Problem: I want to keep learning, growing and levelling up in various skills. Become a better musician, coder, designer, leader, and so forth. I want to avoid plateauing in domains I care about.
1. Find side projects that are fun and small, such that they’re easy to do and I want to do them.
2. Take away the schleps from levelling up, which is often the overhead of figuring out exactly *how* to go about it, e.g. by:
3 Hire tutors/personal trainers.
4 Work with colleagues who keep levelling up and thereby putting implicit pressure on me to do so.
5 Curate a list of tutorials that I’d be really excited to try. A tutorial is just a effort in --> learning out machine!
6 Pay deliberate metacognition to where I make mistakes, and have a routine of doing this at a fixed interval, so I know where my growth edges are.
7 Have a video repeatedly playing on a screen in the corner of someone learning something. Social pressure!
8 Choose work projects with an eye to one I don’t yet know how to do, which will force me to learn.
9 Meditate and do visualisation on myself as an agent capable of learning and growth, such that I don’t flinch away from things I don’t know how to do, and at a deep level become more inclined to reach towards them.
10 Have a regular time interval habit (e.g. once a quarter) of showing my work to people with mastery or a high skill level, and asking them how to improve. In particular doing this with the same person over time so they can have a sense of whether I’m growing or not
11 Keep finding quantitative metrics of the skills I care about. Track them, and check that they’re growing over time.
12 Challenge a friend to who can achieve the highest skill in a domain. The competition will motivate me to try harder.
13 Pick domains of learning where it’s easy to make progress but highly unlikely to ever reach the end. (I wonder what this would be??)
14 Post about my intentions publicly, thereby committing me to them more strongly.
15 Go around to a bunch of people who seem like they achieved mastery and didn’t plateau, ask for their secrets.
16 Make a Bountied Rationality post for someone to review the literature on this for me.
17 Create a community of people dedicated to continual improvement, and have everyone try things and figure out the best strategies
18 Manipulate an evil person into blackmail me into doing something terrible to me unless I keep improving.
19 Get a powerful and inspiring tattoo about continual progress.
20 Watch a motivation video each morning.
21 Go to 5 friends. Ask each to check in with me at a particular point in the future (can be as short as 1 week and as long as 2 years), to ask a particular set of questions to see if I’m still levelling up, and, if not, commit to sit down *right there and then* to find ways of solving that problem
22 Same as 21, but using the postal service that sends a letter to yourself at a particular point in the future.
23 Come up with a set of potential strategies, then design mechanical turk studies to see which ones actually work.
24 Become a motivation speaker about continual improvement, to the point where I would feel like a total hypocrite if I didn’t actually practice what I preached myself.
25 Figure out the neurology of learning, and what supplements to eat to learn more.
26 Figure out if there’s some trauma etc. that’s holding me back from learning and particular domain, and, if so, do therapy for that.
27 Have a slack channel where I keep posting little messages when I’ve learnt something new/expanded a growth edge, and where give praise and motivation (and where others can also post about their learnings)
28 Have a monthly “challenge”, where I pick some goal that seems like I can’t really do it, but give myself a month to accomplish it.
29 Same as 28, but have someone else pick my goal—just like a wise master, they can push further than I thought was possible.
30 Do regular metacognition to maintain a sense of where I can have the highest returns to skill growth (e.g. instead of trying to move from 99.9th to 99.99th percentile guitarist, moving from 50th to 99th percentile coder)
31 Fill my social media feeds with people who keep growing and learning, get rid of people who plateau
32 Become an artist and create art that’s hyper-optimised to inspire me in particular to keep learning
33 Go through some instances when I was really excited to learn something, and actually wen through with it; and try to meditate on why I was excited and what value I derive, so that I can do more of that.
34 Read account of great figures from history and their learning protocols
35 If I feel like I can’t grow more, make things harder for myself. If push-ups are too easy, use a weight vest. If coding some app is too easy, see if I can do it twice as fast. If designing a thing in photoshop is too easy, see if I can do it using only the keyboard and not the mouse.
36 Set myself exciting goals and rewards that’ll only be paid out if I manage to reach a certain level in some skill.
37 Actually just list down all the skills I care about growing in. Just reifying them into an external list might make me more likely to start noticing and analysing when I am and am not growing.
