‘Chore Wars’ (http://www.chorewars.com/) is designed to motivate you do get chores done by providing XP / Gold / Treasure for completing chores, and tracking it to induce competition amongst your housemates.
It works for me as a more interesting to-do list, and has caused my kids to argue about who gets to clean the toilet and level up.
I think we need to decompose what we mean by “grinding”. When I practice a segment of a song on the piano over and over until my hands move the proper way to hit the notes, that’s grinding, right?
I think grinding would be if you kept on practicing the song even after you could consistently play it correctly. Otherwise, the positive connotations of “practice” versus the negative connotations of “grinding” wouldn’t make sense.
Maybe “grinding” isn’t the right word, but playing something over and over until it smooths out is the way most people practice.
Thinking about what might be causing problems or what might lead to improvement, and then working on the piece to make specific changes is what you need to do to get really excellent.
This thread wouldn’t be complete without a link to this Ctrl+Alt+Del comic
‘Chore Wars’ (http://www.chorewars.com/) is designed to motivate you do get chores done by providing XP / Gold / Treasure for completing chores, and tracking it to induce competition amongst your housemates.
It works for me as a more interesting to-do list, and has caused my kids to argue about who gets to clean the toilet and level up.
Or this XKCD comic.
I’d never thought of grinding real-life skills—brilliant!
Learning to play musical instruments is basically grinding.
Getting good isn’t—see Talent Is Overrated for details about the 10,000 hours to mastery theory.
People tend to prefer grinding over developing relevant sub-skills by experimentation, but the latter is what works.
I think we need to decompose what we mean by “grinding”. When I practice a segment of a song on the piano over and over until my hands move the proper way to hit the notes, that’s grinding, right?
I think grinding would be if you kept on practicing the song even after you could consistently play it correctly. Otherwise, the positive connotations of “practice” versus the negative connotations of “grinding” wouldn’t make sense.
Maybe “grinding” isn’t the right word, but playing something over and over until it smooths out is the way most people practice.
Thinking about what might be causing problems or what might lead to improvement, and then working on the piece to make specific changes is what you need to do to get really excellent.
Cooks Illustrated might be a real-world example—they take recipes through a bunch of conscious variations to perfect them.