Learning About Myself

11/20/14

About a year into college, I learned I didn't know myself very well. It was a humbling experience. All these things I thought I could do with ease were actually hard. I wasn't getting in shape like I planned. I wasn't building cool stuff in my spare time.

Now, I've slowly started to figure things out. I'm in much better shape, and I do work on things in my spare time, though I have yet to learn the skill of finishing. I've probably said this before, but it's incredibly frustrating that personal change and progress isn't instantenous.

It's work, and negative process is all too possible. All these tools and strategies to be more productive help, but there's no getting around there being this giant wall in front of me that I have to grind to dust. And it isn't some normal wall, either. No, it's made of nano-machines or something, Stephan. It regenerates itself, even when it looks completely destroyed. It adapts. Tools and strategies of the past become insufficient.

It's hard to remember the progress I've made, sometimes. I'm not 272 pounds anymore, I'm just above 200. Though, I was for a bit below 190. That's the stuff I see. It feels like I lost ground. I don't think about how far I've come in the grand scheme. I don't think about how far the wall has moved, has obeyed my pokes and prods and demands for progress, I think about how there's still a stupid wall in my way.

It just serves to remind me how much I don't know about myself. Even when I'm aware of my weaknesses and my strengths, I still lack adequate knowledge to take advantage of my strengths and minimize my weaknesses.

Such tactics are really what inspired this post. Yesterday, I was banging my head against the door over a lack of understanding I had at work. I spent a lot of time thinking.

My thinking isn't focused. It's random and scattered. I'll be thinking about the task at hand one second and be thinking about a sci-fi concept where collaborative research has made teleportation possible, and a group of people are secretly making a colony on Mars with this technology.

But, I'm kinda digressing here.

Where was I?

Learning about myself... tactics....

Yes, yes. There seems to be three states of productiveness I can be in.

• Doing things
• Thinking about how to do things
• Research about how to do things

The top thing feels like I'm actually doing things. I can point at something and say, "That's what I did." Unfortunately, doing things requires thinking about doing things, and all too often will slide to that even when it's not necessary. And that will lead to a myriad of tangential distractions that I do not know how to do. So, now I'm doing research into how to do those things.

It used to feel productive to go down this rabit hole, but now I recognize that I'm doing it and instead get frustrated. I can always dig deeper and learn more, but that doesn't mean I'll use that knowledge or ever find it useful.

Of course, I can't just get in the habit of only doing things. I won't always know what I'm doing. I have to think. And thinking won't always be sufficient, sometimes I have to gain new information I do not have available in my brain.

But I believe these are all actually very separate things. Switching between them willy-nilly will incur time and energy costs that I have to be more aware of. Proper research is a grokking process that is incredibly taxing, wherein a fuzziness I can't describe becomes concrete and detailed. Thinking is a seemingly randomized connection of all the concrete and fuzzy things I'm aware of, and understanding what collection of those things get me to that goal.

Once research and thinking have been done, doing really should be a quick implementation. A concrete "next action" that I don't have to think about. It's the easy ride down a steep hill after the grind riding up it. It feels like that's where I'm making the most progress, but only the buildup to that made any progress possible.

I don't really know where I'm going here, Stephan. I just thinking aloud at this point. Maybe thinking ablog?

Whatever.

Anyways, I want to try something to be more efficient and hopefully faster about this whole process.

1. Properly define what I need to be doing currently
2. Compile a list of known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns
   • Things needed to be done that I know how to do
   • Things needed to be done that I have to think about
   • Things needed to be done that I need to research
3. Verify list contains only necessary things
4. Do what can be done
5. Do necessary thinking and do what can be done, one at a time
6. Do necessary research, thinking, and what can be done, one at a time
7. Back to step one

I'll try to keep the doing, thinking, and research properly separate, and keep things modular. When one thing starts contaminating other things, I'll try to capture whatever contamination it is and set it aside for later.