Here's what I've planned to do today: Write a blog post about what I have learned from the various books that I've read or reread over the past couple of months.
There was a lot about learning, performance, expertise and decision making. Also building habits and thinking. I want to explore what these learnings could mean to me personally and how I could utilize them in everyday life to get closer to my goals. It is also worth noting that happiness should play a large role in all of this as well. I think that when focusing too much on the performance aspect of it all, happiness and what is really important in life falls to the wayside. This is something that Cal Newport nicely reflects in his book deep work. I think he says something like that working is actually more enjoyable then leisure time. Also he says to figure out what the most important things in ones life are. Robert Greene in Mastery calls this "finding the life's task".
I've thought that for me that would be learning. Figuring out how to use the brain in such a way as to be able to adapt and learn new things fast.
I wonder how good of a goal that is. Or what it means. I'm thinking there is so much knowledge and skill in the world, one person can only master so much of it. There simply is not the time to master everything. So maybe the question to be asked before minding the learning is to wonder about what one should focus on. And also what one can discard and ignore. This seems to be a very important skill today, to be able to just ignore things.
The reason I started this journal entry was to get my head straight and get in the mood for writing the learnings from the books mentioned before. I had just eaten dinner and while doing that I was on the phone checking GitHub repositories. I saw AutoGPT and going through that brought me to stagehand and that brought me to browserbase. These are tools for automating browsers using AI. With browserbase one can run 1000s of browsers and run all kinds of tasks. I guess one could use them for scraping, testing information gathering (that's scraping i guess) and for automating tasks of all kinds. The tool leverages playwright to run tasks in the browser.
When looking at that kind of stuff and also at the profiles of maintainers of some of these projects I can't help but think that I am hopelessly incapable in comparison. But then they focused on something else. And they did so for long enough for me to see them do it. I guess if I continued working on web projects for long enough at some point someone just like me right now would stumble over my profile and think the same thing. How could someone achieve so much and have such skill? I guess the answer is focus and time.
When someone starts programming at age 10 and stays at it that person will have double the amount of experience than I do if I start at twenty and our paths cross when we are both 30. It would in fact be surprising if the person would not be twice as good as I am. And I guess when comparing something as closely defined as that, programming in a specific domain like web development, then one can start focusing on learning and strategies. But before that it's just a matter of time and focus. So that's the big thing, the thing to focus on. Like the interest rate is more important than the amount of money that you put in. If the one too small then it doesn't matter how much of the other thing you throw at it. The result will still be bad. So it is really important to focus on the right thing.
Now I am wondering how much value one can get from learning to do web development for ten years. There's something like diminishing returns. When I get to a good enough level, say in the first two to three years I should probably step up the game and look for something else to learn. Web development is a nice skill to have but in ten years time will it really still be that important? I guess the question here is what to focus on when learning something new.
I'll have to stop the computer now because its running insanely hot. It's a lot better now so maybe it was just because i was placing the laptop on a blanket and too little air was getting through.
So my thoughts so far bring me to a categorization that I'd like to make. The number one thing that we have and should focus on is our life. This means we have a resource that is exhaustible and should be valued above all else: that is Time.
To further specify that, we should consider that not all time is equal. We need to rest, sleep and take care of our bodies. So the resource we have and should guard is quality time. Quality time can be defined as time that we have available to us where we are free to choose what to do.
This is already a large topic which could be discussed in great detail. One thing that comes to mind is energy. This is something that we have control over. We might have a lot of time at our disposal but if we are tired or not functioning at our best this time cannot be optimally utilized. This means we need to take care of sleep, exercise and nutrition as well as mental health.
Let's not focus on that right now and consider it established that we have energy. Now to the time. In many places in today's world we have the luxury of great agency over our time. We rarely truly need to work more than 40 hours a week to make a living. In many cases we can even work less than that. This is a choice we can make. This leaves us with ample time and hopefully enough energy to pursue what we deem worth pursuing. We can optimize here and think about aligning our working time with the things that we want to do. This is an ideal state that we should strive for. In my case, working as a software developer has significant overlap with the things that I want to do. Thus I have a great advantage over someone who has to work 40 hours in a field which does not bring him closer to his goals.
Now that we have thought about time and it's allocation, we can start thinking about what to do with it. So this is about the what. And here we can think about what is really important to us. This is about life's questions, life's task and the most important things in life. The things that are easy to agree on are health, family and human connection. Next up is purpose. This is a bit more tricky to think about and i guess highly individual. Going for myself I think that learning is a big part of my purpose. I gain satisfaction from reading about ideas, thinking about them and trying to efficiently connect them to things I know. This has appeal to me because I feel like it is such a bottomless well. It's also not expensive to do and can be done any time. I guess it's also easy. This will probably be a part worth thinking about. We tend to gravitate toward preserving energy and therefore doing easy things.
