Yup. This was something I probably didn’t figure out until my late 20s, probably because a lot of things came easy for me, and because if I was really interested in something, I would obsess about it naturally. Natural obsession has a lot of the same benefits as “buckling down”, but it’s harder to trigger voluntarily.
The thing that really drove the lesson home was advanced math. I realized that sometimes, making it through even a single page on a day could be a cause for major celebration. I might need to work through complicated exercises, invent my own exercises, learn fundamentals in a related branch of math, etc.
So I propose there are several valuable skills here:
Knowing when to buckle down.
Learning to enjoy being bad at a new skill and experiencing gradual improvement.
For certain goals, learning how to build consistent habits and accepting that real progress might mean at least 6-12 months of consistent work.
Yup. This was something I probably didn’t figure out until my late 20s, probably because a lot of things came easy for me, and because if I was really interested in something, I would obsess about it naturally. Natural obsession has a lot of the same benefits as “buckling down”, but it’s harder to trigger voluntarily.
The thing that really drove the lesson home was advanced math. I realized that sometimes, making it through even a single page on a day could be a cause for major celebration. I might need to work through complicated exercises, invent my own exercises, learn fundamentals in a related branch of math, etc.
So I propose there are several valuable skills here:
Knowing when to buckle down.
Learning to enjoy being bad at a new skill and experiencing gradual improvement.
For certain goals, learning how to build consistent habits and accepting that real progress might mean at least 6-12 months of consistent work.