(In Progress) Advice on Upskilling
You're Not Lazy, You Just Lack a Habit • Don’t have a passion? Go create one. • Make the Habit Easily Repeatable • Don’t Overreact to Bad Days • Aim for Virtuous Cycles • The Importance of Hardcore Skills • Fortify Your F*cking Fundamentals • Why Train? • The Magic You’re Looking For is in the Full-Assed Effort You’re Avoiding • At some point Doing the Hard Thing becomes Easier than Making the Hard Thing Easier • How to Cultivate Discipline • Keep Your Hands On The Boulder
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You're Not Lazy, You Just Lack a Habit
If you’re struggling to stick with demanding forms of practice, then temporarily forget about efficiency and just build a habit with some less effective but more enjoyable form of practice. Although the ultimate goal is to train efficiently and get the largest possible performance gain out of your limited training time, that’s going to feel taxing, and you might not want to work that hard at first – not because you’re inherently lazy, but because you haven’t built a habit. You eventually want to get to the point where performance improvement is your primary focus and fun is a second-order optimization, but it’s okay to optimize for fun at the beginning to help you build a habit.
Consider strength training, for example. If you’re just starting out, but you’re not looking forward to lifting heavy-ass weights, then that’s okay! You don’t have to lift them yet. Your #1 focus should be just getting your ass into the gym and doing some kind of activity that loosely qualifies as exercise. After a week of, say, shooting hoops, you might be motivated to try some bodyweight exercises – and then the following week maybe some light weightlifting, and maybe the week after that you’ll be ready to challenge yourself by putting some serious weight on the bar.
It’s the same way with anything else – for instance, learning math. If you don’t feel motivated to solve a high volume of problems that are challenging enough to make you mentally sweat, that’s okay. You can start off watching math edutainment videos and exploring Wikipedia. The next week, maybe try to solve some “math meme” problems each day (and look at the comments to check if you got it right), and the following week, maybe work out some easy arithmetic or algebra problems each day (stuff that you still remember fairly well but haven’t done in a while). By that point you’ve gotten yourself into the metaphorical weight room, doing some light lifting, and you’re ready to put some serious weight on the bar. And that’s when you start working through a structured curriculum that engages you in taxing practice to pack the maximum possible learning into your practice time.
Once you get to that point, you’ve built a habit, and you need to do everything in your power to maintain it. If you want to take a day off, just do a quick 10 minutes – something that feels negligible but keeps the habit going. The habit is a psychological force field that protects you from all sorts of negative feelings that try to dissuade you from training.
In summary: You’re not lazy, you just lack a habit. So start simple, whatever gets the ball rolling. (But if you know this and you’re still unwilling to build a habit… then yeah, you’re lazy.)
Don’t have a passion? Go create one.
Be disciplined, set up a habit, compound compound compound. Develop a relationship with it, put in extra time when you’re bored, come to it when you need an emotional outlet. Trust that it will grow on you and seep into your identity as you spend a lot of time practicing and developing serious expertise.
It’s just like developing a close human relationship. You might not have a strong bond with the person initially, but you get along “enough” at the beginning, and over time you get to know each other so well, you go through so much shit together, that you are inseparable.
And don’t worry about the long-term too much. The person who became your best friend, you probably didn’t know it the day you met them. You probably got to know them better and better, week by week, month by month, until at some point you realized you couldn’t imagine life without them. It’s the same way with creating a passion. If you keep on making short-term progress then the long-term will sort itself out.
Make the Habit Easily Repeatable
Don’t make it such a “big thing” that you do it one day and dread doing it the next day. You know what happens to people who start their New Year’s weight loss resolution off with 3 hours at the gym every day? They come for one day and then don’t come back! So don’t do that. Instead, start out with a volume of work that’s small enough that you don’t dread doing it again the next day.
It doesn’t matter if the volume of daily work is too small to achieve your long-term goals in the timeframe you want. Eventually, as you build up a habit and your mind and body adapt to whatever it is you’re doing, it will feel easier to ramp up the volume of work until you’re moving at a pace that puts you on track to accomplish your long-term goals.
So don’t worry about total volume of work at the beginning. Just focus on consistency. As the habit sets in and you adapt, you’ll find it easier to increase your volume of work. And as the habit settles into your identity, you’ll actually want to increase that volume of work.
Don’t Overreact to Bad Days
Even if you’re making the right decisions, you can still have bad days. So it’s important to stay consistent and not let a single bad outcome derail you.
Yes, that can be difficult psychologically. We tend to be risk-averse and overreact to negative outcomes. But it can help to zoom out and look at your progress on a longer timescale.
At the same time, though, you can’t use that as an excuse to avoid measuring progress and thinking critically about it. Every time there’s a bad outcome, you have to ask whether there’s anything you can learn from it to carry into the future.
