This is important, because the solution to an impossible task should be to give up, while the solution to a hard task is often to just keep trying! This is a super common and subtle error, and it’s important to notice it in the moment This is completely understandable! Feeling stuck is unpleasant and hard, and pushing through it takes willpowerīut, in practice, while it may feel like being stuck means something is impossible, all it really means is that something is hard. This was a really useful exercise, and would’ve been completely impossible if I’d spent that hour overwhelmed by the thought of actually doing any of themĪ common failure mode is to feel stuck and give up. So I decided to sit down for an hour, and generate a list of 50 different things I could do in that year. This especially applies when it comes to any decision that feels scary or overwhelming - eg thinking about life decisionsĪnd this is super, super bad, because often the scariest thing is something unknown and fuzzy! By making the unknown feel clear and concrete, often it’ll feel a lot easier to pursue, so this leaves me stuck in a catch-22.įor example, I was recently considering the idea of taking a gap year, and feeling a bit overwhelmed by the idea. And these different mindsets can’t be activated at once, so in practice I’m either neglecting one or rapidly switching between them I find that these involve very different parts of my mind - generating ideas should feel free-flowing and diffuse, while filtering should feel constrained, directed and focused. This is an example of a general failure mode - trying to both generate and filter at the same time. Any weak and half-formed ideas are discarded before they can be fleshed out into something worthwhile This is incredibly unhelpful, because this is paralysing in practice, and means I struggle to come up with anything. I’m a massive perfectionist, and I find it easy to slip into the failure mode of generating the perfect idea. I think there are two main insights here: Solving the small problems I run into when doing work But I’ve found it useful in a wide range of areas in my life. This is obviously a useful skill in settings like doing art and research. This is a skill that I still suck at, but I’ve improved a lot at over time, and this post is my attempt to outline the approach that’s worked best for me. I think creativity is an incredibly valuable skill and, importantly, a learnable skill, not an inherent trait. I think these problems are, at their heart, a lack of creativity. The space of possibilities is enormous and the ability to search beyond what’s obviously visible is really valuable for noticing when you are wasting motion. I think this is a really big problem, because the world is large and complicated. I find that this goes hand-in-hand with the far larger problem of being trapped within your preconceptions - to notice the obvious solution to your problem, the obvious life path ahead of you, the obvious thing somebody in your role should do, and never realising there can be anything more. To be working on a problem, or trying to generate ideas, find it hard and stop looking. A really common failure mode that I observe in myself and others is to get stuck and then give up.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |