Things read - Week 21

Two of my favorite podcasters got together few months ago to discuss productivity and habits and I had to listen and then listen again to take notes. So not necessarily the things I read but rather listened to.

Cut the vegetables

The show starts with a story of a young lad name Abbe Faria in Portuguese occupied Goa, couple of centuries ago known for giving eloquent sermons and speeches. He is then summoned by the Portuguese queen to the great city of Lisbon to give one of his sermons. Looking at the grandness of the venue and setup, he fumbles. No words come out of his mouth. Then his father, who was accompanying him on this trips, shouts to him: PUTA!! Hii sagli bhaaji. Kaator re bhaaji, Kaator re bhaaji, Kaator re bhaaji. Meaning: all these are vegetables. Cut the vegetables. Cut the vegetables. Cut the vegetables. Ultimately everything in life boils down to doing the routine, cutting the vegetables. Building habits. Doing the same thing again and again.

Just do it

Understand the trade-off between getting it done and getting it right. Often, we let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Never let perfection be the enemy of production. How do you get something right? You get something right by getting it done, again and again. You have to get it done first before getting it right. We all get into something and start overestimating the short term and underestimating the long term. Have a bias towards action. This is my take: I fully embrace the idea of just doing it and keeping going while continuing to improve. But, at some point, you have to incorporate feedback as well. If you're just ploughing through the weightlifting, day after day, without getting help from the professional, you might not make it too far. Or the progress might be slow. So, while this mindset of just do it works wonders, it is even more wonderful to incorporate the feedback loop from the expert.

Don't just do it; Be it

The next advice from Amit is just to be a bit more introspective. A great question to ask yourself every now and then is: What is the best version of yourself? What does that person do that you don't do now? What does that person not do, that you do now? This connects nicely to James Clear Atomic Habit concept that a habit change should start from the identity change. So put some thought into you own self image and then embrace it. The habits will slowly start sticking (with other techniques like habit stacking and make it so simple that you cannot not do it.) Ideally, embracing the self image will drive the habit and not the other way around.

Verbs matter; Adjectives don't

According to a study, if you take a group of kids and divide them into two, for one group, you praise them in terms of their intelligence and smarts (praise them on attributes). For the second group, you praise them for their hard work and effort (praise them on verbs i.e. you tried well, you worked hard, you persisted etc). The second group is more likely to continue to do better compared to the first group. What's worse is that the first group, who were praised on attributes, might even start to cheat since in their minds they are now intelligent and somehow need to continue being intelligent. Ultimately, we improve by working hard. It's the effort that matters.

Ajay Shah underscores another important point that talent doesn't mean anything. The two superpowers are curiosity and endurance. He also touches on the subject of how playing infinite games is better than chasing goals. You can achieve tangible goals but what after it? A dog chases the car and it finally gets it. But was it worth it?

And finally on the perils of labelling someone: Richard Dawkins says: "We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one go further. "

Habits make us

Thought experiment: Let's say you take a room full of writers. In this group, there are great writers, mediocre writers, and bad writers, i.e., the whole spectrum. If you ask all the writers what their goals and aspirations are, you won't be able to tell who is a good writer and who is not. Because everyone wants the same thing. But if you ask them about their processes, what are their habits - you can easily tell the great writers apart and who is going to make it and who is not going to make it. And, you'll never be wrong.

It takes focus, makes demand so to inculcate a habit, do it one at time since it takes at least a couple of months. Once it goes on the auto pilot, you can turn your attention to other habits but always one habit at time.

What blew me away in this portion of conversation was that when AS says how he has managed to build his life around just one purpose: to get more hours per day for reading. Push away things that are not important. Reduce the amount of decisions you have to make, reduce the burden of everyday life so as to just make time to read.