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# non-fiction, 2021-12-06
I started off this year by working on my productivity system. That didn’t end well. Here are my two cents.
Just like any cult, productivity techniques can be assuring and comforting, but 99% of the time it isn’t the cure for whatever problem you’re having. We, as programmers that know premature optimization is evil, should also be aware of the toxicity of premature self-improving. They both offer little benefits, but foster a false sense of achievement.
Even for the 1%, it’s doubtful that an “improved” version of you can offer what you really want. Let it be wealth or knowledge, we all know the amount of them doesn’t matter that much, it’s how we use them makes the difference.
After my fair share of failures in this area, I’m now rooting for the mindset of an ignorant wise. Or “stay foolish” as Jobs taught us. There are many important questions in life that we are so ignorant of, but let’s not pretend to know their answers, more importantly, not cover up our ignorance with irrelevant chores.
In the same spirit, we should work on a more creative measurement system than the inhumane “productivity” or “efficiency”, that encourages something worthy of our unique existence.
The urge for destruction is also a creative urge.
I borrow this term from Jeff Bezos. He adviced “a skeptical view of proxies” in the context of corporate management, which I think applies to personal management just as well. We can all acknowledge its correctness to some degree, but still regularly fail to recognize this pattern in our daily life.
There are two cases from my past experience that I consider particularly harmful.
It’s too often that I measure the progress of learning by the amount of books comsumed. And the count soon becomes all I care and push for. To quote Schopenhauer from his “On Books and Reading”:
Accordingly, in reading, the work of thinking is, for the greater part, done for us. This is why we are consciously relieved when we turn to reading after being occupied with our own thoughts. [..] Such, however, is the case with many men of learning: they have read themselves stupid. For to read in every spare moment, and to read constantly, is more paralyzing to the mind than constant manual work, which, at any rate, allows one to follow one’s own thoughts.
We set off learning for the capability of doing. But once treating it as a proxy, we unknowingly slides into the illusion that learning is doing. In this tweet, John Carmack calls us out to be “a do-er” first than “the educated”. Yes, the educated like to think they already know the taste of doing, when in fact they don’t. My favorite quote on this is from Peter Medawar, in his book “Advice to a Young Scientist”:
Too much book learning may crab and confine the imagination, and endless poring over the research of others is sometimes psychologically a research substitute, much as reading romantic fiction may be a substitute for real-life romance….The beginner must read, but intently and choosily and not too much.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.