Everything Is a Practice
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But now that I'm considerably older than that, I can mentally afford to allocate a little bit of time over the next six months toward achieving a goal like improving my typing, or getting better at vocal onsets. Being better at something a year or two from now feels very worthwhile, and I know I'll be at that future me fairly quickly.
It would have been better for me, of course, to have gained this ability back when I had lots of time at my disposal. But I can still have an impact because I can be the drop of water shaping the stone over time.
I'll answer your question by repeating the most common things I've heard from others, not my own experience, in an attempt to reduce the error band by not having a sample size of 1.
By your 40s, you generally have at least a direction you're going. People tend to take you more seriously. You have a greater sense of what's actually important and what's not, and stop wasting energy getting as worked up by things that don't really matter. You are still young enough that you aren't yet battling many adverse effects of aging.
You also tend to be at your most physically attractive point. Your career path is likely to be established and less uncertain. Romantic partners tend to be more stable, so your love life brings more joy. Speaking of romantic partners... relationships are better because (as a friend of mine once put it) "sex isn't such a fucking emergency anymore". Your relationships tend to be more balanced. And so forth.
I think, really, it's an age where you have gained more perspective and are still young enough to use that to live a better life.
Damn! You managed to say in four words what it took me a small essay to say. A tip of my hat to you, sir!
Anything you can do that brings you satifaction or exercises your brain and keeps it sharp is a great thing.
Used to know a guy who was as old as I am now when he took up Go. Took him less than ten years to reach a 3 dan rating, which is on the edge of where common wisdom says you need to start as a child to achieve better than that. But any time he wasn't working, he was looking at Go games (and I suspect sometimes when he was working). If he started 5 years younger or lives long enough I expect he'll disprove that rule.
Of course it always helps if you're a polymath. There's a lot of social friction involved with picking up something that is expected of 14 year olds. If you can teach yourself you can skip over a lot of that.
She was doing a lot more than 30 minutes per day, but it was pretty comforting for me to realize that nothing's really stopping most people from continuing to learn and grow deep into their twilight years if that's what they want to do.
It was a year or so of doing this before I became a consistently good shot. Not quick, but if I had tried to set aside longer blocks of practice time, I wouldn't have done it at all.
Slow progress gets you to the finish line. No progress does not.
And this is probably true of most 16 y/o.
I work as a collaborative pianist, which means essentially “accompanist”; so I work with young musicians a lot. This transition to tolerating and embracing slow incremental work in service of a larger goal is what distinguishes those kids who are successful from those who get stuck. But it’s really a mindset that they can acquire at any point. Some are ready earlier than others.
I try to get the students I work with to adopt at least the habit of reflecting on their practice by writing down three things each day: Where did I put in honest effort? Where did I experience some resulting success? And where did I make some measurable progress? So E,S,P prompts. It’s based on the work of psychologist Nate Zinsser. The idea is to make visible the input and output of slow incremental effort.
Maybe I got burned out by goal-setting and productivity talk. It also might be some remnants of some mild depression I had lately. I guess I just don't like feeling pressured to constantly improve, otherwise I'm not "living 100%" like I should be.
So when I read things like this, it grates my nerves: >> "In this process though you will become a better human being. You will get better at living. You will have less pain down the road. Your path will be smoother."
It suggests the inverse: that if you're not improving, you're less of a human being. I'm not sure if the author meant it that way, but that's definitely the way I took it.
My understanding is that the larger culture context, in which our worth is determined by our value as a worker, would be the locus of that feeling. Like, I really don't feel like a "better" person because I learned how to use the CLI more efficiently.
I may even find the term "better" in that context to be offensive: I'm not better because I learned how to deal with the shambling tower of shit that is WordPress at the institutional level. I enjoy the money and the security of a job, but I hate that my security is premised on my willingness to put up with that shitty system.
Ironically, the way that I've dealt with my own feelings about this has been to lean into dumb crap that obviously has no value in a larger context.
Learning chess or getting better at math are a couple of examples of things that it just felt fun and freeing to be better at, simply because I like them. Lately it's been card manipulations.
I've leaned into playing a lot of musical instruments, and I am fortunate to work from home as I play literally all day.
