Golden nuggets I harvested in the past 6 months
Hi old lad, how does it feel getting old? Here is you soon →👴, so let’s get cranking while we are relatively young.
As for the title, I don’t know the precise timespan obviously, but here are the main nuggets that comes to my mind from past months that you can steal, for free.
Productivity:
Remnote is great
Not as great incremental reading as in SM, but better overview of things, and referencing e.g. frameworks and ideas to fuel action
Parkinson law is a beast.
When I don’t want things to bother me tomorrow, I work on super productivity mode.
I think most people are productive to the extent their physical or mental environment constraints them to be. Meaning, if something bothers you to an extent that you don’t want your brain to bully you anymore with negative thoughts, you will finish the task… quickly.
This extends to mentality: If you truly want to stop acting certain way and want to do things differently, you will start doing so at a point where it burns.
For example, few years back when I only read and took no action, I was reminded of this every day by my brain (“You only read, no hard skills, no money, DO SOMETHING!”)…
I was reminded of this by my brain approximately for 6-8 months, until I had enough and started doing whatever that resembles taking action. In my case, starting a shitty e-commerce store, which not so coincidentally over the years branched to digital service business paying my rent. Things expand, my friend. It’s a universal truth.
Ok, one more about this, from Paul Graham (legend startup investor at Ycombinator)
Let's see, you know, I don't think I'm very efficient. I have two ways of getting work done. One is, like, during Y Combinator, the way I worked on Y Combinator was, I was forced to, right? Like, there was just, I had to set the application deadline. And then people would apply, and then there would be all of these applications that I'd have to respond to by a certain time, so I had to read them. And I knew if I read them badly we would get bad startups, so I tried really hard to read them well, right? So I set up this situation that forced me to work. - Paul Graham
Why would the brain exert energy today, if it can do so tomorrow, without consequences? Think about it.
Practical solution that worked for me: I simply take more work than I can handle. It gives me constant brain tease that unless I complete client A’s work today, I will be in big trouble in the next days having to jiggle with A, B and C, which might result dissapointing my clients. And this comes from experience knowing how much things I can get done in certain timespan.
Is it stressful and maybe unhealthy? Yes, but boy do I get things done when I’m in that situation.
SORRY FOR RAMBLING, JEEZ, upcoming next, other nugs.
Social
Aging and pursuing “truth” builds self-confidence
When I walk streets these days, I feel more uncaring about my daily surroundings, as the world has serious stuff going on, and in comparison other people and individual opinions don’t matter much to me these days.
I used to care excessively what other people think, how they see me, whether they judge or shame me.
What is the truth?
People all have their own models of how world supposedly works, what is right and wrong. And there’s so many of them. I believe in mine a lot, as does everyone.
When I was younger and self-conscious with social anxiety, my thought pattern was “is this right” “am I doing it right” “am I behaving weirdly?”
This is living with a mask on. You are not living true to yourself, that’s trying to live true to other people models. See, life becomes easier when you only do things you truly believe in, and are not faking it. That is because you can just view your actions through objective lens.
Believing what’s true for yourself, but adjusting when needed:
“Why did I say this stupid embarassing thing?” - “Well, at the moment I felt like it was a funny thing to say, that’s all.” Apparently not all people are ok with dropping the R-word. OK, noted. I can adjust my models a bit for certain group of people and move on. Might still call James a retarded goblin, though.
Believing what’s true, and not adjusting with negative feedback:
And on the other hand is where people don’t approve my actions, but I won’t adjust my models: *I’m doing thing X or behaving in a way Y, but people don’t seem to take it well* - “Well, I have overwhelming number of concepts in my brain rooting for this path, so what do they know? Do I have good reason to believe their models over my own? No, so keep talking, I believe in my juicy concepts over yours.”
Most people don’t know what they are talking about anyways, and most people parrot things they have superficially heard somewhere. Don’t let people to throw you off your path if you have no reason to — Even if there are bunch of voices and it feels intimidating. Though, keep listening and questioning here and there whether you are right or not, and if it seems that they were right after all, adjust and move on.
Goals
The paths to passionate work and goals is often very complicated. It's actually very rare to find someone who really did have clarity about what they were passionate about in.
From Cal Newport’s speech (youtube vid link)
One of my favorite quotes about this is from the NPR host Ira Glass, "This American Life" host, who is someone who loves his work. And there's this great interview online where some college students come to Glass to ask him:
”How do we build a career like yours”
And he says, “There's this idea in the movie that you should follow your dreams. I don't buy that.”
He starts talking for a while about how you have to force skills to come and it's really hard. And when he sees their faces fall, he finally says,
”Guys, I see you're trying to figure this all out in the abstract, and I think that's your tragic mistake.”
So I like the way Glass put it. The idea that you can figure out in the abstract what you're supposed to do with your career is not just a mistake, but it's a tragic mistake. And I think we all sort of feel that.
This is a good reminder that goals emerge in unpredictable ways. But as I’m writing this post and dug this quote, now I noticed the phrase “how you have to force skills to come.” WOW, that is interesting. It was true for me if you read back on this post. I had to literally force technical skills like programming to come after months of ruminating, and only then I started to see some light in my “career path”, for the lack of better term. Before that, you wouldn’t believe the number of hours I put into trying to figure things out in abstract. Did not work.
But I don’t know, I guess I meant to say it’s a good reminder to keep tinkering, taking action, and not trying to figure it all out in your head. We’re all gonna make it.
Niko