To move on let's try to go deeper into the what. I've established that I enjoy learning. But maybe let's in fact take a step back and think about that. Why learning? What benefit does it bring me and others in the world? To go back to very basic things. I work my job and am therefore able to make a living. I can pay for food, shelter and clothing. I could also buy some other stuff but that is not what interests me. Learning would allow me to get better at my job and thus make more money eventually. But that doesn't seem like a satisfactory reason either. So here's a junction where a strategy from deeper down this categorization tree can come in handy: the five whys.
Why do I want to learn? To learn more about the world. Why do I want to learn more about the world? To be respected and thought of as smart. Why do I want to be respected and thought of as smart? Because I want to be liked. Why do I want to be liked? Because I need the support of other to survive. Why do I need the support of other to survive? Because I am utterly incapable of surviving on my own. Why is that so? Because I grew up in a world which everything is interconnected and splintered. Ok how many whys was that? Six. It felt like a lot more. Very interesting exercise. Ok so let's analyze that.
I like learning because I want to survive. But also because I want to be loved. Now I could discuss whether learning about the world is the best way to be loved. There are likely many other factors that play a larger role in being loved, so I should definitely make sure to invest time in those. In fact it is absolutely imperative to invest time into that. For the other topic of making money e.g. surviving: We are made to believe that we need to be highly skilled in order to make a living. But I guess we would be able to get by without being a master in our field. I'm thinking that we gain a lot of enjoyment from being so good at what we do that others look to us for advice and help.
So this might have something to do with having a decent place in society. From what I read I learned that humans do set up hierarchies between people and it is beneficial to secure a decent place in those hierarchies.
Let's first look at the global hierarchy, our place in society as whole. I think here the currency is money. The chef at the restaurant neither cares nor knows anything about my relationships or skill. He cares about whether I pay the meal and nothing else. Same goes for the guy that made my bicycle. I never met the person and he doesn't care about my existence. Yet he spent his valuable time and energy to build me a bicycle.
There's different playing fields which we play on in our life's. We should be mindful of which playing fields we spend most of our energy on. So what playing fields do I spend my time on? There's my job which I need to thrive financially and secure a good position in the social hierarchy. Then there's my personal life with my partner and around family and friends.
How can we gauge our positions in these hierarchies, or our rank in the roster of the teams that play on these fields?
At work I might get by with being a mediocre programmer. But it's possible that there's more satisfaction to be had when being good, thereby gaining respect and getting the feeling of being a valued member of the team.
In personal life, what counts is our relationships. The love and time we give to others and the depth of our connections. Now it seems obvious that while the job is important to get by in life, it is much less elementary to happiness and a fulfilled life than the personal sphere.
To summarize, there's multiple spheres that are largely disjoint. A global one, where money allows me to buy other peoples time and attention. And a local one where money is meaningless and personal connection is the most important currency.
Ok so let's converge again on the topic that I set out to discuss. We have so far discussed time, energy and the What. Now let's think about the How while keeping in mind the above, namely that consistency / focus and time are likely to be essential.
I think the How is the part that most of the books I read focus on. At the beginning is the goal to improve. For this section we can ignore what we'd like to improve on. James Clear has a insightful framework that might be useful here. We tend to look at goals and outcomes and work back from those to derive processes to be followed, hoping that performing those actions will make us become who we want to be. He suggests to flip that and start by changing the identity. This is probably something like positive affirmations. Saying I am an intelligent and thoughtful person rather than working from the goal of being perceived as smart and coming up with a plan to get there. When we say we are who we want to be it might be easier to align our actions with who we tell ourselves we are.
Anders Ericsson I think has a different approach. He says that the actions we perform change who we are.
Nisbett has something in common with Clear: they both realize that one should make the desired output as easy as possible. Nisbett talks about making the desired action the default action. Clear says to reduce the hurdles that one faces. Shane Parrish also advises to tilt the playing field so that the desired action becomes the easiest. The same works the other way around: To make it harder to do things that are not desired.
We are now on the micro level. And arguably, once we have identified the big theme this is all that matters. The actions we do in a day. Things appear to become laughably easy once we break it down to the atomic units of our life, the day. Once we know what to do, we can schedule our time to make sure we do it. Cal Newport introduced me to the concept of time blocking. This aims to make sure we are aware of what we are doing at any given point in time. The point is not so much to plan our days but to raise the awareness of what we are spending our time on. We often find ourselves in autopilot mode. Time blocking helps us to notice that and allocate our time better to align more closely with what we want to do.
