Today’s guest post is by Heather Johnston. There are two texts: a Substack Note by Applied Psychology = Communication and an excerpt from a post called Against Brute Forcing by Substack author Ava.
If you spend 30 minutes a day for a month learning Spanish you will have wasted 30 minutes of your day for an entire month, but if you spend 30 minutes a day for a year, you will know Spanish, and the hearts and minds of nearly 500 million people will become open to you.
It's useful to be reminded that sometimes more consistency is what you need. All too often, I start some new activity: an exercise routine, learning a new skill, hanging out with a new friend, only to be quickly discouraged. The additional exercise makes me sore, the new skill is really hard, conversation with the new friend feels stilted. However, if I keep at it, these pain points disappear and I reap the rewards of that early effort. In other words, the early part is necessary but not sufficient for the payoff.
However, it’s not possible to commit fully to all of the things one might like to. Spending 30 minutes a day for a year learning a new language is nice in theory, but hard to find time for in practice (in fact the U.S. state department estimates it takes English speakers an average of 600-750 hours to learn Spanish, so it might take closer to four years). For that reason, I thought it fitting to pair this with an excerpt from the blog post Against brute forcing.
Everyone in my life is so excellent at showing initiative. I mean, any one of my friends could cold email the statue of someone who died in 1578 and get a response in 30 minutes. They’re very crisp communicators and extremely competitive. A lot of them run companies or are otherwise self-employed in a way that requires them to just do things constantly. And again, everything in our culture sort of implies that that’s just how you have to be to succeed. You have to be working really hard all the time and constantly brute forcing things. But what I’ve become passionate about in the past couple of years is the idea of not forcing things.
Take the ayahuasca discourse. Urban legend has it that people take ayahuasca and afterwards do things like give up on their startups, which is bad because productivity, ambition, greatness, etc. Now, my argument is that if you do psychedelics and quit something afterwards, it’s probably because you didn’t like or care about it very much. Again, we live in a culture that teaches smart young people that they have to direct their attention and energy towards something, even if it’s arbitrary and they don’t get any sense of meaning out of it. Because of that you get a lot of people trying very hard to brute force something that’s essentially meaningless to them. To me, that’s a bad outcome.
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Another way to say it: you don’t get to work on very many things for 10 years, so choose what you focus on carefully. Save your persistence for what’s truly close to your heart.