Don’t wanna eat my peas
Now, I have dreams like everyone else. And I have shortages of will like everyone else. But I want to make up for them. When I decide that to start sleeping well, I need to exercise every day, I need a figure out a way to make sure that I exercise every day, considering myself in the future as a person with different desires and interests. I need to figure out how to make myself do these things. I need to figure out how to decide, when I know it’s time to exercise but I’m in the middle of responding to this really interesting post or making great progress on this new feature (or, just last night, finishing a book it took me from 7 PM to 1 AM to read), whether the lost momentum of the activity that was being interrupted will be made up for by being better rested tomorrow. How much do I lose by not spending quite as much time learning new random things and forming new mental connections?
The point has been made (I forget where—maybe Paul Graham?) that you shouldn’t let yourself get too caught up by doing errands and chores, because most things really can wait, and you should be lazier with certain things (or more willing to subcontract them) so that you can be busier with the more important things. Act like your time is valuable. But I think I have the opposite problem. I simply don’t know when to make myself take care of myself and my surroundings, let alone make consistent progress toward any genuine accomplishment, without feeling, desperately, like I’m missing out on something important.
Part of it’s that I am so high-strung. (That’s partially due to my ADD medication. I might try another one and see if it makes me less nervous.) I need to relax myself once in a while, like twice a day or so, and make sure that I keep a reasonable mental pace. More of a jog and less of a sprint. But how do you do that? Can I stop and breathe deeply and feel relaxed in a reasonable amount of time? Yesterday I did it for an hour before I felt settled down.
And even stopping for a second to calm down seems hard to do. I feel compelled to keep going. My mind is always racing. And the faster I go, the less I can get done, because I end up being too damn tired. Mentally exhausted. I need to figure out how to make time for slow, steady, random self-improvement. Just enough of that so that I can start getting some boring, necessary things done.
It seems like the right balance would be precarious. Having enough ideas but not enough expertise will get you nowhere, and having no good ideas will make whatever you produce be mediocre. (This can’t really be resolved by teaming up with people who complement you. Too much communication inefficiency.) And having just a little too much curiosity might decrease your daily plodding consistency, and overall productivity, by a factor of two. But have just a little too little curiosity is a recipe for long-term stagnation. Each time you get twice as close to the ideal value, your long-term productivity doubles. It’s a sharp peak you’re aiming for, with very little feedback as to where the right balance is (since the payoff for curiosity is so long-term). I wonder how much of a component of the disposition of great innovators is the right balance of these two qualities.
I’ll leave speculations about how to attain this peak for future posts.
BTW, I hate English peas. Eating them makes me want to vomit, physically. I can sort of tolerate them sprinkled into other things (like casseroles) but only barely.