I'm struggling with the categorization of these different topics. To give my subconscious a shot at handling this I will provide a rough sketch of the categories I think are useful for managing ones life.
What I have right now is a stacked toolbox but it's spread out over a bunch of books which I have stored across different locations all over the place. And I have no idea where and when I should apply them or even when to be aware of them. So what I need is to organize them in a way that allows me to more easily access them. Then I need to practice by actually applying them to my life.
Let's see what categorizations might work. The draft I made above is to make the separation along time scales.
I guess what could be helpful is to realize that absolutely everything breaks down to an atomic action at the end. The thing that changes is the time horizon of the action. For example when deciding about whether to have kids or not that is an atomic action of sitting down and weighing pros and cons, applying different thinking methods and so on. The same goes for the action of learning about the latest AWS service. Both are atomic actions that are performed. The difference is the time horizon. The AWS Service might be no longer relevant a couple months from now. The kids on the other hand will be around for a long time.
Here I am comparing a decision (having kids) with a task (learning about some AWS service). I wonder whether there's a real difference or if making a decision also breaks down to tasks, like doing a cost benefit analysis. For the sake of simplicity let's assume that there is no difference.
So perhaps the categorization of actions by their long term significance is valid. How does this help me in my day to day life? Let's consider our limited resource again: time. When everything comes down to us doing some atomic action we might say that once we have the general direction of our life roughly figured out we can focus on the actions that will get us there rather than spending time ruminating and questioning our plans. We can then simply set ourselves an event in the calendar maybe twice a year to then deliberately check the high level picture of where we're going and whether we need to adjust course.
So to summarize: think hard about who you want to be and where you want to go. Then decide and execute. Only check the course at predefined intervals to make the most the time.
A nice visualization here can be lent from Shane Parrish. He categorizes decisions along two dimensions. Their long term impact and their reversibility. This might be a tool which we can utilize in the big picture phase, so when initially setting out to determine the course to take and on those planned occasions when the course is reviewed. Or of course when big decisions just jump up at you out of nowhere. To illustrate: we have a diagram divided into four squares. In the square at the bottom left we have decisions which are neither consequential nor hard to reverse. So deciding what to eat tonight might fall into this category. Above, in the top left quadrant we have decisions which are hard to reverse but inconsequential. Maybe that's getting a tattoo on your butt cheek. On the bottom right there's the quadrant with decisions that are easy to reverse but consequential. Maybe that's committing to a savings plan. You can always just stop saving but committing might make the difference between being Ok or rich at retirement time. Then the quadrant at top right. Here's the things like taking a new job in a different place, buying a house, getting married, and at the very top right there's having kids.
Parrish suggests that the amount of time we spend deliberating before making a decision should be guided by the position in this diagram.
Ok so now let's say we have a basic framework for allocating our time. Now we can think about how to best execute our atomic actions to get to our goals.
One thing to note is, that doing what needs to be done to get where we want to be might not be fun. There might be a million other things that we could busy our minds with, like watching TV. This is a good segue into the topic of motivation. My understanding is that motivation is more or less useless. Something along the lines of motivation is willpower. Willpower is an exhaustible resource. If we have to expend energy to convince ourselves to do something each time we do it we aren't going to last long.
That's why we need systems that make us do what we need to do automatically and stop us from doing what we shouldn't be doing. A prerequisite here is that we know what each is, but let's assume that's been figured out.
We'll start with preventing us doing stuff we shouldn't do. I feel like that's easier. Say we want to stop eating chocolate. Rather then resisting going to the drawer and getting us a sweet, we can sidestep the willpower issue by simply not buying sweets at the supermarket. Not buying the stuff when we're at the supermarket costs us a fraction of the willpower than constantly resisting the chocolate that's right next to us in the drawer. We're making it harder for us to perform the undesired behavior. Another tool is to change your words. I think this is extremely powerful and simple. Instead of saying "I'm not eating chocolate this month", you could say "I'm don't like sweets". Parrish has made the experience that when relating your resolutions to others it helps to frame them as rules. So instead of saying "I'm trying not to drink" say "I don't drink as a rule".
Also note that punishments and rewards are less efficient than we might think. What's more helpful apart from designing your system to induce the desired behavior is to make use of what other are doing. We are social animals and like to be conformist. Find a group of people who's consistently doing what you want to be doing and identify yourself as part of that group. I wouldn't dream of spending time programming in my free time if I didn't feel like I'm competing with others that I see contributing to open source projects on GitHub and racking amazing commit stats.
The listing of these ideas and tools is rather haphazard. I'll need to categorize them as well. The overall category of the above is something like coercion, motivation, habitualizations
We have