And that's been somewhat freeing because as much as I enjoy the feeling of improving some of my skills, that enjoyment has been often leveraged against me to get me to do jobs I hate. Like, I've spent a lot of time fixing dumb stuff just because I have learned how to enjoy the process, but since it's dumb stuff it's a bit soul crushing to do it unless I just want to do it.
In that context, I feel like I can draw a line between the stuff that really is fun and useful to me and the stuff I'm able to grind on because that's what I was trained to do.
That distinction has made my practice on a lot of things (from music to working on getting better at relating to people) feel more liberating and less like shitty hustle culture.
If you take my 12 step course, you too can learn how to level up your Contentment Quotient. If you act now we'll also throw in a free weight loss program!
Self-improvement might be a 'productive' use of time in the capacity that it is viewed as a positive, but it's not defined exactly by productivity qua work. "Enjoying relationships" and sunshine is self-improvement for those who don't; you literally just said something prescriptive, which requires action, which makes it productive.
Take therapy for instance, like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. The whole point is to help you stop agonizing and indulging distorted thinking, to let go of things so you can better enjoy your life. That's self-improvement.
The problem with the rhetoric I see here is it's used as a deflection against change, when something's wrong. A bait-and-switch tactic. "Why worry about grinding away at juggling therapy and eating real food and doing the bare minimum exercise to stay healthy? Let's not stress ourselves. Drinking myself stupid 'sparks joy', I'll just not think about it, life is short [insert aphorism]".
I think there's an important difference between slowing down to enjoy life and making rationalizations against fixing problems.
That's not so easy for some folks, at least at first. Not until they... practice ;)
And over-focus on "self-improvement" may mean you miss out on things along the way. Making yourself miss those things may be more of a decline than improvement for you.
I'd only add that, in my opinion, self-improvement should be a joy in itself, not a burden or drudgery. If it's not joyful, what's the point?
Even if it's just to further your career goals (which it shouldn't be just that), the lack of joy in doing it might be a strong hint that your career goals are not well-aligned with your personality.
If you're not improving, then you're not improving. What more is there to that? If you had improved, maybe you'd be a better human, or not. Maybe you've transcended the idea and by not improving you grow to be a better human. Regardless of the scenario, it's your ego that is the judge.
I mean, it's true. The version of you that was a couch potato for four hours on a Saturday is less good than the version that went for a run, lifted weights, home-brewed beer, met someone for coffee, or whatever self-improvement you might have done. (I don't agree that enjoying relationships is contrary to self-improvement.) Of course, opportunity cost is a thing, and we will never know what action or inaction you took was the "best" or "right" one.
The better way to approach it, in my view, is to accept the fact that if you're not improving and being productive, in some ways you are indeed a worse version of you than you could be; but in the Stoic tradition, to divorce that fact from how you feel about it emotionally -- as you said, it's OK. Perhaps you can trend towards being better without self-flagellating when you're not.
How so? I see many people assert this, but I've yet to see someone be able to articulate why (that isn't trivially refutable).
Are we measuring by happiness? Contentment? External validation? Popularity? Legacy? Fitness? Total number of experiences? Something else? And, for any chosen metric, why is that metric important?
I don't know anyone who wants to have a heart attack or spend his last 5-10 years of life in a hospital bed. So I am not writing about quality of life like getting a Porsche, because grabbing coffee with a friend or home brewing won't land you that. Having a habit of doing something, walking somewhere gets you going and if someone hits 70y.o. and they are couch potato, they will be in for a world of pain. Where if they would grab a coffee with their friends from time to time do some hobby they will have some lasting relations and stuff to do.
Well I suppose it is not trivially refutable - but happy to see what would be the refutation.
Buying a Porsche implies a certain standard of living, not quality of life. Completely orthogonal concepts. We Americans mix up these concepts frequently, which explains a lot about the culture.
> Are we measuring by happiness? Contentment? External validation? Popularity? Legacy? Fitness? Total number of experiences? Something else? And, for any chosen metric, why is that metric important?
I think this is mostly a distraction.
