I spend a lot of time trying to build skills, because I want to be awesome. But there is something off about that.
I think I should just go after things that I want, and solve the problems that come up on the way. The idea of building skills sort of implies that if I don’t have some foundation or some skill, I’ll be blocked, and won’t be able to solve some thing in the way of my goals.
But that doesn’t actually sound right. Like it seems like the main important thing for people who do incredible things is their ability to do problem solving on the things that come up, and not the skills that they had previously built up in a “skill bank”.
Raw problem solving is the real thing and skills are cruft. (Or maybe not cruft per se, but more like a side effect. The compiled residue of previous problem solving. Or like a code base from previous project that you might repurpose.)
Part of the problem with this is that I don’t know what I want for my own sake, though. I want to be awesome, which in my conception, means being able to do things.
I note that wanting “to be able to do things” is a leaky sort of motivation: because the victory condition is not clearly defined, it can’t be crisply compelling, and so there’s a lot of waste somehow.
The sort of motivation that works is simply wanting to do something, not wanting to be able to do something. Like specific discrete goals that one could accomplish, know that one accomplished, and then (in most cases) move on from.
But most of the things that I want by default are of the sort “wanting to be able to do”, because if I had more capabilities, that would make me awesome.
But again, that’s not actually conforming with my actual model of the world. The thing that makes someone awesome is general problem solving capability, more than specific capacities. Specific capacities are brittle. General problem solving is not.
I guess that I could pick arbitrary goals that seem cool. But I’m much more emotionally compelled by being able to do something instead of doing something.
But I also think that I am notably less awesome and on a trajectory to be less awesome over time, because my goals tend to be shaped in this way. (One of those binds whereby if you go after x directly, you don’t get x, but if you go after y, you get x as a side effect.)
I’m not sure what to do about this.
Maybe meditate on, and dialogue with, my sense that skills are how awesomeness is measured, as opposed to raw, general problem solving.
Maybe I need to undergo some deep change that causes me to have different sorts of goals at a deep level. (I think this would be a pretty fundamental shift in how I engage with the world: from a virtue ethics orientation (focused on one’s own attributes) to one of consequentialism (focused on the states of the world).)
There are some exceptions to this, goals that are more consequentialist (although if you scratch a bit, you’ll find they’re about living an ideal of myself, more than they are directly about the world), including wanting a romantic partner who makes me better (note that “who makes me better is” is virtue ethics-y), and some things related to my moral duty, like mitigating x-risk. These goals do give me grounding in sort of the way that I think I need, but they’re not sufficient? I still spend a lot of time trying to get skills.
Your seemingly target-less skill-building motive isn’t necessarily irrational or non-awesome. My steel-man is that you’re in a hibernation period, in which you’re waiting for the best opportunity of some sort (romantic, or business, or career, or other) to show up so you can execute on it. Picking a goal to focus on really hard now might well be the wrong thing to do; you might miss a golden opportunity if your nose is at the grindstone. In such a situation a good strategy would, in fact, be to spend some time cultivating skills, and some time in existential confusion (which is what I think not knowing which broad opportunities you want to pursue feels like from the inside).
The other point I’d like to make is that I expect building specific skills actually is a way to increase general problem solving ability; they’re not at odds. It’s not that super specific skills are extremely likely to be useful directly, but that the act of constructing a skill is itself trainable and a significant part of general problem solving ability for sufficiently large problems. Also, there’s lots of cross-fertilization of analogies between skills; skills aren’t quite as discrete as you’re thinking.
Skills and problem-solving are deeply related. The basics of most skills are mechanical and knowledge-based, with some generalization creeping in on your 3rd or 4th skill in terms of how to learn and seeing non-obvious crossover. Intermediate (say, after the first 500 to a few thousand hours) use of skills requires application of problem-solving within the basic capabilities of that skill. Again, you get good practice within a skill, and better across a few skills. Advanced application in many skills is MOSTLY problem-solving. How to apply your well-indexed-and-integrated knowledge to novel situations, and how to combine that knowledge across domains.
I don’t know of any shortcuts, though—it takes those thousands of hours to get enough knowledge and basic techniques embedded in your brain that you can intuit what avenues to more deeply explore in new applications.
There is a huge amount of human variance—some people pick up some domains ludicrously easily. This is a blessing and a curse, as it causes great frustration when they hit a domain that they have to really work at. Others have to work at everything, and never get their Nobel, but still contribute a whole lot of less-transformational “just work” within the domains they work at.