Sometimes there’s a flaw in reasoning. Other times there’s a flaw in assumptions. Perhaps you didn’t have all the key information to begin with and you should have done better due diligence. Or perhaps some information revealed itself or changed after you made the decision but you were too slow to react.
It’s not worth beating yourself up over mistakes, unless they’re mistakes you’re repeating over again. One-and-done mistakes won’t keep you from making progress in the long-term, but repeated mistakes will.
Aim for Virtuous Cycles
It’s a fact of life that things compound. You improve one aspect of your life, it’s going to have carryover effects, and that other aspect is going to have carryover effects, and so on.
It’s important to take advantage of these feedback loops and orient them in a positive direction. Because if they’re not moving you in a positive direction, they’re moving you in a negative direction. There is no stable equilibrium.
You’re going to get pulled into self-perpetuating cycles whether you like it or not. So it’s important to do all you can to get yourself pulled into virtuous cycles, not vicious cycles.
The Importance of Hardcore Skills
Hardcore skills are the biggest bottleneck to improving one’s life and society in general. It doesn’t matter which of those things (yourself versus society in general) you’re more focused on – hardcore skills are always the answer.
So many people want to have high impact and improve the world (and their own lives) in a big way. But desire is not enough. You typically can’t do anything big unless you have big skills. I say “typically” because sure, some people get really lucky being born into the right family in the right place at the right time and enjoy an outsized impact despite not having built up their skills as much – but even for those people, the difference between a relatively large impact (relative to other people) versus an absolutely large impact (“put a dent in the universe”) still comes down to skill-building.
Hardcore skill development is also one of the greatest social mobility hacks. Even if your family is not well-connected, you can make up for it by developing real skills. Sure, you have to develop more skills than well-connected people to reach the same level of opportunity, and you’re going to have less guidance developing those skills and finding your way to the arena – but once you’re in the arena, those extra skills pay big dividends.
The Importance of Having Your Prerequisites In Place
Having your prerequisites in place is the difference between something seeming confusing and inaccessible versus “wait… that’s all it is?”. It’s easy to think you lack learning ability when really you just lack prerequisite knowledge. Differences in learning ability do exist, but they’re often conflated with presence or absence of prerequisite knowledge. (Beware: it’s also easy to think you’re wicked fast when really you’ve just mastered more prerequisites than your peers.)
More generally, the way to “unlock” things that feel inaccessible to you is to shore up your prerequisite abilities. This applies not just to learning tasks, but also to opportunities. Everybody knows that luck is where preparation meets opportunity, but fewer people understand that if you don’t have the prerequisite abilities in place that prepare you to capitalize on an opportunity, you probably won’t see it in the first place. Imagine how many opportunities you’re blind to because you don’t have the prerequisite knowledge to even see them whiz by.
Fortify Your F*cking Fundamentals
To have enough mental bandwidth to think deeply about what’s going on in any complex field, you need to be very comfortable with the fundamentals. And that’s not going to happen if the fundamentals you need are close to the edge of your ability. Sure, you can execute at the edge of your ability… but not comfortably, and that makes all the difference. Your high-level train of thought is going to get continually derailed by the low-level details you have to manage. You’re going to have a hard time seeing the forest for the trees.
To hammer in your fundamental skills to the point of comfortable execution, it helps to not only get plenty of practice with those skills, but also layer plenty of more advanced skills on top.
For instance, consider figure skating. Yes, figure skaters get really good at skating in part because they skate a lot, but it’s not just that. It’s also that they continually layer more advanced jumps and spins. Skating around the rink will get you to a decent level of comfort in your basic skating skills, but being able to land jumps and spins will force a whole new level of robustness and fault-tolerance in those underlying skills. It’s like those robot testing demonstrations where all the engineers stand in a circle shoving the robot around. It’s not enough to just test that the robot can follow a predetermined path. You gotta bang it around a bit to make sure it’s resilient.
It all comes down to forcing structural integrity of underlying skills. When you build advanced features on top of a system, they sometimes fail in ways that reveal previously-unknown foundational weaknesses in the underlying structure. This forces you to fortify the underlying structure so that the system can accommodate new elements without compromising its integrity. And when you fortify the system to execute advanced tasks successfully, it becomes capable of executing simpler tasks comfortably. What’s more, fortifying the underlying structure often requires improving its organization and elegance, which, in the context of knowledge, is what produces deep understanding and insight.
Why Train?
Most skills can be trained. But serious training usually isn’t pleasant, so most people don’t do it.
If you suck at writing, then just sit down and write for 15 minutes each day. It might be unpleasant fishing for cohesive thoughts in your brain stew, pulling them out, and translating them into text.
But that doesn’t mean it will always feel that way. As you practice again and again, it will feel easier over time. And as it feels easier you’ll free up more and more mental bandwidth to notice areas for improvement. And you’ll get better.
Will you become a world-class writer? Who knows. Probably not. But will you open up opportunities that were previously closed to you? Probably.
