Re Human — Week 5 Reflections — Day 35
Re-inventing ourselves is the most important skill nowadays. I’m reinventing myself by improving in 15 areas at a time. This post is part of my Re Human project.
Grateful I’ve been able to do all the habits in my system every day.
At this point, I find myself even forgetting to write the checkmarks. I know feel each of the activities as an internalized “habit”, and I don’t feel like I need the reminder of the board for the daily habits anymore. But for the dynamic daily habit, I do find it good to be reminded of what activity is each day. I almost forgot to go to Salsa class on Wednesday and then I looked at the board and realize I was just in time to head out.
Some hypotheses this week:
Hypothesis #1: people think passion causes success. But I think more often than not, it’s the other way around. Success causes passion.
You may see successful people and also see that they’re passionate — one could think that they’re successful because they’re passionate. But correlation does not mean causation. It could very well be the other way around — as they’re becoming successful, they’re becoming passionate. I think this is the case. No one is born with a passion. We have interests and we develop them into passions. Do you think that passion is more likely to be developed through getting stuck and failing or through progressing and succeeding?
I personally find myself enjoying and becoming “more passionate” about certain areas the more progress I see and the better I become. So it’s very useful to be mindful of this overarching concept and understand that beginnings are going to be hard — but if you practice continuously, you have a high chance of progressing, and thus developing an interest into a passion.
Hypothesis #2: extrinsic motivation can slowly shift into intrinsic motivation.
Hypothesis #2 follows from hypothesis #1. If you’re extrinsically motivated to practice some skill / do some work, and you end up seeing lots of progress and succeeding, you can end up developing a passion, which in turn means you enjoy doing the activity, which we call intrinsic motivation.
Hypothesis #3: learning several things in parallel is advantageous because it’s easier to see and experience the connections between them.
I feel this so much with several of the areas.
One example: so many of the areas are “thinking” tools: Design is a way to visualize your thinking, Writing is a way to manipulate your thoughts expressed in words, Drawing can express some other abstract thoughts that words can’t.
Another example: this week I finished The Dream Machine, started Atomic Habits, and been reading The Selfish Gene (all are books).
The three books are about completely different topics: the history of computing, habits, and natural selection. But I can’t stop thinking about all the shared themes. Fundamental units, Response as Life, Power of Repeated Actions, Replicators, Computation, if it has a replicator, is virtually how life works — we’re complex robots.
Hypothesis #4: People learn something better if it can “hang” on branches of things they already know — metaphors.
This is why knowledge compounds. And thus:
Hypothesis #5: All learning, even in areas that seem useless, is useful.
Because everything is related and you can take concepts / mental models from one field into another one. And more concepts can help you understand more concepts more easily.
More detailed thoughts, tips, and takeaways about each area, organized by day in my Re Human publication.
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Thank You :).