I don't think most folks find it that hard to separate the best 1/3 of things they might reasonably do to fill a free hour, from the worst 1/3, for example, or to name on a Thursday things they probably ought to do more of in the next couple days, because they've not done much of it this week, and it's good to do. Absence of iron-clad proof of what "good" is doesn't seem to impede them a bit.
Let's define life as a path through a space of nonfungible states. Our utility metric U(s,t) gives a utility value to experiencing a certain state (s) at a certain time (t). Our goal is to maximize our utility over our lives (for the sake of the religious, include "and afterlives" wherever I say lives), aka the integral of U over the range 0 to infinity.
States are time and past state dependent. Two experiences are different states even holding everything else equal depending on what states you have previously experienced, and when you experience them.
What states you can experience at a given time is limited by your previous state. You may have an infinite number of possible next states, but there are also infinite states that you cannot experience next that you could have arrived at if you had a different previous state. e.g., you can't enjoy a night in with your wife, if your previous state didn't have you already married. The ultimate example of this is the secular "dead" state, where your only available next state is dead@t+epsilon.
With all that out of the way, we can start cutting away some easily analyzed sets of metrics. The easiest is the "heaven or hell" set. These assign some non-zero value to all dead states, dependent on a morality function applied to all states prior to death. As t->Inf, your average utility will be dominated by your death value, so your best choices in life are those that maximize your prescribed morality function. Given that most such religions assign a negative morality to sloth, and at the very least you'd be hard pressed to find someone who believes that sitting on your couch is the most moral possible action you could be taking at any point in time, couch potato is right out.
Morality-based reincarnation metrics follow a similar line of thought, so long as you assume that your reincarnation has positive or negative effects on your range of possible average utility. (E.g., the best possible bug life is worse than the best possible human life).
If you follow a belief system where everyone experiences the same afterlife regardless of their life, then you can just subtract the value of U(afterlife,t) from a finite life metric to arrive at identical choices.
We'll ignore immortality/non-static afterlives, because they're hard to reason about, and relatively niche held beliefs.
What's left is finite life metrics, where U(dead,t)=0. All the utility you can possibly accumulate is going to be obtained before your time of death. These can be categorized into four groups:
A) Different states have varying utilities, but tend positive.
B) All states have the same positive utility: U(s!=dead,t) = x > 0
C) Most or all experiences are somewhat negative
D) Most or all experiences are somewhat negative, but killing yourself is more negative than the expected value of living until your natural demise.
Type C is the radical anti-natalist block. They assert the best possible move is to kill yourself. You are unlikely to meet someone who earnestly believes this due to survivorship bias, but since every state you spend alive is reducing your utility, delaying a deliberate exit to sit on the couch is sub-optimal.
Type B is exact opposite: the only thing that matters is living as long as possible. The best choice is always the one that extends your lifespan, which precludes the life-reducing sedentary choice of couch-potato-dom.
Type A (most secular philosophical beliefs systems), and D (more mainstream anti-natalism) are largely interchangeable except when it comes to evaluating the expected value of prolonging your life. Thus, for the purposes of refuting the couch-potato lifestyle we can analyze them together, because there are better ways both to die young and to grow to a ripe old age than sitting on your couch.
In this space it makes sense to evaluate states not just on their immediate utility, but on the utility of future states they make possible or exclude, and the states necessary to pass through to achieve them.
The latter is where couch-pototo-ness really shines: it has an incredibly low barrier to entry. There is minimal sacrifice that needs to be made to achieve sitting on the couch, watching TV, relative to the bare minimum of survival. You don't need to do anything unpleasant, or immoral, or antisocial, or really anything at all to get to sit there and watch TV. But we can exclude metrics that assign a higher utility to some other, as easy or even easier to achieve states, because the leisure wouldn't be an attraction to them.
Future states is where the couch potato states really flounder: compared to pretty much any use of your time, they have very little effect on your available future states. Their utility will probably be somewhat above average in most people's metric functions, because that's what mass entertainment was designed for: being appealing to most people. But the lack of expanding your availability of options means that for almost any metric, there will be something you could be doing that takes slightly more delayed gratification, but with a much higher pay off.