I don’t know whether this resembles your experience at all, but for me, skills translate pretty directly to moment-to-moment life satisfaction, because the most satisfying kind of experience is doing something that exercises my existing skills. I would say that only very recently (in my 30s) do I feel “capped out” on life satisfaction from skills (because I am already quite skilled at almost everything I spend all my time doing) and I have thereby begun spending more time trying to do more specific things in the world.
Seems to me there is some risk either way. If you keep developing skills without applying them to a specific goal, it can be a form of procrastination (an insidious one, because it feels so virtuous). There are many skills you could develop, and life is short. On the other hand, as you said, if you go right after your goal, you may find an obstacle you can’t overcome… or even worse, an obstacle you can’t even properly analyze, so the problem is not merely that you don’t have the necessary skill, but that you even have no idea which skill you miss (so if you try to develop the skills as needed, you may waste time developing the wrong skills, because you misunderstood the nature of the problem).
it seems like the main important thing for people who do incredible things is their ability to do problem solving on the things that come up, and not the skills that they had previously built up in a “skill bank”.
It could be both. And perhaps you notice the problem-specific skills more, because those are rare.
But I also kinda agree that the attitude is more important, and skills often can be acquired when needed.
So… dunno, maybe there are two kinds of skills? Like, the skills with obvious application, such as “learn to play a piano”; and the world-modelling skills, such as “understand whether playing a piano would realistically help you accomplish your goals”? You can acquire the former when needed, but you need the latter in advance, to remove your blind spots?
Or perhaps some skills such as “understand math” are useful in many kinds of situations and take a lot of time to learn, so you probably want to develop these in advance? (Also, if you don’t know yet what to do, it probably helps to get power: learn math, develop social skills, make money… When you later make up your mind, you will likely find some of this useful.)
And maybe you need the world-modelling skills before you make specific goals, because how could your goal be to learn play the piano, if you don’t know the piano exists? You could have a more general goal, such as “become famous at something”, but if you don’t know that piano exists, maybe you wouldn’t even look in this direction.
But most of the things that I want by default are of the sort “wanting to be able to do”, because if I had more capabilities, that would make me awesome.
Could this also be about your age? (I am assuming here that you are young.) For younger people it makes more sense to develop general skills; for older people it makes more sense to go after specific goals. The more time you have ahead of you, the more meta you can go—the costs of acquiring a skill are the same, but the possible benefits of having the skill are proportional to your remaining time (more than linear, if you actually use the skill, because it will keep increasing as a side effect of being used).
Also, as a rule of thumb, younger people are judged by their potential, older people are judged by their accomplishments. If you are young, evolution wants you to feel awesome about having skills, because that’s what your peers will admire. You signal general intelligence. The accomplishments you have… uhm, how to put it politely… if you see a 20 years old kid driving an expensive car, your best guess is that their parents have bought it, isn’t it? On the other hand, an older person without accomplishments seems like a loser, regardless of their apparent skills, because there is something suspicious about them not having translated those skills into actual outcomes. The excuse for the young ones is that their best strategy is to acquire skills now, and apply them later (which hasn’t happened yet, but there is enough time remaining).
Based on your language here, it feels to me like you’re in the contemplation stage along the stages of change.
So the very first thing I’d say is to not feel the desire to jump ahead and “get started on a goal right now.” That’s jumping ahead in the stages of change, and will likely create a relapse. I will predict that there’s a 50% chance that if you continue thinking about this without “forcing it”, you’ll have started in on a goal (action stage) within 3 months.
I’m pretty convinced that they key to getting yourself to do stuff is “Creative Tension”—creating a clear internal tension between the end state that feels good and the current state that doesn’t feel as good. There are 4 ways I know to go about generating internal tension:
Develop a strong sense of self, and create tension between the world where you’re fully expressing that self and the world where you’re not.
Develop a strong sense of taste, and create tension between the beautiful things that could exist and what exists now.
Develop a strong pain, and create tension between the world where you have that pain and the world where you’ve solved it.
Develop a strong vision, and create tension between the world as it is now and the world as it would be in your vision.
One especially useful trick that worked for me coming from the “just develop myself into someone awesome” place was tying the vision of the awesome person I could be with the vision of what I’d achieved—that is, in m vision of the future, including a vision of the awesome person I had to become in order to reach that future.
I then would deliberately contrast where I was now with that compelling vision/self/taste with where I was. Checking in with that vision every morning, and fixing areas of resistance when they arise, is what keeps me motivated.
I do have a workshop that I run on exactly how to create that vision that’s tied with sense of self and taste, and then how to use it to generate creative tension. Let me know if something like that would be helpful to you.
