I think this is worth expanding on- in practice, I’ve found the strongest method for avoiding the “oh no my great idea is not working out but I’m stuck in it” trap is to have other promising options just waiting for you to poke them.
Instead of feeling trapped and entering a cycle of motivation-killing burnout, a dying idea starts feeling just… kind of boring, and you naturally want to do the other more interesting thing. You don’t even have to try, you just find yourself thinking about it in the shower. When refined and used intentionally, it can align productivity with natural inclinations.
I tend to organize my work as a few different parallel depth first searches. In a given day, I’ll often work on two different things, and in a given week I might hit three or five. Something like spaced repetition applied to fields of study, with time for the other ideaspaces to lie fallow. This tends to produce recursively expanding options for research. After doing this for years, it’s now completely impossible for me to actually investigate everything I’ve written down in a todo somewhere, but at least I definitely don’t feel married to any one idea!
I suspect getting the full benefit does require a few (dozen) iterations of failure. Noticing that you already know an idea is dead is a lot easier when you’ve felt that same thing 20 times.
I think this is worth expanding on- in practice, I’ve found the strongest method for avoiding the “oh no my great idea is not working out but I’m stuck in it” trap is to have other promising options just waiting for you to poke them.
Instead of feeling trapped and entering a cycle of motivation-killing burnout, a dying idea starts feeling just… kind of boring, and you naturally want to do the other more interesting thing. You don’t even have to try, you just find yourself thinking about it in the shower. When refined and used intentionally, it can align productivity with natural inclinations.
I tend to organize my work as a few different parallel depth first searches. In a given day, I’ll often work on two different things, and in a given week I might hit three or five. Something like spaced repetition applied to fields of study, with time for the other ideaspaces to lie fallow. This tends to produce recursively expanding options for research. After doing this for years, it’s now completely impossible for me to actually investigate everything I’ve written down in a todo somewhere, but at least I definitely don’t feel married to any one idea!
I suspect getting the full benefit does require a few (dozen) iterations of failure. Noticing that you already know an idea is dead is a lot easier when you’ve felt that same thing 20 times.