explore objective, but I think of it as a doing/exploit. It feels like me getting hyper focused on the outcome/production, and if I don’t get the one I want I dismiss thoughts of “Well you learned something along the way!” as grasping a straws/justification.
“learned something along the way” is the wrong level. Specify what you learned and make a conscious evaluation of whether that knowledge has value in future production. Search/exploit is fractal and recursive: you’re searching for search strategies while executing such strategies to search for production knowledge. Turtles all the way down.
“learned something along the way” is the wrong level
Agreed. When I used to think of “learning something along the way”, it was a very passive sort of framing. I wasn’t able to think of search/exploit as a very active, “fractal and recursive” activity.
Though, like you said, I’ve heard of these ideas in startup land before, I found your post particularly lucid. Last spring when I tried a TAP a week, I had the learning-intention and also had a hard time articulating that.
I notice there’s also an uncomfortable sort of suffering I experience when I approach a task/project/goal that is fundamentally a learning/explore objective, but I think of it as a doing/exploit. It feels like me getting hyper focused on the outcome/production, and if I don’t get the one I want I dismiss thoughts of “Well you learned something along the way!” as grasping a straws/justification.
“learned something along the way” is the wrong level. Specify what you learned and make a conscious evaluation of whether that knowledge has value in future production. Search/exploit is fractal and recursive: you’re searching for search strategies while executing such strategies to search for production knowledge. Turtles all the way down.
Agreed. When I used to think of “learning something along the way”, it was a very passive sort of framing. I wasn’t able to think of search/exploit as a very active, “fractal and recursive” activity.