SD#77: Mastery, procrastination, and multitasking
December 10, 2023
Welcome to the 77 edition of Seven Dawns, a weekly newsletter by me, Tomas Ausra, with a focus on getting better every day. A very warm welcome to the new subscribers who joined since last week. I’m glad you’re here.
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Hi friends,
Mastery and genius. Topics studied and overstudied by scholars from west to east. It’s natural to be so obsessed with successful people, after all, we all want to be successful and finding out the recipe to that success seems like the (elusive) dream. Malcolm Gladwell shot to popularity with his 10,000-hour rule to mastery. While now debunked, it promised a way to success and we chewed on it, taking every bite of advice we could. Are we more obsessed with the search for the shortcut rather than the skill we’re trying to master? After all, most experts emerged by immersing themselves into the deep dark end of a subject and… enjoying it.
🔎 Our seven ideas this week:
1. A simple definition for genius is: to have a disinterested obsession with something that matters When you look at the lives of people who’ve done great work, you see a consistent pattern. They often begin with an obsessive interest in something that would have seemed pointless to most of their contemporaries. One of the most striking features of Darwin’s book about his voyage on the Beagle is the sheer depth of his interest in natural history. His curiosity seems infinite. Ditto for Ramanujan, sitting by the hour working out on his slate what happens to series. It’s a mistake to think they were “laying the groundwork” for the discoveries they made later. There’s too much intention in that metaphor. They were doing it because they liked it. To put the recipe for genius into one sentence, that might be it: to have a disinterested obsession with something that matters. The paths that lead to new ideas tend to look unpromising. If they looked promising, other people would already have explored them. How do the people who do great work discover these paths that others overlook? The popular story is that they simply have a better vision: because they’re so talented, they see paths that others miss. But if you look at the way great discoveries are made, that’s not what happens. Darwin didn’t pay closer attention to individual species than other people because he saw that this would lead to great discoveries, and they didn’t. He was just really, really interested in such things. 👉 Paul Graham |
2. In putting something off until a later point in time, we’re also failing to consider how much our future self will want to avoid the same negative emotions that we’re trying to avoid right now Across the globe, about 20 percent of people are chronic procrastinators. And, while estimates of exactly how many people procrastinate to some extent are a little hard to nail down, one informal survey found that 85 percent do so in a way that bothers them. Procrastination isn’t just about putting something off until tomorrow that you could just as easily take care of today. It’s also about knowing that even as you delay, you’re harming yourself. When we’re faced with an unpleasant task — say, folding the laundry or finally making that appointment with the cardiologist — and we decide not to do it, we prioritise our present self’s desire to avoid negative emotions. We get anchored on our feelings in the present. But procrastination presents an additional wrinkle: in putting something off until a later point in time, we’re also failing to consider how much our future self will want to avoid the same negative emotions that we’re trying to avoid right now. Note that it’s not as if we’re simply failing to consider our future selves. When we procrastinate, we do think about the future and our future selves but not in a particularly deep or meaningful manner. 👉 The behavioral scientist |
3. When you relax that part of you and accept, for a moment, that the universe is much larger than your judgements, and will continue with or without your consent, Awareness happens You enjoy meditating. At some point, during your meditation, you bump into this thing, this fundamentally different way of experiencing reality. It almost feels as if you were in a thick forest your whole life, and then you burst into a twilit clearing. It’s not your normal painful way of being, which is so grippy and harsh. It’s more expansive, more lush, more beautiful. You hear that people call it Spirit, or Awareness, and that sounds really cool. You’re not the only one who knows about this. A lot of people access it in prayer, for example. And most people are comfortable with brief glimpses of this thing, knowing it’s there, communing with it occasionally. But you really crave it. You want more! So you become an effective seeker of this thing. You learn how to access it in more situations — when you’re driving, when you’re cooking. More and more, you can do this neat mental gesture, where you surrender what feels like a “small” self into a “big” self. You notice that Spirit, or Awareness, is what’s happening when you release your compulsive need to protect yourself from reality with thinking and planning. Like, there is this part of your brain, this scared animal part that says, “I need to be judging everything right now, or thinking about how to guard my reputation, or planning for some weird fantasy of how the future will go, or I will die.” It’s not exactly the inner monologue, but it drives a fair amount of the inner monologue. And when you relax that part of you and accept, for a moment, that the universe is much larger than your judgements, and will continue with or without your consent, Awareness happens. 👉 Sasha Chapin |