(Reasonably personal)
I spend a lot of time trying to build skills, because I want to be awesome. But there is something off about that.
I think I should just go after things that I want, and solve the problems that come up on the way. The idea of building skills sort of implies that if I don’t have some foundation or some skill, I’ll be blocked, and won’t be able to solve some thing in the way of my goals.
But that doesn’t actually sound right. Like it seems like the main important thing for people who do incredible things is their ability to do problem solving on the things that come up, and not the skills that they had previously built up in a “skill bank”.
Raw problem solving is the real thing and skills are cruft. (Or maybe not cruft per se, but more like a side effect. The compiled residue of previous problem solving. Or like a code base from previous project that you might repurpose.)
Part of the problem with this is that I don’t know what I want for my own sake, though. I want to be awesome, which in my conception, means being able to do things.
I note that wanting “to be able to do things” is a leaky sort of motivation: because the victory condition is not clearly defined, it can’t be crisply compelling, and so there’s a lot of waste somehow.
The sort of motivation that works is simply wanting to do something, not wanting to be able to do something. Like specific discrete goals that one could accomplish, know that one accomplished, and then (in most cases) move on from.
But most of the things that I want by default are of the sort “wanting to be able to do”, because if I had more capabilities, that would make me awesome.
But again, that’s not actually conforming with my actual model of the world. The thing that makes someone awesome is general problem solving capability, more than specific capacities. Specific capacities are brittle. General problem solving is not.
I guess that I could pick arbitrary goals that seem cool. But I’m much more emotionally compelled by being able to do something instead of doing something.
But I also think that I am notably less awesome and on a trajectory to be less awesome over time, because my goals tend to be shaped in this way. (One of those binds whereby if you go after x directly, you don’t get x, but if you go after y, you get x as a side effect.)
I’m not sure what to do about this.
Maybe meditate on, and dialogue with, my sense that skills are how awesomeness is measured, as opposed to raw, general problem solving.
Maybe I need to undergo some deep change that causes me to have different sorts of goals at a deep level. (I think this would be a pretty fundamental shift in how I engage with the world: from a virtue ethics orientation (focused on one’s own attributes) to one of consequentialism (focused on the states of the world).)
There are some exceptions to this, goals that are more consequentialist (although if you scratch a bit, you’ll find they’re about living an ideal of myself, more than they are directly about the world), including wanting a romantic partner who makes me better (note that “who makes me better is” is virtue ethics-y), and some things related to my moral duty, like mitigating x-risk. These goals do give me grounding in sort of the way that I think I need, but they’re not sufficient? I still spend a lot of time trying to get skills.
Anyone have thoughts?
Your seemingly target-less skill-building motive isn’t necessarily irrational or non-awesome. My steel-man is that you’re in a hibernation period, in which you’re waiting for the best opportunity of some sort (romantic, or business, or career, or other) to show up so you can execute on it. Picking a goal to focus on really hard now might well be the wrong thing to do; you might miss a golden opportunity if your nose is at the grindstone. In such a situation a good strategy would, in fact, be to spend some time cultivating skills, and some time in existential confusion (which is what I think not knowing which broad opportunities you want to pursue feels like from the inside).
The other point I’d like to make is that I expect building specific skills actually is a way to increase general problem solving ability; they’re not at odds. It’s not that super specific skills are extremely likely to be useful directly, but that the act of constructing a skill is itself trainable and a significant part of general problem solving ability for sufficiently large problems. Also, there’s lots of cross-fertilization of analogies between skills; skills aren’t quite as discrete as you’re thinking.
Skills and problem-solving are deeply related. The basics of most skills are mechanical and knowledge-based, with some generalization creeping in on your 3rd or 4th skill in terms of how to learn and seeing non-obvious crossover. Intermediate (say, after the first 500 to a few thousand hours) use of skills requires application of problem-solving within the basic capabilities of that skill. Again, you get good practice within a skill, and better across a few skills. Advanced application in many skills is MOSTLY problem-solving. How to apply your well-indexed-and-integrated knowledge to novel situations, and how to combine that knowledge across domains.
I don’t know of any shortcuts, though—it takes those thousands of hours to get enough knowledge and basic techniques embedded in your brain that you can intuit what avenues to more deeply explore in new applications.
There is a huge amount of human variance—some people pick up some domains ludicrously easily. This is a blessing and a curse, as it causes great frustration when they hit a domain that they have to really work at. Others have to work at everything, and never get their Nobel, but still contribute a whole lot of less-transformational “just work” within the domains they work at.
