I like this in that I have also noticed there is very little in the way of bundling up this kind of well-known how-to-live advice, so having it all in one place is possibly useful. I suspect why there’s not a lot of this sort of thing, though, is that most of the value is in compiling the information and very little of it is in the reading of it.
One thing that I’ve discovered as I’ve successfully become more effective at shaping the world is that everyone was telling me all of this advice for ages but I either didn’t believe it or didn’t know how to use it. Simply knowing of it was not enough, and in fact often just knowing what to do led to weird anti-effective strategies of trying to cargo-cult the advice, like spending so much energy tracking and documenting tasks that there was little left over for actually doing said tasks.
Again, I think this is a great first step. After all, I knew all this stuff but hadn’t bothered to really write it down anywhere (well, I sort of did try to do that once but not very well). The challenge seems to be how to share this knowledge in a way that people will pick it up, and if current self-help literature is any indication it seems to be a pretty tricky business.
Related to this: there are several points in the article where you mention (but don’t link) a book that explains a concept in more detail. (i.e. “Deep Work.”)
And on one hand you have sort of summarized the core point of Deep Work… but part of the reason books like Deep Work or Peak are useful is because they provide lots of context and anecdotes and inspiring speeches that cause you to take the ideas seriously.
So another update I think’d be useful here is for each section to directly link to the places that explain things in more detail, with notes like “if you’d like to really act on this, here’s an easy next step you can take right now.”
Great points. Regarding the lack of links, I was thinking that I had linked to it enough and that it can be annoying to have too many links. But on second thought, I don’t think it’s actually that annoying, and I intend for this post to be very modular, so for the use case where someone just arrives at a particular section that doesn’t have a link, well that wouldn’t be good.
And on one hand you have sort of summarized the core point of Deep Work… but part of the reason books like Deep Work or Peak are useful is because they provide lots of context and anecdotes and inspiring speeches that cause you to take the ideas seriously.
I very much agree, thank you for making this point. I updated the post to make a note of this. I did try to include lots of links to resources that elaborated on what I was talking about. I guess I could have an explicit Further Reading section for each subsection of this post, but that sorta seems like overkill to me, especially since Deep Work and Peak would be recommended numerous times, which gets repetitive. So instead I just noted the resources that are used heavily in this post up front. That plus the links to blog posts and stuff within the section seems like it’d be enough.
“I suspect why there’s not a lot of this sort of thing, though, is that most of the value is in compiling the information and very little of it is in the reading of it.”—I don’t expect that many people will get much value from this post if they simply read through it once. On the other hand, if they return to it a few times and scan through looking for techniques they haven’t tried or which they were doing and got out of the habit of doing and experiment with it, I expect that it would have a significant effect. This is much easier when you have it all in the one place, instead of spread across a large number of articles.
I like this in that I have also noticed there is very little in the way of bundling up this kind of well-known how-to-live advice, so having it all in one place is possibly useful. I suspect why there’s not a lot of this sort of thing, though, is that most of the value is in compiling the information and very little of it is in the reading of it.
One thing that I’ve discovered as I’ve successfully become more effective at shaping the world is that everyone was telling me all of this advice for ages but I either didn’t believe it or didn’t know how to use it. Simply knowing of it was not enough, and in fact often just knowing what to do led to weird anti-effective strategies of trying to cargo-cult the advice, like spending so much energy tracking and documenting tasks that there was little left over for actually doing said tasks.
Again, I think this is a great first step. After all, I knew all this stuff but hadn’t bothered to really write it down anywhere (well, I sort of did try to do that once but not very well). The challenge seems to be how to share this knowledge in a way that people will pick it up, and if current self-help literature is any indication it seems to be a pretty tricky business.
Related to this: there are several points in the article where you mention (but don’t link) a book that explains a concept in more detail. (i.e. “Deep Work.”)
And on one hand you have sort of summarized the core point of Deep Work… but part of the reason books like Deep Work or Peak are useful is because they provide lots of context and anecdotes and inspiring speeches that cause you to take the ideas seriously.
So another update I think’d be useful here is for each section to directly link to the places that explain things in more detail, with notes like “if you’d like to really act on this, here’s an easy next step you can take right now.”
Great points. Regarding the lack of links, I was thinking that I had linked to it enough and that it can be annoying to have too many links. But on second thought, I don’t think it’s actually that annoying, and I intend for this post to be very modular, so for the use case where someone just arrives at a particular section that doesn’t have a link, well that wouldn’t be good.
I very much agree, thank you for making this point. I updated the post to make a note of this. I did try to include lots of links to resources that elaborated on what I was talking about. I guess I could have an explicit Further Reading section for each subsection of this post, but that sorta seems like overkill to me, especially since Deep Work and Peak would be recommended numerous times, which gets repetitive. So instead I just noted the resources that are used heavily in this post up front. That plus the links to blog posts and stuff within the section seems like it’d be enough.
What do you think?
“I suspect why there’s not a lot of this sort of thing, though, is that most of the value is in compiling the information and very little of it is in the reading of it.”—I don’t expect that many people will get much value from this post if they simply read through it once. On the other hand, if they return to it a few times and scan through looking for techniques they haven’t tried or which they were doing and got out of the habit of doing and experiment with it, I expect that it would have a significant effect. This is much easier when you have it all in the one place, instead of spread across a large number of articles.
I agree that difficulty seems to be in how to actually implement the advice, rather than simply knowing about the techniques.