4. Humans tend to do whatever it takes to keep busy, even if the activity feels meaningless to them Dr Brené Brown from the University of Houston describes being “crazy busy” as a numbing strategy we use to avoid facing the truth of our lives. We are scared of idleness because stopping would mean having to really consider what we want out of life and what we currently have. Sometimes, the gap feels so wide, that we’d rather stay on the hamster wheel. Being busy is a defence mechanism. It’s a way to avoid just being. Having responsibilities, deadlines, a long task list… Overloading our senses can make us believe we are moving in the right direction, or at least in a direction. But the constant cycle of tasks we tackle without ever thinking often leaves us stagnant. Instead of measuring progress by the quantity of work we produce, we should consider the quality of our work. Not just the quality of the output, as usually measured by externally-designed metrics, but the quality of the impact it has on our mental and physical well-being. “Did the work feel intellectually stimulating, did I learn something new, did it help me cultivate my curiosity, did it allow me to connect with interesting people?” are sensible questions to ask when work represents such a huge chunk of our lives. 👉 Ness Labs |
5. Constantly switching context between different tasks has a terrible effect on attention, try mindful context switching Psychiatrist Edward M. Hallowell described multitasking as a “mythical activity in which people believe they can perform two or more tasks simultaneously as effectively as one.” Mindful context switching is a strategic approach to task management that emphasises the importance of staying focused on a single task while maintaining an acceptable level of responsiveness. It involves defining your necessary level of responsiveness based on external demands, breaking tasks into achievable chunks that fit within these response intervals, and scheduling dedicated time slots for them. It was inspired by the work of Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths, authors of Algorithms to Live By, who wrote: “You should try to stay on a single task as long as possible without decreasing your responsiveness below a minimum acceptable limit. Decide how responsive you need to be — and then, if you want to get things done, be no more responsive than that.” 👉 Ness Labs |
6. Art isn’t so much inspiration as it is the compounding of repetition over days and weeks and months and years at a time. It’s finding so much joy in the process that the process itself is enough to sustain the artist’s soul Soetsu Yanagi was a philosopher, art historian, aesthete, poet and the originator of the Japanese folk crafts movement known as mingei. In The Beauty of Everyday Things, Yanagi describes mingei as common, ordinary objects sturdily and intentionally made by lesser-known (and often under-appreciated) artisans and craftsmen. This, Yanagi explains is made possible through repetition: “They have become one with the task at hand, free of all self-awareness and thoughts of artistic manipulation, effortlessly applying themselves to the job at hand. They may be cheerfully talking and laughing as they work, but most surprising is their speed. Speed is necessary if they are to make a living. Thousands of times, tens of thousands of times, it is this repetition that frees their hands from thought. It is this freedom that is the mother of all creation. When I see them at work in this way, I am astonished beyond words. They have complete faith in the power of their hands. There is not a smidgen of doubt.” 👉 Cole Schafer |
7. Status symbols change: idleness and leisure were considered virtues in the ancient world, whereas today being busy is a badge of honour Owning a car used to represent freedom. We’re now transitioning to a world where not having a car is freedom. In the past, going online was a luxury. Now, going offline is a luxury. There was a time when a feed full of selfies was cool. Now it’s lame. One of the most fascinating things about Poparazzi is that it shot itself to the #1 spot in the App Store (and, ironically, closed doors this year) by building its entire product around one of Instagram’s least important features: tagged photos. Status symbol changes represent new product opportunities. 👉 Check your pulse |
👨🏫 Quote of the week:
“Practice does not make perfect. It is practice, followed by a night of sleep, that leads to perfection.”
Matthew Walker
🎁 Fun things to click on:
A website where you can find lots of things explained in sketches. Hoodmaps is a crowdsourced map that divides cities up into areas and labels. The 100 best movies of the past 10 decades according to the TIME’s film critics. A smart game that will teach you statistical concepts useful in life and machine learning. What does the entire Universe look like? …using cereal.
Thanks for reading! If you have any learnings you’d like to share with me, or disagree with any of the ones above then do drop me a message.
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Speak soon,
Tom