Do You Feel Like You Consistently Learn And Grow All The Time, Or Does It Happen In Bursts With Periods Of Nothing In Between?

[Joseph Maynor]

Curious.  Is your success like a logarithmic curve or like a series of spikes?  Can that series of spikes be averaged out into a curve?  What kind of curve would that be for you?  This is more for the math nerds out there like me.  Ignore this part if you don't understand this.

As I am 39 turning 40 this December, I am kind of looking back at my life.   Say from age 15 - 39.  And I am fascinated with the question: Have I done enough?  Could I have expedited anything?  Have I wasted any time?  Have I screwed-up my life in some kind of irreparable way?  Have I been living the dream the entire time, faithfully trudging along, plugging-away, the entire time?  

Or were there periods of growth set off by seas of stagnation?  What does that picture look like?  How would I optimize myself if I could go back in time?  These are fascinating inquiries to me right now.  And I wanted to share this line of inquiry with you and have you go through the same kind of inquiry on your own life.

What does your life performance record look like?  Not based on external metrics, but based on your own standard for yourself.  You know you.  How have you been faithful to you, and how have you dropped-the-ball?  

We tend to bullshit ourselves about this, so you really gotta set your ego aside, sit down, poor yourself a glass of tea, and think through these issues for a while to let the objective picture, the true picture, start to emerge.  And the ego does not want to do this.  You don't want to do this.  It's threatening because it could cause some self-doubt which releases negative emotions. 

Edited August 9, 2017 by Joseph Maynor

[Shin]

Read:

Mastery from George Leonard.

[WaterfallMachine]

It differs. It isn't always the same pattern in a graph. That's why there tends to be different equations for a piecewise function.

The real world isn't always predictable. It's like the story of a turkey who's being fed everyday and thought his owner had good intentions for it. That is, only for it to realize that the owner was planning to fatten him up as a meal. People can get lost in seeing the same pattern and thinking it would always last. (Credits for this example is the author named Nassim Taleb.)

There are a lot of factors. 

Nassim Taleb talked about two concepts called Mediocristan and Extremesian. Mediocrisian has to stay within a certain range, more stable, and doesn't have much differences. While Extremesian can have extreme differences, more risky and more unpredictable. Imagine that if you take a random amount of adult human beings from the Earth and most of them would stay within a certain height. Rarely is anyone beyond seven feet or smaller than 3 feet. That's Mediocristan.

Then imagine the example of a country with a small amount of rich people and a huge amount of people in poverty for Extremesian. The rich can have millions while the poor can be barely living with a dollar a day. How wide or narrow the differences are is a concept I've often heard from Statistics.

And personal development seems to have a mix of that. Sudden changes — like a man hearing from his doctor that he has a high risk for a severe disease would either give up or push forth in major action. But there are also gradual ones such as how a teenager learns about life as they grow up. 

People are often affected by how extreme or in the middle their environment is. Personal development becomes more regular once the movement is controlled by the person. If someone can earn wisdom, discipline, compassion and more, their skills would stay with them even as they lose the external resources they have. But there could also be drastic changes so drastic that they'd get torn apart by it. They relapse. 

I've went through large changes. I've went through many relapses. I went through many periods of barely any growth because I kept repeating the same mistakes. I notice the more time passes, the smoother the flow of my efforts come. I don't force it to come to the point of overwork. I don't get so lazy that I'd waste too much time. It becomes a reinforcing feedback loop. The more experience allows me to gain experience even faster. The more discipline, the more compassion, the more technical skills, the more this and that makes it even faster. 

I don't just learn these skills. I've learned how to gain skills well.

And that's a much deeper kind of knowledge everyone would be glad to have.

 

 

 

[Loreena]

@Joseph Maynor  Not a huge period of stagnation. But sorta intermittent.

Like maybe a gap of a month or a few months. 

By the way, we're always learning something whether it's good or bad experiences. Life is too complicated for it to be a straight path. There's no manual you see !!

We're consciously or unconsciously always trying to give our best shot at life but the world is full of too many traps to fall into. If only humanity could understand that we do more harm than good by cheating our fellow men. Look at the marketing and false advertising that our culture does, Leo even mentions how toxic it is in his latest video. So yeah, it's hard to live in a world where you are bound to fail 99% of the time if you aren't smart enough. 

But whatever. There's no point in looking back unless you want to learn something from it, or it's just another self pity trip. 

Do the best everyday as long as you can make it. 

I think the one thing you or me or anyone could have done to optimize their lives is to get smart ahead of time, by knowing a lot of stuff beforehand.. by gaining a ton of knowledge and using it prudently in every situation. 

[Spiral]

Learn nope, not really at this point most self-development things are things I've heard before,Leo often provides something new almost every week even if it theoretical. As for growth yeah definitely have remade my mornings routine resenlty(thanks siim).