3-Item Status
Current Location: Milwaukee, WI
Reading: The Extinction of Experience by Christine Rosen
Listening: Anti-Superstar by Haute & Freddy
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Quick Notes
New Work:
This week’s Let’s Know Things is about AI-Associated Delusions
Yesterday’s Brain Lenses essay was on the Understanding Gap & the pod was about Abbreviations
Persistence Curve
While we all have at least a few things we’re just latently good at, most of what we’re able to do (for fun or for money) is the result of dogged persistence.
Just showing up, over and over, is a powerful thing. And we’re not always psychologically incentivized to do so, because even if some new pursuit or area of inquiry starts out shiny and interesting, that glimmer will tend to dull, and that novelty will tend to wear off the more we learn.
We love easy gains, and when we’re exposed to something entirely new, every single thing we pick up is the kid’s-level version of that thing. It’s the ABCs and 2+2, and we can often learn these basics rapidly, and that makes our brains happy: we’re acquiring knowledge and know-how! That’s survival-related stuff! Keep it up, keep it up!
Our brains are less enthused about having to spend energy on things, though, even if those things are valuable. And after we breeze through the basics, all that’s left is progressively heavier (knowledge- and skill-related) lifts: we’re not learning the alphabet, we’re learning cuneiform; we’re not doing addition, we’re doing abstract algebra.
I picture this dynamic as something like the Gartner hype cycle for new technologies, where there’s a rapid incline along a steep arc, that upward arc representing (for this use-case) how quickly we pick up new stuff (and to a certain degree how much fun we have while doing so) when we decide to learn something new.
After that swift climb, though, comes the “trough of disillusionment,” which I think is an apt term for this use-case, as well.
In this trough, we’ve soaked up all the easy gains and low-hanging satisfaction fruits, and we have to work increasingly hard for each small indication of progress, and in many cases to feel like we’re moving at all.
It’s not uncommon at this point in the process to feel like we’re taking several (or more) steps backwards, actually, because we suddenly know enough to realize how much we didn’t know, before, and our infinitely tiny bit of knowledge now seems a lot less impressive, perhaps even bordering on pointless.
That recontextualization can disillusion a person.
Something I’ve learned over the years, as someone who loves to learn and thus falls into to this trough on a regular basis, is that you can teach yourself to get better at recontextualization, in the sense that you know this fall is coming, you’ve mentally prepared yourself for it, and it thus feels less like a sucker punch in the gut when it arrives.
There are ways to more rapidly scale that initial incline, allowing you to catch a glimpse of the bigger picture ahead of time so that as you learn the basics you already have a sense of where you’re going, which in turn can make it feel less like a spike followed by a sudden drop, and more like a steady incline with a lot of little plateau-like resting spots along the way.
Simply being aware of this dynamic, though, probably helps more than any little tactical tricks, because lacking that awareness, it really can be demotivating to rapidly go from “Oh wow, I’m so good at this thing, which I now love” to “Oh wow, I truly suck at this, why am I even wasting my time?”—especially if this happens semi-regularly, as that recurrent feeling could lead to an (incorrect) self-perception as someone who’s simply incapable of learning anything new.
Attempt these sorts of climbs regularly enough, though (ideally with this understanding in hand), and it gets easier to swap-out that self-deprecation with a sense confident struggle: this isn’t easy, but I know that what’s on the other side of it will probably be worth the effort.
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What Else
I’m working on a Markdown-based slide deck app that’s kicking my butt, but man am I having a good time with it. I’ve also been making little tweaks and updates to my existing app catalog, which has been satisfying.
It’s mid-July, so I’m just a few weeks from getting back to working on Yore, beta-reader notes in hand. It’ll be a fairly dramatic segue, as I’ve been super-focused on development stuff these past few months, but the goal is to carve up my weeks so I have focused time for deep, long-format writing, and to have those periods coexist with both shorter-form writing and the completely orthogonal coding-related projects.
It may take a few weeks to find the right rhythm, but I think I’ll enjoy the process of figuring it out.
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