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How Important is Growth? | Scott H Young
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The 2 ways you can approach your habits: Progressive and Consistent
- Progressive. You start off easy, make it a little bit harder each time, until you eventually do very difficult things, with a lot less effort.
- Consistent. Do the same thing, with the same expectations, each time. You don’t aim for growth, but maintaining the same, solid baseline.
When you set up a progressive habit, you’re on a path to improvement
Small, incremental adjustments in difficulty are almost certain to push your level up. The downside with progressive habits is that they are harder to sustain.
Progressive habits vs.Consistent habits
- Progressive habits can be better if you expect low decline or a continued, long-term focus on growth. If this area of life is going to remain under the spotlight for you in the future, you can probably keep pushing progressive training habits.
- Consistent habits are better when the domain of life you’re trying to improve rarely is your biggest priority.
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Ways to improve your life
There are a few different ways you can go about setting a goal or creating a new habit.
- Target the minimum output. You focus on always doing at least a little bit so t...
When to Focus on the Minimum
Minimum targeting works well for establishing long-term habits.
A goal of, for instance, doing fifty push-ups every day might not be ideal for fitness, but doing something is better than doing nothing.
Another reason to focus on the minimum is that it assumes the difficulty is in starting. To start a process can often be the hardest. Then you want to set a lower threshold to make starting as easy as possible.
When to Target the Average
Focusing on the average makes sense when you're hoping to sustain something, even if it is not always a perfectly easy and consistent output.
It works when you are already putting in a bit of effort, but want to improve that effort over the long-term.
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Learning Slows Down with Age
Most aspects of mental processing slow down as we age. While we continue to accumulate knowledge of the world at a slower rate, we gain more experience that increases our wisdom.
Our minds tend to grow worse
Researchers disagree in their hypotheses about how our minds tend to get worse with age. What can be observed is the following:
- Older individuals do struggle more with Stroop tasks, where an automatic habit needs to be overridden by instructions.
- Older individuals have a harder time with multitasking.
- Older people find it difficult to bind information that occurs in a combined context. It impacts their ability to remember life events.
However, older people seem to be better at emotional regulation.
Cognitive Reserve
Some people seem to age mostly with minds intact and others notice dramatic slowdowns. The brain appears to have a lot of redundancy built-in - known as cognitive reserve.
Education seems to have a protective effect on aging, possibly because education contributes to cognitive reserve.
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Building habits
The basic process for building all habits is basically the same: you repeatedly condition the behavior you want, over time, until it becomes automatic.
But no habit starts out auto...
Conditioning a habit
- Classical conditioning: a paired association with a trigger and a behavior. Going to the gym after you wake up each morning is this kind of habit.
- Operant conditioning: you not only associate a trigger with a behavior, but you reward that pairing, to accelerate the habit-forming process.
The 30-Day Trial
You commit to some change for 30 days, then tou can go back to your old ways. But having spent thirty days applying a new behavior is often enough to convince you to stick with it.
Pros:
- Can handle more significant/difficult behavior changes you might be unlikely to start with a perpetual commitment.
- Fosters an experimental mindset, rather than assuming you already know what’s best.
Cons:
- 30 days probably isn’t enough to actually make something a habit.
- Without a long-term plan, many 30-day trials will revert back to the original behavior.
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