False Dichotomies

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When you think about improving at something, which camp do you fall into?

Do you work harder, or do you work smarter?

There is a false dichotomy most people are presented with where improvement must either be a product of working harder or smarter. You should avoid falling for this trap. Knowing the best way to do something and never practicing is doomed to failure. Always practicing without understanding your mistakes is also doomed to failure. These two factors are multipliers upon each other.

For most of my life, I fell into the work smarter bucket. I would spend countless hours attempting to optimize various aspects of my life.

What I didn’t realize is that, it’s really only half of the battle.

You can’t always just work smarter. You will be more efficient in your goals, but for the most part, your progress will mostly look the same as before with modest improvements. For most, I imagine there will still be a feeling of something missing.

On the other hand, you can’t simply just work harder/longer. Sure, you will see improvements. There most likely be improvements in how you do work as well. But not all practice is equal. You can dedicate yourself to a task and not end up with world class skill, despite working at it every second of your existence.

Practical Example

I first saw this false dichotomy affecting my school studies, but at the time wouldn’t have been able to put it into words.

In my life, I had a really hard time studying for school. I would study for hour and hours and still fail tests horribly. Despite researching and implementing a half dozen studying methods, I would still have issues every time.

I built a pillar of knowledge that did me no good. I would ace sections of the test no problem, but I would wonder what words meant, or which formula to attempt to apply for a given problem. I took this as a sign that studying, except in extreme amounts would not help, so why try at all.

A solution?

The issue wasn’t with my effort, but in a false dichotomy. I thought that the only way to improve my grades was to study more, since this is what everyone was telling me at the time. So, I would study more, and do the same if not worse on the tests. The real trick, had nothing to do with the act of studying. It was entirely wrapped in this web of lies I was telling myself about what I needed to do to succeed.

I was spinning my wheels, while my wheels were off the ground. I was missing the base knowledge required to make any progress in understanding for whichever section of the test I was studying for. I couldn’t know what to study because I simply didn’t know what I was missing.

I wanted to study smarter, so I would practice with new ways to organize flash cards, new apps for task management, or reading self help books. None of which were helping much. I knew I used to be good at school, and that it wasn’t always this difficult to keep up. So I resigned myself to bad grades assuming the classes were just too difficult for me. Until I finally tried the thing I didn’t want to do the most.

Carefully chosen new motivation

I hadn’t cared about my grades for a while and still didn’t. Instead, I started caring about improving my ability to explain what I was learning to a time traveling version of myself 1 year ago. Everything went from: this doesn’t make any sense, why should I care, then do nothing. To: I must not know enough about it yet to be able to explain to my past self. There must be something about this that I don’t understand the most, lets go find what I need to know be able to know. And of course, repeat until you find something you start to understand, and build from there.

I started paying attention in class by writing down key points of what the teacher said, especially if I didn’t understand it. I would almost never review this later. I would do this so my attention would drift less. Short notes helped build cursory knowledge of the subjects and really helped in picking the areas to dedicate more studying effort on.

It doesn’t always work, and nothing sufficiently complicated ever ‘always works’. The point is to find out that you are often wrong, and can enjoy learning even when done just to make learning the next thing easier.

Victory through side effects

After I started to do the correct thing, I still failed a good chunk of tests because I was so far behind. I needed to learn the things to learn the things to learn the things we were working on. But with a new mental model and building up the small things to learn the bigger things, my life became a lot easier in general.

I no longer looked at studying as a linear output machine, where each ounce of effort was equal to every other ounce. I no longer spent all of my time trying to know the answers for whichever random chapter I picked to master. I did everything I could to make studying enjoyable and worth while by constantly asking myself what was missing? Constantly asking myself if I agreed with the outcome of the lessons, finding ways to keep myself engaged.

The lessons here don’t just apply to this one area of life, but are the foundation for all improvement. There is an area of your life, that you’ve given up on because you believe that you have already done your best. You have built this false dichotomy of self where you must simply be only so good at the task because you put x amount of thought or effort in and still fail to make meaningful progress.

Notes for my former self

If I were to give advice to my past self to stop the unnecessary suffering. I would tell myself:

• Beating yourself up is not helpful. Acknowledge your shortcomings, but identify one or two things you can do to bridge the gap and move on.
• You can’t put in a lot of time and effort on the same thing for very long if you don’t actively find ways you already enjoy parts of it.
• Expect progress to take twice as long or more. Outcomes are often exponential in nature, later progress will come with much less effort.
• You can’t control external factors, but don’t assume that they are the only things that matter.
• Don’t worry about getting things perfect the first time, have the courage to make a lot of mistakes and review what went wrong.
• Life is about failure, and you aren’t living if you aren’t failing in some area. So quit worrying and just go do the things you can do, but just don’t know it yet.

I hope this rant is as useful to someone else as it would have been to my past self.