An Exercise in Commitment. Part 2

May 23rd — June 6th, 2017

Hey everyone! It’s me again.

I have decided to try and post every 2 weeks over the next 6 months, in order to reflect on my progress and document my process. That makes this post #2, out of ~14.

There are a few things I want to cover in this post today. Feel free to skip down to what interests you — each section will be independent of the others. Here is what I’ll be talking about in this post:

1. Rationale behind the challenge

2. Approach to the next six (five and a half) months

3. Making an adjustment to one of my goals.

4. What I chose six goals.

Additionally, I have unfortunately had to make a switch to one of my goals. I am no longer attempting to run the four-minute mile, and will instead be focusing on developing my skills in squash. The rationale for this can be found below in the section “Making an adjustment to one of my goals”.

Also — after a lot of searching, I finally found a unicycle on Kijiji. Here is a photo of my triumphant victory.

SECTION ONE: Rationale behind the challenge:

So to recap — over the next six months (now five and a half), I have set the following goals.

• Learn to Unicycle (be able to unicycle for 2 km without any problems)
• Learn Spanish (be able to watch a full movie in Spanish and then recite the plot)
• One-armed chin up and pull-up (be able to do 10 repetitions on each arm)
• Juggle (4 balls — juggle for 4 minutes without any mistakes)
• Play Harmonica (be comfortable enough with my skill to be able to play in front of a group of at least 30 people)
• Develop proficiency as a squash player (from level 2.5 to 5.0+ — more details on this next post) (NEW GOAL)

Over the last few weeks, I have had some friends comment on the difficulty of these goals, so I think it is important that I speak about my rationale now.

When I decided to set this challenge for myself, there were a few things that were going through my mind. I wanted to learn a few things about myself. This included:

• learning to commit to a limited number of tasks over time,
• identifying how to rapidly acquire new skills,
• determining where my limits were in terms of multi-tasking and learning,
• analyzing whether it was easier for me to acquire certain types of skills (e.g. language vs physical fitness),
• developing competency in new and fun skills! (going from below 50th percentile to above 80th percentile in terms of ability)

Because of these considerations, I thought it would be more useful to set goals that were impossible (or nearly impossible) to achieve. The intent was to (please excuse the cliché), force me to focus on the journey, rather than the goal itself, as well as determine where my limits were.

Personally, I believe that training to reach an impossible finish line may lead to much more improvement than focusing on a more attainable goal (see image below), provided appropriate measures are taken to prevent burnout and the goal is approached in an effective manner (more on this later).

While this may not be a philosophy everyone agrees with, it is something that I thought would be worth testing out through this challenge. If this ends up being a successful for my personal learning style, it could end up being a highly useful strategy for future endeavours.

SECTION TWO: Approach to the next six (five and a half) months:

Ok so this is obviously a monstrous take ahead of me, let’s determine how to approach it. I think it would be a good idea to start by identifying timelines, as each skill will have its own requirements in terms of time commitment, which will dictate how I will spend the next little while.

Time for each skill: with relevant threads underneath

Harmonica — 1–2 months diligent practice

• Hard to find good information. This one is kind of a guess…

Unicycle- 2–3 months diligent practice

• See this data

Juggling — 2–3 months diligent practice

• Reddit thread
• Conducted my own analysis on Reddit

Spanish — 3 months

• Tim Ferriss

Chin Up — 5–6+ months

• Hard to find exact sources because there is a lot of variation in initial ability. Difficult to achieve at all so timeline is 5–6+ months.

Squash — 5–6 months

• Hard to find exact sources because there is a lot of variation in initial ability. Difficult to achieve at all so timeline is 5–6+ months.

Now that I have an idea of the rough timelines each goal will require, I can determine how to structure my training. I think it would be best to start by addressing my longer goals (squash, chin-up, and Spanish), and getting a system in place for these first. Once that is stable, I can take on juggling, unicycling, and the harmonica in 1–2 month bursts.

Below is a tentative attack plan:

• Month 1 — First week involves planning stage. Start squash, chin up and Spanish training intensely
• Month 2 — Start Unicycle Training, scale back others slightly
• Month 3 — (halfway through) Start Harmonica training after significantly scaling back unicycle
• Month 4 — Continue Harmonica Training, start Juggling late this month
• Month 5 — Evaluate and modify plan as required
• Month 6 — Evaluate and modify plan as required

I will be re-evaluating my approach every 2 weeks and changing as required as well.

Aside from timeline, the other initial step is defining how I want to approach each goal. In order to do so, I have done some reading about skill acquisition and learning (in a non-academic sense). A few sources I have drawn from include:

• The first 20 hours — how to learn anything | Josh Kaufman | TEDxCSU
• A How-To Guide: Accelerated Learning for Accelerated Times
• Tim Ferriss shares how to master any skill by deconstructing it | The Next Web
• How to Acquire Any New Skill in 20 Hours or Less

After reading through various sources, I put together an outline for how to approach each goal. I will start each goal by answering the following questions / prompts.

