Re Human — Month 1 Recap — Day 28
Re inventing ourselves is the most important skill nowadays. I’m re inventing myself by improving in 15 areas at a time. This post is part of my Re Human project.
Four weeks ago, I decided and shared that I would be improving in 15 areas at a time. I called this personal project/experiment “Renaissance Human”, and I’ve learned a lot in the process.
When people do experiments, they usually have hypotheses they want to test.
I had a couple hypotheses before starting my experiment and I’ve also formed new ones that I wouldn’t have thought of if I hadn’t started the experiment in the first place.
In this Monthly recap, I’m going to be sharing the major hypotheses I had and the new ones I’ve formed, using stories of my learning process from the 15 areas as examples — to either back them up or to disprove them.
First off, the 15 areas are: meditation, writing, piano, reading & taking notes of books, becoming a media influencer, soccer trick juggling, piano, fitness, music production, salsa dancing, digital drawing & painting, V.R. Artist & architect, graphic design, different & positive social interaction systems, topics deep dives, and building & running a startup.
Hypothesis #1: it’s possible to consistently be learning 15 things at the same time.
So far it seems that this is true. I’ve been lucky and I’m grateful I haven’t missed a single activity — I’ve seen progress in the 15 areas every week.
The trick here was to rely on the consistency of daily habits, and innovate on a new idea I’m calling a dynamic daily habit. Which brings me to my second hypothesis:
Hypothesis #2: there’s not much time in a day to be working or building a startup, and be learning across the 15 areas I want to be improving on, but there’s enough time in a week.
This is where the dynamic daily habit comes in. I made some of the areas daily habits — meditation, working on startup, piano, writing, reading books, soccer trick juggling, and fitness. But it would be silly to also want to do salsa, music production, graphic design, V.R. building, etc. every single day. Each of these areas require some time to get started and just 10–20 minutes isn’t enough time to really jump in and get the learning that comes from the process. The nature of these activities is that they require more time than others that I could switch in and out much faster, like meditation or soccer trick juggling.
So I thought: I’ll make a dynamic daily habit that changes the activity depending on the day of the week. I called it “extended Re Human activity”, so in my mind, every day I have a daily habit of doing an extended Re Human activity — which is very useful because we humans live in a world where daily habits are the way we continuously do things — so I thought it would be useful to ride on that power.
I’ve actually really enjoyed these dynamic daily habits, because even though it’s a “routine”, it’s a routine that changes every day. This is related to a third hypothesis I realized through the process:
Hypothesis #3: diversifying your activities lowers the probability of depleting your willpower.
I think that willpower comes from our mind —how we perceive we’re doing, what we think is left to be done, what expectations we have for ourselves, feeling overwhelmed or excited, etc. There were studies claiming that willpower depletes itself over the day, but then there’s studies that have argued that this isn’t actually true.
I personally think that as long as it’s physically possible (i.e. we obviously require sleep, food, etc), it’s purely dependent on our minds. But our minds are highly influenced by biochemical processes we can’t fully control. Also, even if we could have some perception of control, it’s hard to exercise that perception — our minds are very powerful and have other mechanisms they’re trying to satisfy.
Here’s an example: I believe motivation is highly correlated with progress — if you’re seeing progress in something, you get motivated. If you’re stuck and can’t see a possibility of progressing, you’re de-motivated. For example, I have found it hard to get started on music production whenever it’s “music production” days because I hadn’t been seeing much progress, even though it’s one of the areas I most want to improve on! Our minds are smart and probably evolved into creating this mechanism to not pursue pointless/impossible things.
But this hypothesis of how motivation works might explain a phenomenon I’ve experienced:
By diversifying the activities / areas I’m working on, there’s less chance that I’m completely stuck and don’t feel progress at all. If I were only working on one thing and I get stuck, it would be hard to keep pushing through because I’m not seeing any progress. But because I have 15 different areas that I’m working on, there’s a much higher chance that in a couple of them I’m feeling progress and thus gain will-power — I have 15 different possible sources instead of one.
This is where some of the seemingly pointless areas, such as “soccer trick juggling” have actually turned out to be super useful. I can physically feel getting better at juggling and doing tricks, thus giving me a dose of will-power every day — just by doing 10mins every day.
Hypothesis #4: consistent, small acts are more powerful than grandiose single-time acts.
This is a hypothesis I had before starting the experiment and I can obviously say that I’ve improved more in these 15 areas than in other areas I haven’t even done anything in (like martial arts). But in comparing my small daily habits vs my longer weekly habits, I can’t really tell with certainty which approach has had more improvement. It’s probably way more dependent on the area itself and how hard it is to improve in it, for each person. The whole thing about experiments is that you keep things constant and only change a single variable to see how that variable actually affects the system — haven’t done that for this hypothesis so that’s probably why I can’t tell (for weekly vs daily habits).
Hypothesis #5: goals are not necessary for progress. In fact, the process is the only thing that creates progress.
This is an extremely powerful realization/concept I’ve been internalizing more and more recently but have experienced several data points throughout my life and through stories from others.
I didn’t set any goals for any of the areas. For some I set directions and for others they’re just habits/systems. I didn’t say “my goal is to be able to do one-hand pull ups in a month”, or “my goal is to do the around the world soccer juggling trick in a month”, but I was able to do both of them in around two weeks.
For some areas, having a goal seemed too restricting or arbitrary. I don’t even know what I would have as a goal for Salsa Dancing: I didn’t know much before starting about what was possible and I would be trying to predict what would be the thing to be optimizing for, without knowing what’s actually best at any given moment. Plus, dancing is really about the process more than anything else.
This hypothesis is part of a grander hypothesis I’m forming and writing about that abandoning your goals is a good idea if you focus on systems instead. Sign up for my weekly present (at the bottom) or follow me here on Medium if you want to be notified when I share my thoughts on this.
Hypothesis #6: media online accumulates value over time, not only when it’s posted.
At the beginning I wasn’t planning on writing daily documentation posts of my learnings/process for this experiment, but my co-founder Max Deutsch suggested I should give it a try (because he did a similar learning project last year and found it very valuable to share his process publicly). So on the second day of my experiment I started writing these documentation posts. I found that they have indeed accumulated value over time, not just when they were posted. (right now the value is in the form of giving value to other people who read them, and in them “clapping” on the posts and sharing them with friends, multiplying the value). The cool thing is that people don’t have to access the content when I post — they can access and gain value from it whenever — maybe even 100 years from now.
All my hypotheses are just hypotheses — they’re not definitive claims of how the world works. They’re heavily biased thinking based on experiences from one person — but I think they could be useful to more people than just me.
If you want to see the stories / learnings / art from each area, check out my daily posts here.
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Thank You :).
