The truth about mastery and resolutions

The Daily Drip

Do you know what's cool? When you're already proficient at something.

It's not staying in shape that's hard, it's getting into shape that's hard.

It's not practicing your instrument or language or skill for 10 minutes every couple of days, it's the 3 years of up-front work required to get you there.

Face it. No one wants to write a book. We just want to have written a book. We want the experience to be in the past.

Once you've gained proficiency, the maintenance is 100x easier. All of a sudden, you get more of your time back and you can go spin up a new skill if you want.

Instead of thinking about starting one new thing at a time and then "mastering" it to proficiency, we often take on too many things at once.

I heard good language for this somewhere. It sounded like "we overestimate what we can do in a year, but we underestimate what we can do in 10 years."

I wrote a blog post many years ago about my "launch sequence" for each day. It was a series of activities with which I would start my day. This worked for about a year, and then guess what? It broke down. I didn't keep up with more than half of those habits I'd developed.

Life just has a way of knocking things around.

That post is still out there and I should probably edit or delete it, because, in retrospect, it's not totally true or feasible.

One of the things I love about getting older is understanding myself better. Looking back at my data and learning to understand my own habits and failures. It's helpful to see those patterns and bring them to the front of my mind for fixing.

I'm more pragmatic than I was 10 years ago and I hope I'll continue to grow that way.

Sounds like a recipe for a successful long-game strategy to me.

I think this is relevant as we approach the turn of the year and we all start setting fitness and health resolutions.