Explosive progress vs. Consistent growth
07/22/2022
Days where nothing seems to happen are the ones to explore your inner world.
I've noticed that keeping up with consistent habits seems to come in waves. Maybe they aren't suited for my personality. Maybe I work better in bursts rather than consistent 1% increments.
Explosive progress vs. Consistent growth
It's exhausting to try to wrangle my mind.
The day has been eventful, I've gone out to eat, I've walked around, I've watched videos online. Yet barely any output has occurred, I've slept and feel groggy, but at least I've meditated.
It's one of those days.
I'm not going to blame myself or talk down myself.
There is a restructuring happening within me. I'm noticing more and more of the parts of myself that are struggling to be expressed. The past drillmaster energy is moving away and the playful creative side of myself wants to play.
Can I just let myself play?
I can build up motivation and passion through passive consumption.
I would watch videos on Youtube about video games I was playing when I was younger. Or looked and researched extensively about a hobby before I jumped in. And usually when I found I had passion for something, jumping in was easy and I moved quickly to learn it.
This process is something I've forgotten about.
There's a part of myself that was creating expectations for myself that I couldn't meet.
I forced myself to set unrealistic schedules, without letting myself experience excitement and the energy to start it was greater than the resistance. Energy management is a concept I've been extremely interested in. Energy management is the awareness of how energy builds up within us and is then expressed.
Perceiving reality clearly involves perceiving our inner world clearly.
My mind believes that it needs to be consistent and grow daily at something.
I learned this from a book or something. However, looking at the reality, I've procrastinated more times than I can count and then finished projects last minute. I run sprints on new skills, spending hours and hours in one sitting instead of dividing study time into 1 hour every day.
Everytime I've gotten insecure about my skills - I try to create systems of consistent practice.
And everytime I've attempted to follow systems of consistent practice, they break down.
All this time I've been trying to return back to the ways I learned before in childhood. I know that all of the most successful projects have come from a sudden burst of inspiration and passion. I can build a structure extremely quickly that works well enough to move past the initial stages.
It only takes a single document and vision and finding the right people to make something happen.
These 1000 word essays are bursts of energy within a short period of time.
I am not writing an essay over multiple days. They need to get out now instead of later. When I get into the flow, stopping to do something else cuts off the energy I need to see something through.
This makes me think a lot about how I am structuring my creative projects.
I am not letting myself find inspiration for music, art, and other projects.
What would work better is to surround myself with the creative things that inspire me and passively revisit them through my storage system. I've been using mymind to save random articles and stuff and I should use it as intended, which is to search up whatever I'm looking for passive inspiration from. Generating the energy for the creative impulse is my goal for this process.
What happens after the creative impulse?
I give myself the time to be obsessed.
I have an addictive personality. Whenever I find something that hits my dopamine receptors, I keep on pressing the button. This works extremely well for projects that fall under the passion category.
Giving myself time to be obsessed means scheduling in my calendar blocks of time where I can be undisturbed and focused on my work. Deep work comes easily to me, except when I've been trying to implement systems of consistent practice. I finally realize now that "consistent practice" has been robbing me of the time to make exponential progress in a short amount of time.
When I'm in the flow, don't disrupt it. When something is fun for me, time passes by quickly. There's no block when I'm in this deep work flow.
Obsession is one of the sources of extreme progress that I make in my life.
I can consume information quickly and efficiently.
In the past, I was interested in note-taking systems because the thought of having access to all of my notes about the things I consume was enticing.
However, I've realized that what I learn from consuming turns into experiences when I get into states of flow. I learned through experience, not through processing notes. I can take notes on my output and experiences and I will learn just as much as if I had taken notes on quotes I've found.
The feedback loop of experience is stronger for learning than the feedback loop of active note-taking.
My strength is transformation and rapid growth.
What I've learned about transformation is that it requires us to actually experience what we are feeling and to go through challenges instead of avoiding them. Transformation doesn't happen from moving emotions or words around our head in loops.
We must surrender to experiencing instead of overthinking.
What I've learned about myself through this process of reflection around my chaotic creative and learning process is:
1. Inspiration over consistency: utilize passive consumption to create passion and activation energy instead of trying to schedule arbitrary consistent practice time.
2. Follow the creative impulse and allow myself to be obsessed: after I've created the activation energy required for the creative impulse, block off the time necessary for me to continue my deep work (reduce distractions and move obligations).
3. Prioritize reflection of experiences as a tool for learning: instead of processing notes, process my experiences and track them in my personal knowledge management system.