So there's my (hopefully) non-trivially refutable explanation for why choosing to be a couch potato kinda sucks. TL;DR: It's a very-low, very-local maxima for most utility metrics because it doesn't open any new doors.
Great way to frame it. Somewhat similarly, I view it as path dependency: your current choices are constrained by previous choices, meaning the further you deviate from the person you wish to be the harder it is to turn things around if the future you so wishes to.
If a person desires peace and quiet and a vacation, then getting up at 6am to go to gym and spending time grinding leetcode is not good for them, it's a burden.
I think this is at the crux of your and the other commenters' points. There can be no final agreement on this topic between those who think that there is an objective "good" and those who don't.
Then the real question becomes about your goals, rather than some vague ideas of "work". I think it's better to really consider what you want and don't want, and genuinely accept them. The productivity scale is not some inherent moral metric. This shrouds the intent of productivity, which is to accomplish goals.
So you're not worse if you're not being productive, but you are worse if you aren't accomplish whatever goals you have for yourself. Not because it's some moral failure but simply accomplishing goals feels good and not accomplishing them feels bad. Further the goals themselves aren't universal. They're merely reflections of your innate desires, which you have to accept. If you feel like you weren't "productive", it's probably closer to say that you feel bad for not achieving what you set out to do.
The simple problem here I think is goal setting. Not solely productivity itself.
I would however challenge the corollary that that is an objectively more enjoyable life. I find many unhappy friends an colleagues grinding on a path of thejr choosing, to a pace of their own arbitrary selection.
In my experience, I am most happy when I am goal-less, but engaged. Open to happy accidents. Agile to respond to new inspirations. Free of burdens imposed either by others or myself. I pair this with a drive to bring my pursuits to a nice milestone if possible, ideally public like publishing a video. But I allow myself to move on if something doesn't bring joy anymore.
So even if things are more free flowing the fact that you accept the consequences and benefits of living that way is still goal oriented, and being productive. Being productive in that way can even be playing video games, so long as it, the act itself, doesn’t interfere with what you want.
Be shameless about what you want!
You forget the importance of rest itself in self improvement.
Understanding how to improve, is a lifelong journey. Understanding how much to work, how much to rest, how much to sharpen the sword, how much you can mix those things... and how all this interplays with your personal factors is essential to get the most from yourself.
Sometimes... Watching TV and not seeing your friends, or whatever is the RIGHT thing to do. And we should have 0 shame about it when it is. I'll admit video games are my vice over TV in general. But there's times when I've gone too hard... and even gaming may be too taxing for what I can take.
And, like I also said, it's important to not attach emotions to your judgment of whether your choice was the right one or not; you can reflect upon your choice to play a video game over doing some other "productive" thing without feeling shame about it. In fact, it's important to remain dispassionate in this process.
"who the world wants you to be" from the OP.
This is toxic positivity.
There's a place for feedback loops whether you label it tldr; GPT, sensemaking, or dislike.
The internal judge is à dangerous beast.
I've always been a tinkerer and all that. Rarely with any goal in mind, either; like the author of this blog post, it's always been practice for the sake of it. As I've gotten older, though, the benefits of that tinkering have been accruing over time. It lends itself to a more thorough understanding of the world, which helps in little concrete ways--if you asked me how much I know about mechanical systems I'd say "nothing" but in truth I can get by pretty well from servicing small woodworking tools and from designing stuff for a 3D printer--to the large--having a deeper understanding of why the world is the way it is through history and philosophy and political science.
I do a lot of this practice. I would also say that I'm pretty happy and, in most ways, content with where my life is. Doing more, at that point, is internal practice, not external competition. It's mind-and-soul exercise. And practicing saying no, practicing relaxation, counts too. Just, like with everything else--don't do that too much.
I mean it’s hard to argue that you should do things that get in the way of this pursuit.
I agree with your sentiment, but I think your definition of self-improvement is off if it doesn’t include leisure, because finding healthy ways of incorporating leisure into your life definitely makes your “path” “smoother”.
Like, my ideal self isn’t a 100x engineer that sleeps at the office most nights. My ideal self spends time with his family, and cares for friends even if they don’t offer me anything tangible, and has hobbies that won’t result in measurable benefits to my “productivity”. So doing those things is self-improvement because I’m moving towards my own definition of success.
