3. Learning through Obsession

I am genuinely bad at balancing. I seem to jump from one obsession to the next. Just over the last three months, my obsessions included:

  1. Shooting free throws
  2. Podcasts and books about different technology topics
  3. Chess
  4. Watching Bill Burr (comedy) videos online

I historically thought that this habit was a pretty big negative, as it does not strive for balance. There are rarely limits. On any of the above, I can easily spend 2–3 hours a day without any worry. And in case of chess or watching videos, I could go well into the night — my worst night came in late April, when I ended up playing chess until 5 AM before a school day at 10:30 AM. I felt miserable.

However, this approach is not without its positives. Sure, no one except a professional chess player should ever spend that much time playing chess and no one except an aspiring standup comic should watch Bill Burr videos endlessly. There should be strict time limits on those. But I feel like the first two (free throws and podcasts / books) have taught me a lot more in a short period of time than I would have learned over several months of balancing.

I think the following three phenomena contribute to the period of high learning in a short span of time when we obsess:

  1. We think about it even when we’re not around it. I was reading a fair bit about blockchain recently. And when I read an unrelated article about upcoming elections in India, I thought about how blockchain could shape elections in the future. In my chess phase, I constantly used chess analogies to explain non-chess things in my life. When we obsess, a lot more in our lives becomes connected to the new thing that we learn.
  2. There is a high quickly accessible memory (basically, RAM) so that the startup on each day becomes easier. The best analogy I can think of here is that obsessing is like putting our minds on ‘sleep’ when we rest instead of on ‘shut down’ (when we balance).
  3. Learning is non-linear (aka, there is a ‘learning curve’). We first have no idea what’s going on, then we start picking up on some lingo and see patterns, and then large pieces of information start to fit well. This applies not only over a long period of time, but also in short ones. Spending 2 hours on a single day on something is usually a lot more productive than spending 30 hours each day for 4 days. Please refer to Cal Newport’s ‘Deep Work’ on this.

So my conclusion is this: Avoid harmful obsessions (chess and YouTube, to me, are more entertainment than knowledge-building). As for the good obsessions, plan your days and weeks according to this natural tendency — don’t commit to doing 10 small-medium things each day, but instead dedicate a large amount of time to doing one big thing each day for a span of several days. Remember that learning is non-linear.

Finding Satisfaction

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Chronicle of a life spent figuring out what life is about.

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