1. What is my baseline?

2. Identify those that perform well in this skill:

• What common characteristics make these people great?
• What are the averages and how do I compare?

3. Identify sources of information:

• Who do I know that is an expert in this skill? (friend, academic, etc..)?
• What sources of information are there on this skill?

4. Basic principles of success in this skill

• What are people recommending for training?

5. What are people recommending for training (modified from Tim Ferriss D.S.S.S approach)?

• Deconstruct the skill.
• What abilities does it require?
• Key processes to master.
• What sub skills are most important, and what are most difficult?
• What makes the skills so hard? Why might I fail?
• What sub-skills will be the highest yield?
• How should I sequence these sub-skills to optimize learning?

6. What metrics can I use to determine improvement?

7. What is my surveillance plan to collect data on these metrics?

This approach draws primarily from work by Tim Ferriss and Josh Kaufman. A lot of the focus is placed upon identifying the 20% of inputs that will lead to 80% of outputs (Pareto Principle), in order to get the most out of my limited training time.

In my next post I will be working my way through each goal and answering the above questions. This will then inform my training plan for each goal. Stay tuned for that post, where my approach will become more tangible!

SECTION THREE: Adjustment to my goals

As I mentioned above — I have had to adjust my four-minute mile goal, switching it out for a squash-related goal instead. Determining whether to do this was a difficult decision, especially because my ego wanted to ignore the difficulties I was having an continue to push through.

Over the last two weeks, I have dabbled in each goal to get a better idea of the magnitude of each. While each goal was set to be nearly impossible to achieve, I found that some goals still required much more time than others.

This was particularly true for the four-minute mile. I found this was taking up more than half of my focus, with the other five goals being split between the remaining time. This began to frustrate me, as it was highly inconvenient to fit the training into my schedule, while also spending time on the other goals.

At first, I wanted to ignore this difficulty and continue forward with my training. However, after further reflection I realized this decision was coming from my ego. The amount of time consumed by the four-minute mile was destructive towards my overall goal of improving each skill as much as possible. Given that I am already operating under very tight constraints, I believe this imbalance would be detrimental to my morale and performance over the next 5.5 months.

Because of this, I have decided to switch my mile run goal to something that better integrates into my daily life. Over the last month I have been spending quite a bit of time playing squash recreationally. I think this is an appropriate replacement, as it is still a fitness-related goal. Additionally, it is already part of my daily life, and will take away less time from the other skills.

So there we go. There is my logic behind why I have to switch out my goal. While I really wanted to continue and push through it, I recognize that this would likely be detrimental to my overall goal of learning about skill acquisition.

SECTION FOUR: Rationale behind choosing six goals:

After my initial post, I had some overwhelmingly positive feedback from close friends — which was a fantastic motivator. There was one point that many people brought up, however. If I wanted to develop my ability to focus, why did I still choose six goals? Isn’t that a lot?

This is an important question, and one that would be a problem if I didn’t address.

Perhaps it’s best to start from the beginning. I have a history of finding a new interest on nearly a weekly basis — which served as a motivator for this project. While designing the challenge, there were a few things I wanted to keep in consideration:

• I needed to tone down from starting something new each week, in order to gain some focus.
• I need some variety in the skills I pick up, otherwise I would end up hating the challenge and burnout.
• I wanted to focus on skills that would require about 2 months of commitment
• I was interested in pushing my limits in time management and learning, to see how much I could achieve.
• My goal was to develop competency in certain skills (<50th to >80th percentile), rather than expertise (>95th percentile).

Taking these factors into account, I played around with different ideas for both the # of goals and timelines. I originally thought about assigning myself a year-long timeline. However, after further consideration and consulting with a few close friends, I realized this was too long, and would likely cause fatigue and burnout.

I thought six months would be a more appropriate time, as it would still be enough of an exercise in commitment, without being so long that it drained my focus and motivation.

After deciding on a six-month timeline, I had to determine how many goals I wanted to focus on. Based upon my previous trend of starting something new each week, I estimated that I would start and stop about 24 skills over a six-month period. Scaling down from 24 to < 3 skills, seemed too limited, and just the thought of it hurt me.

After further reflection, I determined that I would want to focus on skills that took about 1–2 months of hard commitment to develop competency in. Additionally, I would ideally like to have more than one skill to focus on at a time. Splitting my time into three two-month blocks, focusing on two skills at a time, would equal six skills in total (3 * 2 = 6. QED). Six was also the number of months I was giving myself to learn these skills. I liked the sound of that.

And so with that, the goal of six skills in six months was born. Hopefully that gives some rationale to my thought process. This challenge is something where no previous methodology really exists, and so it is hard to determine whether there is a right or wrong answer. Maybe I would have been better off choosing 1 skill, or 15 skills. Who knows?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on how you would have structured something like this — there are definitely things I haven’t considered, and all insight is helpful.

Anyways. That’s all I wanted to say for this post. Thanks for reading this far if you’re still here — I appreciate it.

If you’re interested in getting email updates when I make a new post, fill out the following form. I’ll only be sending emails every 2 weeks!