38 Just have an open-ended, meandering conversation about skill growth with a friend.
39 Do a babble challenge on skill growth.
40 Design my life to have a bunch of “equilibirum popping mechanisms”—things that make it such that I can’t really get locked into an equilibirum. My ask some clever friend to make plots to make my life absurd once a year, have weekly reviews/check-ins with a coach, etc., in ways where I shake things up and reevaluate.
41 Move city, move house, move team, change furniture. Shake things up and see if it has good effects.
42 Set aside some time daily or weekly to actually practice new skills. Even if in a less relevant domain (say, knitting). Just having the habits and culture around me of learning a skill in one domain, will keep those muscles alert and have positive overflow effects into other domains.
43 Make big spectacles of my monthly challenges (mentioned above), e.g. using Twitch streams and FB events, such that I feel really motivated to do something great.
44 Treat it like an interesting science problem: how can I figure out the optimal way for me to learn? Solve that science problem.
45 Keep exploring and trying random new things. Have a day a month to say, sample a Wikipedia list of “list of activities (filtering for things I’ve never done), and then do those things.
46 Try to learn a skill backwards and with only one hand, see if I discover more surface area on how it works.
47 Apply for jobs requiring skills I don’t have, or announce events requiring skills I don’t have, forcing me to learn in order to pull those things off.
48 Figure out how to make progress in a domain where I am among the experts, and there are no tutorials or obvious next steps. Otherwise this seems like a strong failure mode for where I would plateau.
49 Instead of thinking of it as “learning”; think of it as “trying” different “styles”. E.g. if I’ve always only done object-oriented programming, then do functional programming. If I’ve been designing things Tufte-style, look for a different way of making graphs. Try to build up a mental library of models or styles, such that I can compare and triage as needed. The term “horizontal learning instead of vertical learning” comes to mind. I’ve never heard it before, so if it already means something else, that’s an accident.
50 Invest in things like sleep, exercise and nutrition. Lack of energy is probably a key failure mode preventing from learning and growing.
Problem: I want to keep learning, growing and levelling up in various skills. Become a better musician, coder, designer, leader, and so forth. I want to avoid plateauing in domains I care about.
1. Find side projects that are fun and small, such that they’re easy to do and I want to do them.
2. Take away the schleps from levelling up, which is often the overhead of figuring out exactly *how* to go about it, e.g. by:
3 Hire tutors/personal trainers.
4 Work with colleagues who keep levelling up and thereby putting implicit pressure on me to do so.
5 Curate a list of tutorials that I’d be really excited to try. A tutorial is just a effort in --> learning out machine!
6 Pay deliberate metacognition to where I make mistakes, and have a routine of doing this at a fixed interval, so I know where my growth edges are.
7 Have a video repeatedly playing on a screen in the corner of someone learning something. Social pressure!
8 Choose work projects with an eye to one I don’t yet know how to do, which will force me to learn.
9 Meditate and do visualisation on myself as an agent capable of learning and growth, such that I don’t flinch away from things I don’t know how to do, and at a deep level become more inclined to reach towards them.
10 Have a regular time interval habit (e.g. once a quarter) of showing my work to people with mastery or a high skill level, and asking them how to improve. In particular doing this with the same person over time so they can have a sense of whether I’m growing or not
11 Keep finding quantitative metrics of the skills I care about. Track them, and check that they’re growing over time.
12 Challenge a friend to who can achieve the highest skill in a domain. The competition will motivate me to try harder.
13 Pick domains of learning where it’s easy to make progress but highly unlikely to ever reach the end. (I wonder what this would be??)