The Magic You’re Looking For is in the Full-Assed Effort You’re Avoiding
30 minutes of fully focused deliberate practice 4 days per week can have you making serious progress towards most learning or fitness goals. But it has to be fully focused – a “full-assed” effort – and you have to be continually upping the level of challenge as your capabilities increase. You have to work intensely enough that you come out of each session seriously winded. Meaning that either your brain feels like mush or your body feels like jell-o.
When someone fails to make decent progress towards their learning or fitness goals and cites lack of time as the issue, they’re often wrong. It’s often not lack of time but rather lack of willingness to put forth a full-assed effort under a continually increasing level of challenge.
If you put in a half-assed effort then you get a quarter of the results at most. That’s what causes the purported lack of time. To get the equivalent of 30 min full-assed, you have to put in at least 2h half-assed, which you quite reasonably might not have time for. Or you put in 30 min half-assed and get the equivalent of 7.5 min full-assed, which doesn’t move the needle fast enough on your progress for you to reach your goal in a reasonable timeframe.
The magic you’re looking for is in the full-assed effort you’re avoiding.
At some point Doing the Hard Thing becomes Easier than Making the Hard Thing Easier
The condition for getting yourself to do something is simple: it’s just internal willpower ≥ external friction. If that condition is false then the way you make it true is by decreasing friction and/or increasing willpower.
It’s helpful to think of this like balancing a budget: willpower is like your income and friction is like your spending. If your budget isn’t balancing then the first thing to do is cut out any dumb costs. Is there anything dumb about your environment that’s causing needless friction? Cut it out. Your life is like a big codebase – if you’re struggling to implement a new behavior in some area, then refactor that area to make it easier to build on.
But at the same time, you can only take cost-cutting so far. There are always going to be some basic expenses you have to cover. And there’s a limit to how easy you can make it to add a new feature to the codebase. You can refactor all you want but there’s always going to be some amount of complexity inherent to the new feature.
The trick is to be honest with yourself about when you start asymptoting off in your attempts to reduce environmental friction. At some point doing the hard thing becomes easier than making the hard thing easier. And that’s when you have to muster up the willpower to overcome whatever friction is left over. That’s when you have to say “enough refactoring, time to lock in and implement this sucker.” That’s when you have to change your focus from cost-cutting to producing extra income.
In any journey, you can chart an easier, more efficient course, but there’s always going to be some serious trekking involved.
How to Cultivate Discipline
When there’s something that you know you should do, but you can’t get yourself to do, it means some habit is pulling you away from doing it. So what you need to do is tear down the unproductive habit and build up a counter-habit whose gravity eventually becomes strong enough to completely overtake the original habit. You try to disrupt your momentum on your negative habit and create momentum towards a positive habit. And while you might not be able to do this all in one fell swoop, what you can do is iterate on it and gradually ease into a transition one little step at a time.
Here’s a concrete example which may or may not apply to you but hopefully it will illustrate the main idea. Let’s say you’re having trouble cultivating discipline with exercising every day. The first question is: what’s keeping you from exercising? Maybe you plan to exercise after work but then things come up and you always find an excuse. Okay, so do it first thing in the morning. Why aren’t you already doing it first thing in the morning? Let’s say it’s because you have a habit of waking up 15 minutes before you have to leave for work and there’s not enough time for exercise.
That habit is pulling you away from your goal of daily exercise. So you need to gradually replace it with a more productive habit. Maybe instead of waking up 15 minutes before work, you wake up 20 minutes before and spend 5 minutes doing jumping jacks as soon as you get out of bed. (Or if 5 minutes is too daunting then maybe you start with just 1 or 2 minutes and gradually build up to 5 minutes.) After enough days of waking up 5 minutes earlier for 5 minutes of jumping jacks, you’ll have created a “new normal” morning routine, and you’ll find it within yourself to wake up another 5 minutes earlier and replace your 5 minutes of jumping jacks with a 10-minute run.
You keep going this direction, gradually tearing down your habit of waking up just before you have to leave, and building up a habit of waking up earlier and earlier and doing more and more exercise with that extra time. Eventually you reach your desired fitness routine goal and then you just maintain that habit into the future.
Keep Your Hands On The Boulder
People will do unbelievable mental gymnastics to convince themselves that doing an easy, enjoyable thing that is unrelated to their supposed goal somehow moves the needle more than doing a hard, unpleasant thing that is directly related to said goal.
If you want to move the needle on a goal, you have to concentrate your efforts directly on that goal. You can exhaust yourself doing other things, fulfilling other responsibilities and/or moving the needle on other goals – but at the end of the day, each goal has its own needle, and the general feeling of exhaustion doesn’t imply you’ve successfully moved any needle in particular.
This can be a hard truth, especially for people who have taxing responsibilities that are separate from their aspirational goals. But the only way to achieve those aspirational goals is to somehow find it in oneself to directly move the needle on them. There is no other way.
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