111–120 of 591 posts
I train Brazilian jiu jitsu and MMA. In our gym, we have a giant sign that says:
"A black belt is a white belt who refused to give up"
Basic translation: You can achieve the highest possible rank [Black belt] if you just keep showing up and enjoy the process.
This is excellent advice. Just by doing something, the habit gets created and the longer it gets, the easier it is to get started.
This has literally never worked for me with any habits I've tried intentionally cultivating. I'll pick something and do it every day for several weeks. Then I stop. Am I doing it wrong? Am I just weird that I can't seem to form good habits? I sincerely think I wouldn't remember to brush my teeth in the morning if my mouth didn't feel so gross, and I've been doing that every morning for over 30 years!
One solution is to set yourself a goal to just do this one thing, to get started, and do that thing. No matter how bad, just make that draft, POC, whatever. Start breaking up things into smaller pieces, and set yourself to accomplish one piece at the time, no matter the state of results. Iterate on this to improve quality and scope, and keep your focus on the smaller, managable things, while getting more clear about the whole over time. If something is too much, just break it up.
Another take is how to manage your expectations and associations. If every time you visit the dog is to give it medicine, it'll become suspicious of you. So every time you visit your projects, make sure to leave room for some cuddle time, while making sure it's also supporting progress on that same thing. For very difficult goals, transform it into a spike and celebrate it no matter what the results. No matter what, you learned something new. You want to associate with progress.
This type of sentiment generally makes me feel that literally nobody understands why business work or don't. I remember pitching the idea of a fantasy financial league to a friend who is a teacher, as a way of teaching kids about the stock market and finance. His reply instantly gelled with me and let me know they actually understood much more than I about both teaching and finance: He said it will teach exactly the…
I’m no business expert, but this approach seems like a huge gamble to me. Why spend years building a project before the usefulness and public reception is quantified? I’d rather spend a hard few months building something that fails rather than an easy 6 years.
Reminds me of the book atomic habits. It emphasizes the compounding gains of small wins.
If you liked that book, Power of Habits is the 10x better version. It's less of a 20 year olds book of lifehacks and more of a science based approach. Power of Habit book changed my life, quit all drugs and video games. Now I just read nonfiction books.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup. Knowledge usually works like this. When I first got into home cooking a few years ago, the learning process was painfully slow. It must've taken several attempts spread across a week just to learn how to make basic scrambled eggs the "proper" way. Now after a few years of experience, every ingredient I learn to work with seemingly unlocks a dozen more dishes that I can easily assemble. The rate of learning accel…
Would you mind sharing what you used to learn cooking? My main struggle is recipe books that teach you the recipe rather than cooking. But I'd love to learn HOW to cook, not WHAT to cook.
I've not read Salt, Acid, Fire, Heat so I can't comment, but I assume it takes a similar approach.
Duolingo taught me this. I started doing ten minutes of Duolingo a day... 959 days ago. It showed me the enormous power of doing something small every day. Since then I've tried setting myself other streak targets. My most successful has been publishing weeknotes (just published number 92) since that forces me to focus on what I've got done - and through that incentivizes me to get stuff done, so I can put it in my w…
Me too, about half that. But I'm painfully aware it's no longer getting me anywhere (I completed the 'tree' hundreds of days ago) - what I really need to do is sit down with my textbook in order to progress further with the grammar, and widen my vocabulary beyond what's in Duolingo. But that requires more time commitment, so I do it much less often, and do Duolingo instead.. fairly pointlessly - sure it probably help…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup. Knowledge usually works like this. When I first got into home cooking a few years ago, the learning process was painfully slow. It must've taken several attempts spread across a week just to learn how to make basic scrambled eggs the "proper" way. Now after a few years of experience, every ingredient I learn to work with seemingly unlocks a dozen more dishes that I can easily assemble. The rate of learning accel…
Would you mind sharing what you used to learn cooking? My main struggle is recipe books that teach you the recipe rather than cooking. But I'd love to learn HOW to cook, not WHAT to cook.
Duolingo taught me this. I started doing ten minutes of Duolingo a day... 959 days ago. It showed me the enormous power of doing something small every day. Since then I've tried setting myself other streak targets. My most successful has been publishing weeknotes (just published number 92) since that forces me to focus on what I've got done - and through that incentivizes me to get stuff done, so I can put it in my w…
Me too, about half that. But I'm painfully aware it's no longer getting me anywhere (I completed the 'tree' hundreds of days ago) - what I really need to do is sit down with my textbook in order to progress further with the grammar, and widen my vocabulary beyond what's in Duolingo. But that requires more time commitment, so I do it much less often, and do Duolingo instead.. fairly pointlessly - sure it probably help…
This type of sentiment generally makes me feel that literally nobody understands why business work or don't. I remember pitching the idea of a fantasy financial league to a friend who is a teacher, as a way of teaching kids about the stock market and finance. His reply instantly gelled with me and let me know they actually understood much more than I about both teaching and finance: He said it will teach exactly the…
That said, I wonder if the "fantasy financial league" game can become a lesson by selectively choosing a handful of stocks over a 30 year period. Tell the kids about the economics of the period (let's say the 1960s - 1990s) and provide a few companies with the tickers, names, and descriptions replaced. Watch as the "blown up" stock subsides, but the conservative investor wins in the long-run.
EDIT: I cannot stop thinking about how ubiquitous YOLO as a philosophy has become in the last decade. Everything about life has become a binary of win or lose. Your stock market plays "won" if you are in the green, your tweet "lost" if you did not get effective engagement, your latest commit "won" if the established metrics succeeded after deployment. And then there are the implications in machine learning, where everything becomes a binary "correct or incorrect" assessment...