14 Post about my intentions publicly, thereby committing me to them more strongly.
15 Go around to a bunch of people who seem like they achieved mastery and didn’t plateau, ask for their secrets.
16 Make a Bountied Rationality post for someone to review the literature on this for me.
17 Create a community of people dedicated to continual improvement, and have everyone try things and figure out the best strategies
18 Manipulate an evil person into blackmail me into doing something terrible to me unless I keep improving.
19 Get a powerful and inspiring tattoo about continual progress.
20 Watch a motivation video each morning.
21 Go to 5 friends. Ask each to check in with me at a particular point in the future (can be as short as 1 week and as long as 2 years), to ask a particular set of questions to see if I’m still levelling up, and, if not, commit to sit down *right there and then* to find ways of solving that problem
22 Same as 21, but using the postal service that sends a letter to yourself at a particular point in the future.
23 Come up with a set of potential strategies, then design mechanical turk studies to see which ones actually work.
24 Become a motivation speaker about continual improvement, to the point where I would feel like a total hypocrite if I didn’t actually practice what I preached myself.
25 Figure out the neurology of learning, and what supplements to eat to learn more.
26 Figure out if there’s some trauma etc. that’s holding me back from learning and particular domain, and, if so, do therapy for that.
27 Have a slack channel where I keep posting little messages when I’ve learnt something new/expanded a growth edge, and where give praise and motivation (and where others can also post about their learnings)
28 Have a monthly “challenge”, where I pick some goal that seems like I can’t really do it, but give myself a month to accomplish it.
29 Same as 28, but have someone else pick my goal—just like a wise master, they can push further than I thought was possible.
30 Do regular metacognition to maintain a sense of where I can have the highest returns to skill growth (e.g. instead of trying to move from 99.9th to 99.99th percentile guitarist, moving from 50th to 99th percentile coder)
31 Fill my social media feeds with people who keep growing and learning, get rid of people who plateau
32 Become an artist and create art that’s hyper-optimised to inspire me in particular to keep learning
33 Go through some instances when I was really excited to learn something, and actually wen through with it; and try to meditate on why I was excited and what value I derive, so that I can do more of that.
34 Read account of great figures from history and their learning protocols
35 If I feel like I can’t grow more, make things harder for myself. If push-ups are too easy, use a weight vest. If coding some app is too easy, see if I can do it twice as fast. If designing a thing in photoshop is too easy, see if I can do it using only the keyboard and not the mouse.
36 Set myself exciting goals and rewards that’ll only be paid out if I manage to reach a certain level in some skill.
37 Actually just list down all the skills I care about growing in. Just reifying them into an external list might make me more likely to start noticing and analysing when I am and am not growing.
38 Just have an open-ended, meandering conversation about skill growth with a friend.
39 Do a babble challenge on skill growth.
40 Design my life to have a bunch of “equilibirum popping mechanisms”—things that make it such that I can’t really get locked into an equilibirum. My ask some clever friend to make plots to make my life absurd once a year, have weekly reviews/check-ins with a coach, etc., in ways where I shake things up and reevaluate.
41 Move city, move house, move team, change furniture. Shake things up and see if it has good effects.
42 Set aside some time daily or weekly to actually practice new skills. Even if in a less relevant domain (say, knitting). Just having the habits and culture around me of learning a skill in one domain, will keep those muscles alert and have positive overflow effects into other domains.
43 Make big spectacles of my monthly challenges (mentioned above), e.g. using Twitch streams and FB events, such that I feel really motivated to do something great.
44 Treat it like an interesting science problem: how can I figure out the optimal way for me to learn? Solve that science problem.
45 Keep exploring and trying random new things. Have a day a month to say, sample a Wikipedia list of “list of activities (filtering for things I’ve never done), and then do those things.
46 Try to learn a skill backwards and with only one hand, see if I discover more surface area on how it works.
47 Apply for jobs requiring skills I don’t have, or announce events requiring skills I don’t have, forcing me to learn in order to pull those things off.
48 Figure out how to make progress in a domain where I am among the experts, and there are no tutorials or obvious next steps. Otherwise this seems like a strong failure mode for where I would plateau.
49 Instead of thinking of it as “learning”; think of it as “trying” different “styles”. E.g. if I’ve always only done object-oriented programming, then do functional programming. If I’ve been designing things Tufte-style, look for a different way of making graphs. Try to build up a mental library of models or styles, such that I can compare and triage as needed. The term “horizontal learning instead of vertical learning” comes to mind. I’ve never heard it before, so if it already means something else, that’s an accident.
50 Invest in things like sleep, exercise and nutrition. Lack of energy is probably a key failure mode preventing from learning and growing.