Mmmm, I attempted to acknowledge this (imo correct) point with the first bit about going from A/BSS to winter drumline or martial arts; I agree it could use more emphasis.
I don’t know that it makes the advice substantially less useful; it adds an extra step of picking and choosing but beyond that I’m not seeing a big chunk made less relevant? (Since I already believed/agreed with this point while writing, and yet produced those lists anyway.)
So, you’ve given some very specific examples of the lower “levels” of a “nook hierarchy” (your bedroom, street, school system, etc.)—this is admirable. But when it comes to higher levels, the post gets vague. What’s up there? Ok, there’s college. Then what? The presidency, sure. Running an internationally notable crypto exchange, sure. Now, right away we should notice that those seem, intuitively—just based on how unlike each other they seem to be—like single examples in a vastly larger domain, which we probably have only a vague sense of. (Because if we had a more systematic apprehension of said domain, then the list of examples that we’d intuitively and instantly generate would not look like this. This is a difficult-to-formalize point, but I hope you can see what I’m getting at.)
That’s the preamble. Now, having said that, let’s back up a bit and look at a “lower” level: university. Questions for consideration:
What are the levels up from there?
What are the sibling “nooks”, on the same level? (Are there any?)
Suppose you go up a level from university—pick any path you like. What other “nooks” on the same “level” as university also feed into this next-higher-level “nook”? (Are there any?)
Of the answers to #3, were any of those “nooks” available to you, as alternatives to university, from which you could then also proceed up to whatever next-higher-level “nook” we chose? Could you have taken that different path and ended up in the same place?
Is there just a single “nook” at the “top” level? Or are there multiple “top-level” “nooks”, in the sense that any two such do not share any “nook” to which it’s possible to proceed from either of the two?
Alright, now back to my earlier point about the value of the advice suggested in the OP:
Decide whether you want to keep leveling up, because there is a tradeoff between climbing to the next level of chamber-size and developing expertise in your current chamber.
But this is actually two decisions: whether to go “up a level” at all, and which “upward” step to take.
But if you go up one level higher than that, you will be able to access a bunch of that-sized nooks that all open up into the same antechamber, and choose from them, and thus your odds of something like satisfaction and success go way way up.
But which “upward” step you take determines which “that-sized nooks” you now have access to, and who knows how your choice affects your odds of “something like satisfaction and success”?
And there’s a bigger problem, which is that taking any given “upward” step is quite likely to change your life circumstances, your social context, and yourself, in ways that make it much more difficult to step back “down”—and stepping “up” in an alternate direction after that “downward” step is harder still…
What I am getting as is that (as with so many things) however intuitive it may be to visualize this model as implying a hierarchical structure—a tree—in reality the graph structure which emerges from applying the model to reality is far more complex. And thus determining an optimal traversal strategy for the graph is correspondingly more difficult…
Mmmm, I attempted to acknowledge this (imo correct) point with the first bit about going from A/BSS to winter drumline or martial arts; I agree it could use more emphasis.
I don’t know that it makes the advice substantially less useful; it adds an extra step of picking and choosing but beyond that I’m not seeing a big chunk made less relevant? (Since I already believed/agreed with this point while writing, and yet produced those lists anyway.)
Can you say more? Perhaps about which chunk(s)?
Sure.
So, you’ve given some very specific examples of the lower “levels” of a “nook hierarchy” (your bedroom, street, school system, etc.)—this is admirable. But when it comes to higher levels, the post gets vague. What’s up there? Ok, there’s college. Then what? The presidency, sure. Running an internationally notable crypto exchange, sure. Now, right away we should notice that those seem, intuitively—just based on how unlike each other they seem to be—like single examples in a vastly larger domain, which we probably have only a vague sense of. (Because if we had a more systematic apprehension of said domain, then the list of examples that we’d intuitively and instantly generate would not look like this. This is a difficult-to-formalize point, but I hope you can see what I’m getting at.)
That’s the preamble. Now, having said that, let’s back up a bit and look at a “lower” level: university. Questions for consideration:
What are the levels up from there?
What are the sibling “nooks”, on the same level? (Are there any?)
Suppose you go up a level from university—pick any path you like. What other “nooks” on the same “level” as university also feed into this next-higher-level “nook”? (Are there any?)
Of the answers to #3, were any of those “nooks” available to you, as alternatives to university, from which you could then also proceed up to whatever next-higher-level “nook” we chose? Could you have taken that different path and ended up in the same place?
Is there just a single “nook” at the “top” level? Or are there multiple “top-level” “nooks”, in the sense that any two such do not share any “nook” to which it’s possible to proceed from either of the two?
Alright, now back to my earlier point about the value of the advice suggested in the OP:
But this is actually two decisions: whether to go “up a level” at all, and which “upward” step to take.
But which “upward” step you take determines which “that-sized nooks” you now have access to, and who knows how your choice affects your odds of “something like satisfaction and success”?
And there’s a bigger problem, which is that taking any given “upward” step is quite likely to change your life circumstances, your social context, and yourself, in ways that make it much more difficult to step back “down”—and stepping “up” in an alternate direction after that “downward” step is harder still…
What I am getting as is that (as with so many things) however intuitive it may be to visualize this model as implying a hierarchical structure—a tree—in reality the graph structure which emerges from applying the model to reality is far more complex. And thus determining an optimal traversal strategy for the graph is correspondingly more difficult…