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Is Your Path a Staircase or a Circle? | Scott H Young
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The circular path
... when you're trying to improve something look like this:
- You start with some ideas.
- You get excited for a while (1-2 weeks).
- Maybe you take some steps and do something to act on your ideas.
- Your enthusiasm starts to fade and your projects get abandoned.
- You go back to where you started.
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The staircase path
... when you're trying to improve something looks like this:
- You get an idea.
- You build a specific project around it (short-term).
- Once you finish it, you move to the next idea and the project around it
- Each project builds on the last, expanding options.
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What defines the shape of your path
- Focusing on one thing at a time until you finish it: if you focus on one project at a time until completion, you will make infinitely more progress than the person who does multiple projects at once.
- Having the right method: doing something that’s outside your usual routine requires not just commitment, but new methods.
- Actualization vs. possibility: the more you can adjust your life to the joys of doing and actualizing, over daydreaming and philosophizing, the more solid your life’s foundation will become.
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Practice loops
Practice loops are useful as a concept to think about learning any skill. A practice loop is an activity or group of activities you repeat over and over again while learning somet...
Loops and drills
Many loops aren’t straightforward repetitions. You may never write the same essay twice. The loop isn't writing a particular essay, but the overall process for writing essays.
In the same way, each thing you learn may have more than one loop. Drills are smaller loops to focus on smaller parts of the bigger loop.
Designing Your Practice Loop
Step one involves figuring out what your loops are. These are the activities you repeat over and over when learning something.
Next, analyze the loop for different parts to see whether you can make improvements. It will result in faster learning.
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Long-term flexible commitment
What many people fail at with long-term commitments is that they make their initial vision too rigid.
Flexible commitment can help overcome this by bringing together two pr...
Walk the Winding Path
- Stick to short commitments. Get good at this skill before going further.
- Understand your goal at different levels. The highest goal should be fairly abstract.
- Set a much more specific agenda of how I could fulfill this.
- Have periodic reviews where you can change your direction and incorporate new ideas.
- Don't let your reviews interfere with the short-term process of committing.
The winding path: Goals and projects
- A goal level, which is big-picture and abstract. It has just enough detail to inspire, but not so much that you're stuck pursuing things that don’t matter when conditions change.
- Underneath that, have projects: these tend to be short-to-medium term efforts you think will help realize the larger goal.
The flexibility of the system comes once one leg of a short-term commitment has ended. This provides an opportunity for pivoting and redirecting.
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The Commitment Muscle
Sticking through things longer builds resilience. But sticking through on a bad idea, project or effort can lose you years of your life.
The goal is to increase your ability to susta...
Quitting Points
They are pre-specified periods of time, effort or stress that you decide you’re willing to endure before you step back and re-evaluate.
Pick Your Quitting Point
- Set shorter lengths of projects: set projects that are short enough that committing to them all the way is easy enough to do or break into chunks th bigger ones.
- Set re-evaluation points for ongoing habits and goals.
- Based on impact to other areas of your life. You can choose metrics like: time and how those things impact your life.