keep improving after you seen everything or tried? im lost

[Franz_]

If you’ve put in 10,000+ hours into something (the rule) and really gone all the way with it, applied every insight you found, pushed your understanding as far as you could (including things like awakening in spirituality or mastery in any field), how do you keep evolving when there is no resource/insight anymore 

At that point it can feel like you’ve already seen everything there is to see, or at least everything accessible to you right now.

So what actually drives further growth beyond that?

Is it about somehow generating new kinds of insights, or more about deepening and refining what you already know? Or is the feeling that there are no more insights just a blind spot?

And do you think endless improvement or evolution is possible or we are limited no matter what when it comes to this?

[LastThursday]

10,000 hours is just a rule of thumb not a hard cut off, so there is always more to add without limit. It also depends on the "something" in the "into something" you mentioned. The more time you put into something the more it will affect other areas - the skills and knowledge translate into other things. In the end it's not that you're mastering a particular subject, it's that you're levelling up everything, but with an emphasis in a particular area. 

There is a sense of diminishing returns though for a lot of things, you make a lot of progress earlier, but slower later, because everything becomes more complex or subtle or about fine tuning or at the limit of some faculty such as anatomy or thinking.

Also when mastering a thing you don't know what you don't know, especially if no one else has done it before. You are always working things out for yourself, and that takes deep domain knowledge to come up with new insights, and time to pick things up. Even if others have gone before you, you still need to research their techniques and embody them yourself. It can feel like there's nothing more to learn, but that's not true most of the time, you just don't know what it is yet.

It's endless because mastery affects many things at once, and you're free to shift your focus around, and because there is a lot of stuff already out there to learn.

Edited 21 hours ago by LastThursday

[mmKay]

There is always more to do, learn, see or go to. The ceiling you're mentioning only exist in theory, and inside the mind, not in practice.

Infinity is infinitely infinite

[Franz_]

@LastThursday  about thinking and anatomy, can you somehow overcome these limits? how would you do it? and i don't really agree about there is always something to learn because when you mastered  a martial art,how can you develop it further? in that domain your pretty limited imo what i mean is that there isnt really anything to work with,it's pretty grounded,so do you think is there truly a new thing to learn in every domain even in the grounded stuff like this? i hope u get what i mean even with a not so good explanation like what i said  haha

Edited 2 hours ago by Franz_

[LastThursday]

@Franz_ with thinking the only fundamental limit is time and patience, thinking is a slow process, thinking about new things is hard. Thinking has a kind of ratchet effect whereby you commit new knowledge to long-term memory and thinking becomes easier because of that. Take someone like a mathematician, all they do is think, but they can learn new abstractions without limit. Mathematics is bigger than any one person can take on in a lifetime.

With physical bodily stuff, the limits are absolute physical limits like strength, speed, endurance and so on. I think for those sorts of things you will hit your own limits if you push things far enough, and you'll have a very good idea of what those are. But still, you don't know what you don't know. If you were to try and run a marathon and you've never run before then you might mistakenly think that you've reached a limit of your abilities. Clearly if you keep practising then you'll realise you were wrong.

But even with physical stuff it's not as if it's just physical limits, you also have a brain controlling things. I would say there's no end of nuance in how you use your body. For example sprinters train with a coach because there's a lot to master about exactly how you should be running, outside of pure speed and stamina. So you can reach a biological limit of mastery, but still improve on technical ability.

To re-iterate the point I made before, nearly always a domain is not strictly defined, it's fuzzy round the edges and you're free to explore and improve around those edges.

Edited just now by LastThursday