Fungibility of progress

 Building off of my previous post regarding the fungibility of experience. As it turns out, even progress is somewhat fungible. As long as you're making progress on something, you're getting somewhere.

It's like this with lots of complex systems -- if there are enough paths and interconnections, pretty much any path you choose, as long as it's in the right direction, is about as good as any other.

There are limitations, big caveats to this, of course. For instance, you can waste your time on a lot of busywork. A lot of people do this because they can only see the short term, and neglect the big life-changing tasks that could help make your other work a lot easier. Poverty can do this to you, as does anything that induces a scarcity mindset. That's not even mentioning the fact that often poverty actually forces your priorities in the sense that you really don't have the resources and time to create value, so it's not purely a mindset thing.

At the same time, this fungibility framework helps you overcome that. If you're afraid of neglecting some menial task, you don't have to be. As weird as it sounds, keep in mind that in a way, you're overall making good progress, even better progress than if you hadn't neglected that task, so it's not such a big deal. I'm not saying neglect to shower and devote that time to projects, but it really puts things into perspective about what's important and what's not, what you should prioritize with your time (you can't do it all). 
It's just easier this way, because it allows you to assign value-per-unit-time to your tasks without worrying about all the particular outcomes of all your particular tasks. It linearizes life for you: just focusing on maximizing value and you're good.

Again, do take showers and clean and pick up your kids from school and so on. This framework allows you to pick your battles, for those who simply try to fight them all. But some battles, obviously, you just need to fight. 

Fungibility of experience

 People think in careers all the time, but I think from time to time it's more helpful to think in a more "first principles" manner.

 Focusing on a particular discipline or technical skill works for a lot of people when the world needs those skills, and to a larger extent the need is defined by the supply. If you have those skills in your populace, why not use them? 

But things change and there's no way of predicting where the masses are going to go and what particular skills are going to be in demand. At the end of the day, there's no guarantee that your particular skill will fit in with the global "plan". 

What I've seen though is that you can't really go wrong if you just work on generally challenging and developing yourself and being active. People who work like this tend to even be at the forefront of change. 

• After all, there were no M.S.'s in Data Science before data science became a thing. When data science was being in its infancy it was just smart people applying computational models to business data. It was experts from different fields coming together and defining the practice
• From the perspective of someone who wants to hire people to work for them, it's good to have specialists who are extremely good at what they do, but otherwise or in lieu of that you just want smart, well-rounded people who can problem solve and are a pleasure to work with, people you can communicate with and will understand your vision

At the end of the day, you can practically work on anything to develop those skills. It's what people like to call "soft skills". It's about developing yourself as a human. It's those skills that are useful in any sort of work: intelligence (emotional and cognitive), communication, critical thinking. 

There are also skills you develop that aren't as general, but generalizable -- developing yourself as a knowledge base. For example, if you like doing Raspberry Pi projects in your spare time, it's likely that you're going to be able to apply that to a business. Even if you can't directly use it, you'll likely find it easier to learn more technical subjects because of the similar "thought-patterns"*. You're building up patterns of thinking that can be easily applied elsewhere. 

And statistically speaking, as long as that base of knowledge upwards, you're likely going to be able to apply it somewhere. For instance, as a child you're impressed that your parents can seemingly do everthing -- and that's because they have years of this thing called "experience" on you. This is what I call the "fungibility of experience". It happens because our world is vast and interconnected -- really, any experience is useful somewhere, someday. 

Often, it's less important what you do, and more important that you do -- maximize "resource production" per given time, even though these "resources" don't seem so "fungible" at the time. 

So based off of this, this would be my "career advice" to myself: 

• Specializing isn't bad. Specializing builds character, intelligence, complexity. So invest time in learning something deeply, but as you progress, keep an eye on how much you are developing as a human and as a knowledge base as opposed to how much you are simply advancing in that particular subject. 
• Practical example: If you're a engineer, pick up a book on, I don't know, anthropology. Read different stuff. Learn an instrument, I don't know. More engineering makes you better at engineering, but has diminishing returns on making you a better human. 
• Generalizing is good. Don't be afraid of picking up new things (and dropping them) to the extent that they provide you with human and knowledge enrichment, and deeply enough where you're actually building some complexity and knowledge rather than dabbling. Connect with others, fast-track your knowledge rather than discovering everything yourself. Don't worry about if it's a waste of time, because again, fungibility of experience.  
• Practical example: Read research papers in fields you've never even heard of. You'd be surprised at the novelty -- there is a lot of profound stuff on things you never even gave a thought to, if you go high-level enough
• Be open to a wide range of opportunities. Experiential fungibility only happens in a sufficiently large system, and if you're closed off to opportunities, you're cloistering yourself in a smaller subsystem. Don't limit your opportunities to, say, "environmental psychology" because that's what you got you Ph.D. in. Labels are just labels. 
• Practical example: Talk to people. What are their needs? Keep up with the news, but not just the mainstream. Where do you think you can help? 
• If nothing else, focus on simply doing, and more importantly, trying. Maximize that vs. the time you have. Remember, it's not the fungibility of time, it's the fungibility of experience. Just because you've been around longer doesn't make you any wiser. 

