Why Do You Do What You Do?
correcting what I view as
mistranslations of scientific research about human development and so that is
the core of my work and I think I'm
doing it for everyone who is curious but either doesn't have a scientific
background or doesn't have that
particular scientific background curious but interested in self-improvement but
doesn't either have the time or or
the means to to go sifting through this evidence themselves and what is the
sort
What Areas Of
Self-Improvement Do You Focus On?
Realms of self-improvement that you have focused on thus far in your career well earlier on I was focused in physical skill acquisition like in in athletics
but increasingly uh I've moved into career and personal development generally and looking at that with a very very kind of long lens right so one of the most important things to me one of the most important messages that I've b working on the last few years is
the fact that sometimes optimizing
for short-term development will undermine your long-term development so let's
say
if we're thinking about sports or
music or something like that the obvious thing to do is to get a head start and
whatever you're doing pick something stick with it don't don't switch things because then you've lost time Focus very narrowly and do as much of it as you possibly can to the exclusion of other things that's such an obvious way
right and you will jump out to to a
lead right we see that in sports and music we see that in school with certain
Head
Start programs that give people an advantage in some academic skills the problem is that kind ofnarrow Focus creates short-term results but undermines this broader toolbox that
you need for long-term development and so you'll see what scientists call Fade Out in these advantages which isn't necessarily actually anything going away it's the fact that people with this broader base will catch up and surpass so it appears to be a fade out okay so if you take more time to get a broader understanding of something
whether it's in sports If you're sort of a child prodigy um over the long term that's going to benefit you better and help sustain your development but in the short term you might lose out because there's some kid who is doing you know
really deliberate practice obsessively and he's going to have a it's kind of like the tortoise in the hair yeah analogy where you know the tortoise uh eventually wins the race yeah I mean
there's a a big body of research in Psychology that can be summarized with the phrase breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer okay transfer is the ability of someone to take skills and knowledge and use it to solve a problem
they haven't seen before right you transfer to a new situation and what predicts your ability to do that is the breadth of problems you've been exposed to in practice if you're exposed to like a broader set of problems you're forced to build these generalizable flexible models that you'll be able to apply to new things going forward across all of your work at the very heart of what people are trying to achieve in their lives what is that at the very very heart of what they're trying to achieve that you're speaking to getting better getting better at things right obviously people want
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