I don’t know whether this resembles your experience at all, but for me, skills translate pretty directly to moment-to-moment life satisfaction, because the most satisfying kind of experience is doing something that exercises my existing skills. I would say that only very recently (in my 30s) do I feel “capped out” on life satisfaction from skills (because I am already quite skilled at almost everything I spend all my time doing) and I have thereby begun spending more time trying to do more specific things in the world.
Seems to me there is some risk either way. If you keep developing skills without applying them to a specific goal, it can be a form of procrastination (an insidious one, because it feels so virtuous). There are many skills you could develop, and life is short. On the other hand, as you said, if you go right after your goal, you may find an obstacle you can’t overcome… or even worse, an obstacle you can’t even properly analyze, so the problem is not merely that you don’t have the necessary skill, but that you even have no idea which skill you miss (so if you try to develop the skills as needed, you may waste time developing the wrong skills, because you misunderstood the nature of the problem).
It could be both. And perhaps you notice the problem-specific skills more, because those are rare.
But I also kinda agree that the attitude is more important, and skills often can be acquired when needed.
So… dunno, maybe there are two kinds of skills? Like, the skills with obvious application, such as “learn to play a piano”; and the world-modelling skills, such as “understand whether playing a piano would realistically help you accomplish your goals”? You can acquire the former when needed, but you need the latter in advance, to remove your blind spots?
Or perhaps some skills such as “understand math” are useful in many kinds of situations and take a lot of time to learn, so you probably want to develop these in advance? (Also, if you don’t know yet what to do, it probably helps to get power: learn math, develop social skills, make money… When you later make up your mind, you will likely find some of this useful.)
And maybe you need the world-modelling skills before you make specific goals, because how could your goal be to learn play the piano, if you don’t know the piano exists? You could have a more general goal, such as “become famous at something”, but if you don’t know that piano exists, maybe you wouldn’t even look in this direction.
Could this also be about your age? (I am assuming here that you are young.) For younger people it makes more sense to develop general skills; for older people it makes more sense to go after specific goals. The more time you have ahead of you, the more meta you can go—the costs of acquiring a skill are the same, but the possible benefits of having the skill are proportional to your remaining time (more than linear, if you actually use the skill, because it will keep increasing as a side effect of being used).
Also, as a rule of thumb, younger people are judged by their potential, older people are judged by their accomplishments. If you are young, evolution wants you to feel awesome about having skills, because that’s what your peers will admire. You signal general intelligence. The accomplishments you have… uhm, how to put it politely… if you see a 20 years old kid driving an expensive car, your best guess is that their parents have bought it, isn’t it? On the other hand, an older person without accomplishments seems like a loser, regardless of their apparent skills, because there is something suspicious about them not having translated those skills into actual outcomes. The excuse for the young ones is that their best strategy is to acquire skills now, and apply them later (which hasn’t happened yet, but there is enough time remaining).
I’ve gone through something very similar.
Based on your language here, it feels to me like you’re in the contemplation stage along the stages of change.
So the very first thing I’d say is to not feel the desire to jump ahead and “get started on a goal right now.” That’s jumping ahead in the stages of change, and will likely create a relapse. I will predict that there’s a 50% chance that if you continue thinking about this without “forcing it”, you’ll have started in on a goal (action stage) within 3 months.
Secondly, unlike some of the other responses here, I think your analysis is fairly accurate. I’ve certainly found that picking up gears when I need them for my goals is better than learning them ahead of time.
Now, in terms of “how to actually do it.”
I’m pretty convinced that they key to getting yourself to do stuff is “Creative Tension”—creating a clear internal tension between the end state that feels good and the current state that doesn’t feel as good. There are 4 ways I know to go about generating internal tension:
Develop a strong sense of self, and create tension between the world where you’re fully expressing that self and the world where you’re not.
Develop a strong sense of taste, and create tension between the beautiful things that could exist and what exists now.
Develop a strong pain, and create tension between the world where you have that pain and the world where you’ve solved it.
Develop a strong vision, and create tension between the world as it is now and the world as it would be in your vision.
One especially useful trick that worked for me coming from the “just develop myself into someone awesome” place was tying the vision of the awesome person I could be with the vision of what I’d achieved—that is, in m vision of the future, including a vision of the awesome person I had to become in order to reach that future.
I then would deliberately contrast where I was now with that compelling vision/self/taste with where I was. Checking in with that vision every morning, and fixing areas of resistance when they arise, is what keeps me motivated.
I do have a workshop that I run on exactly how to create that vision that’s tied with sense of self and taste, and then how to use it to generate creative tension. Let me know if something like that would be helpful to you.