* It's what people call "transferable skills", basically -- I just don't like thinking about skills that exist in domains and transferring, but skills that exist in their own right, in a platonic sense if you will, outside of any particular domain of application. It's also imprecise because you could either be talking about skills that are directly applicable in say, a new job, or skills that aren't directly usable, but help you learn your new job by analogy. People actually have been using the term "mental model" a lot more now, which is pretty much what I'm talking about. 

Motivation vs Discipline

 

I feel like I had a decent reply to Vlad so I'm making a post out of it. 

 Somehow you are managing to disagree with him without saying anything substantial or contrary to what Michael already said. And no, lack of balance and overwork doesn't actually lead to burnout, it leads to bad health outcomes and exhaustion. Yes, these events often go hand in hand with burnout, but it's stress that does it, not the overwork itself.

Michael is spot on about motivation and discipline. Relying on discipline to carry you through life is like relying on fear to rule a state. It will work in the short term, but... yeah.

It's actually kind of lazy to rely on discipline more. It's weirdly Stockholm-syndrome-y and American that many think the 2nd and 3rd comics is a good situation to be in, without realizing the 1st is perfectly attainable if they were to sit alone with their thoughts and gain some self-knowledge (which is something Americans fear, apparently).

And often when people ascribe success to discipline it's usually just strong drive (see: motivation), good planning, organization, and a conducive/favorable environment.

This is actually science, not the kind of ambiguous platitudes you are offering here: studies have found that people who are successful in resisting temptations long-term do so not by practicing discipline, but by avoiding situations where they might fail as temptations fade over time.

It's like training a dog, motivate them with positive reinforcement and set them up for success and they'll eventually re-align their motivators and motivate themselves. Isn't it weird that no other animal on earth feels like it has to choke down stuff it doesn't want, but apparently it's a perfectly normal state of affairs for humans?

    The thing is, life is complex and it's hard for the brain to calculate motivation and reward to every facet of every decision you make, particularly when you have to weigh all that against immediate needs such as food, sex, sleep, etc. That's when we do a sort of override to get past that dilemma -- this is what people call "discipline". The comic depiction of discipline as some rock giant carrying you through tasks is actually perfect. You don't want to, but you do. 

    Some people rely on this discipline process often enough without allowing their motivation to catch up, until their reward center has had enough and makes you sit on the couch binging Netflix and ice cream all night after work wondering why you just don't have the energy to do your laundry (especially with all this sugar you're consuming). THAT'S burnout. 

    Your motivation is not something you need to fight or override. It's something you need to learn to work with, and yes, discipline is a very important tool to get your over the small bumps and smooth out the ride, or when things get high-stakes. But a lot of people don't really have time for self-knowledge and believe it's just a problem of discipline, so , and for people who are struggling it's not doing them any favors to tell them they have a discipline problem. 

 Dr. Jane Elliot talks about how people tend to switch between a hiding mode and chasing mode throughout their lives. Hiding is what happens when you coast at work, live day-to-day with a bunch of goals but never feeling like you're living up to your potential. Chasing is the opposite -- you throw yourself full throttle into a goal but at the end of it, it feels empty and meaningless. It's kind of like settling in a city vs traveling the road. Camping out within the city walls is safe and cozy, maybe you can start a family there, but it's not very exciting and you feel like you want more. The roads between the cities are treacherous, with bandits and obstacles, but also, who knows what the next town over has in store? As it so happens, it's often just more of the same...

But this hiding and chasing gives structure to our lives, in different ways: the former affords us security, and the latter imbues our lives with a sense of purpose. But at the same time, they are not satisfying because they both distract us in different ways. By hiding, we distract ourselves with the mundanity of the day-to-day. By chasing we distract ourselves with the excitement of, well, chasing a goal. But distract us from what? Well, in a sense, they distract us from asking why. 

Let me explain. 

For starters there's this word, "should", that comes up a lot when we "want" to pursue some goal but feel an "internal resistance" to achieving or working at it. For instance, "I really should start working out" -- but I never seem to stick to it. 

Dr. Elliot also talks about the word should in her article and how it's basically, well, bad:

The whole stupefying system of ‘should’ rests on our conviction that we’re inherently terrible at self-discipline, which means there’s no analysis required to understand why we can’t do the things we know we want to do.

Basically, as soon as we say "should", we're taking the goal as fixed, and if we fail it's a discipline issue.  We feel this "internal resistance" that we feel like we need to fight. Nowhere do we question whether this goal is actually what we want, or it's just one of those "wants". Nowhere do we question why we feel that resistance, or what it's trying to tell us about what we want. This lack of self-knowledge is exacerbated, in part, by that distinctly American attitude that life should be difficult and full of work, grit is a capital-V Virtue, and emotions can be overcome by hard work. 

But we don't need to fight it. Elliot proposes that the next time we feel that resistance, we don't fight it. We listen to it, understand where it's coming from, and think about it. If it's a particularly strong resistance, we can negotiate with it, start small. And a lot of the time, that resistance is valid and founded on fears and past experiences. But like stretching a muscle, trying to force it and tensing up just makes it worse and leads to injury.