It's not only OK, it's absolutely essential.
> if you're not improving, you're less of a human being
I don't think that's the message that you should take. Your value as a human being is independent of all that. However, I think there's an element of truth to "if you're not growing, you're dying."
You are good enough as you are. Sure, there is a better version of yourself and everyday is an opportunity to be a little better BUT your value as a human has NOTHING to do with any of this shit.
Time for rest and recovery is good.
I end up spending a lot of time and energy hacking away at problems. The problem is, it seems like my mind isn't resilient enough to keep up with it. After a certain point there comes an onset of fatigue, frustration, and just general feelings of discomfort that drones on in the back of my conscious.
I guess this is to be expected. The muscles of my mind have been overexerted and need rest. A remedy to this is to "go with the flow" of my mood/feelings. Which sometimes contradicts my undying feeling of curiosity. It becomes a balancing act between the two.
I dunno ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I aim for expertise in the much smaller subset of skills that are of genuine value to me.
I aim at being a "jack of all trades, master of a couple".
It mentions how people that took self-defense classes would hand a gun back to their assailant after disarming them, and that stuck with me.
This is a really key point about practice. "Practice" doesn't automatically mean improvement -- it can just as easily lock in the opposite.
You have to actively practice. That is, you have to analyze your performance and consciously practice changes that lead to improvement.
For the last few years, I want to play pool more and more, but going to a club is such a drag for me. Especially when alone. A home with a pool table would be great.
A few frames of six-ball every few hours as a break from work...
There is a finish line, but I think the goal post moves over and over and over again. Historically, every time I set a goal, I would think to myself, "once I do/get/achieve X, I'll be happy." In retrospective, I care less about the goal and find myself most joyful throughout the process of achieving said goal.
> I care less about the goal and find myself most joyful throughout the process of achieving said goal.
People often misunderstand the concept of "enlightenment" by thinking of it as an end state to be achieved. It's not. "Enlightenment" is not an achievable goal, it's a direction to walk along your path. The real thing is the walking of the path itself.
- Aristotle's distinction between activities/beings that are an end in themselves vs. activities that end with the achievement of their goals, and the realization that one activity can be both
- Buddhist practice of focusing on the activity of mind
Both address directly what this article does indirectly: the brain's reward system prunes reality and self-expression as necessary to get things done, so often improvement comes only after deconstructing those blinders. And that in turn is super, super difficult, and virtually never happens unless it has to, because someone is traumatized by reward-system-induced failures like addiction, violence, social ostracism, personal shame, etc. In the "best" case, one's compassion for others' suffering sensitizes one to sniff and shun reward-system fast-paths.
It's ALWAYS better to avoid reward-system hysteresis, since it's almost never fixable. And remember, the more capable and well-funded you are, the less the environment will offer any guardrails. It's all on you.
(luxagraf.net is redirecting to www.google.com at the moment)
This has been my experience.
I've done a lot of things, in my life. Taken a number of paths, but I've found designing end-user applications and device control programming to be most gratifying.
But one aspect of my Practice, is finishing stuff. It has to have an exit.
It's my Practice, and I do it every day.
So - of i went - set it up...im into production so i thought "cool...i'll sample this every now and then"...turns out - futzing around on the kit - ended up with me selling it and replacing it with a top shelf kit, with top line cymbals...i play around 15 minutes twice/thrice a week....
i went from nothing - to - playing the tastiest funk grooves, with barely any effort...just savoring the fun while i was playing...literally no expectations...i wish more things were like that :)
My practice of yoga extended to everything else in my life and has helped me accept that I am a human be-ing. Every day in your human body will be different, new versions and push requests are happening RIGHT NOW to your favorite tools and repositories that you're not aware of so how can you possibly expect yourself to be an expert?
Release your labels and expectations to practice your art:
If you practice with the full outcome in mind all the time, you severely hinder your ability to narrowly improve, which is critical to growth.
I understand this is written to speak more about “practice” in the trade sense, but even there I think that’s wrong.
If I only ever had the full sequence of $whatever in mind, I would severely limit my growth.