I think it would be very useful to talk about a specific skill as a case study. When I considered skills that I might be interested in cultivating (for example, playing guitar, juggling, or learning a new programming language came to mind for me) many of the steps varied from unimportant to explicitly antagonistic. If I want to practice a skill like programming where my feedback loop necessarily involves searching the internet for syntax, my set of relevant distractions will be very different than if I need to go outside to an open space to juggle clubs.
It’s antagonistic to that end because a specific skill is the wrong case study.
I think by the time someone decides on a specific skill they can have already baked in really critical mistakes.
They aim for a goal that only vaguely fits what they really care about, so their clarity and motivation bleed out as they spend time on it. (I want to stop feeling like an imposter! Guitar players are objectively impressive, let’s learn guitar!)
Or they fail to prioritize effectively, so open 50 projects and make scant progress in any of them.
Or they have a broken understanding of what learning looks like, so intentionally trying to learn mostly stifles the actual process of discovery and integration. (I must ace this course, or must memorize all the syntax and best practices, or must dive straight into complicated Real Project use.)
Or they forget to have a gears model of successfully acquiring the skill at all, and instead half-assedly hope it will fall out of the sky if they perform the right gestures. (If I give myself a few hours of exposure therapy to embarassedly dropping clubs, I’ll learn to juggle right?)
The right class looks more like:
You feel like an imposter. All your successes are flukes and lightning won’t strike twice, but on this day you’re setting yourself up to replicate the conditions for success anyways. All your failures were inherent and inevitable, but on this day you’re giving yourself a chance to notice small things that vary the experience.
YOU WANT TO DO ALL THE THINGS! When you clean up the space and leave out only the things you need today, that’s still a lot of things! When spending double time on everything, you also wind up getting to fewer of them than you expected. After a dozen iterations of this you have probably gotten the hint that your calibration is off. There’s obvious solution avenues you can try once you have a way to gauge the problem—hide everything by default, limit yourself to a few solid projects you pick every time, tighten your standards of picking, use a new selection strategy entirely, accept the bias and work around it.
You have cleared your desktop, physical and digital, and closed all your open tabs. You’re working on this course for a half hour. Yay celebrate, maybe take a breather. You’re going to work on this course for another half hour.
You’ve been going over syntax for 10 minutes. Wow this really sucks and you hate it. What could you do that would be more rewarding and still, in some sense, be equivalent to going over syntax for 10 minutes? Well… what was the important part here? Was it the specific information—can you read in a different way, switch up note-taking styles, make anki cards? Was it the reviewing—could you use different sources, prioritize different information, go over some other topic entirely? Was it understanding the language better—maybe you could go through a tutorial, or read source code, or mess around in a REPL instead.
After a couple dozen cases of beating your head against a big project plan you don’t understand enough to work on, then being faced with the prospect of repeating the exercise knowing you still can’t make progress, you start to appreciate the value of leveraging prior knowledge and performing small empirical experiments.
Your friends are raving about language X, so you read an intro on it. You read a different perspective. It does sound neat, and you’ve got time to mess around. You go through a basic project setup to get a feel for it. You set it up again and get slightly more comfortable. Maybe you end there, satisfied, and explore other things… maybe you want to try to do something a bit more complicated. Maybe you try and struggle at both attempts so you shift to reading docs or working from an example. You stay focused on specific actionable goals at every step, keeping in tune with they pan out.
You spend way too much time stuck on the task ‘get rid of distractions’ and don’t get around to doing anything useful. Removing distractions takes unsustainable amounts of upfront energy, or there’s a debilitating backlog of cleaning and organizing to get through. Of course this wasn’t less true any other time that you needed to be free of distraction. So, you pick a standard to care about and painstakingly familiarize yourself with the actual costs and benefits of reaching it. Working through the backlog in pieces will just be what DoubleDay is for you until that’s no longer your bottleneck.
You’re totally in a half-ass, satisfice mindset about this problem. But you’ve already satisficed a nice environment and are making plausibly deniable dummy attempts regardless, so you could stand to occasionally throw in a sincere try. Do something that has a real chance of working whether or not it fits the narrative. No need for anyone to know your secret audacity.
I think it would be very useful to talk about a specific skill as a case study. When I considered skills that I might be interested in cultivating (for example, playing guitar, juggling, or learning a new programming language came to mind for me) many of the steps varied from unimportant to explicitly antagonistic. If I want to practice a skill like programming where my feedback loop necessarily involves searching the internet for syntax, my set of relevant distractions will be very different than if I need to go outside to an open space to juggle clubs.
It’s antagonistic to that end because a specific skill is the wrong case study.
I think by the time someone decides on a specific skill they can have already baked in really critical mistakes.
They aim for a goal that only vaguely fits what they really care about, so their clarity and motivation bleed out as they spend time on it. (I want to stop feeling like an imposter! Guitar players are objectively impressive, let’s learn guitar!)
Or they fail to prioritize effectively, so open 50 projects and make scant progress in any of them.
Or they have a broken understanding of what learning looks like, so intentionally trying to learn mostly stifles the actual process of discovery and integration. (I must ace this course, or must memorize all the syntax and best practices, or must dive straight into complicated Real Project use.)
Or they forget to have a gears model of successfully acquiring the skill at all, and instead half-assedly hope it will fall out of the sky if they perform the right gestures. (If I give myself a few hours of exposure therapy to embarassedly dropping clubs, I’ll learn to juggle right?)
The right class looks more like: