Weekly Mix #247 - The mental tool I've been using a lot lately

Mastery, Learning Like an Athlete, Life Improvements & Shifting Time

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Happy Wednesday!

The newsletter is back, albeit a little late this week.

A mental tool I've been using a lot lately is shifting my time horizon.

I was reminded of this concept in Annie Duke's How to Decide, where she suggests it as a tool for deciding how long you should spend on a decision.

The idea is simple: ask yourself whether this will matter in a week/month/year, and if the answer is "no" then you can speed up your decision-making process.

But we can use this "time-travel" technique in other areas of our lives besides decision-making.

"Will this matter in a year?" is a good question to ask when you've made a mistake, and need to recalibrate or determine how serious it is.

"Where do I want to be in 5 years?" is a good question to ask when you're thinking about how to spend your time and energy.

And "What can I do today to make progress towards this bigger goal?" is a good question to ask to introduce some urgency in your day and make progress on longer-term projects.

In the short term: urgency. Try and move quickly through things in your day.

In the long term: patience. Try to choose projects and people you want to work or be with long-term.

Have a great week!

Graham

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Links

📚 Mastery - Robert Greene - One of my favourite books, in keeping with the theme of refocusing on what I want to learn, and thinking in longer time horizons, I'm re-reading it as a reminder of what it takes to master whatever you're pursuing in life.

📖 Learn Like an Athlete - David Perell - The summer is always a bit of a break from "work" to focus on other things, like spending time outside and with friends, but as fall comes around, I start to get back to focusing on what I want to learn and accomplish. This is a nice short piece that lays out how, as a knowledge worker, you can practice like an athlete.

📖 How I practice at what I do - Tyler Cowen - This pairs well with the post above, and is a short set of points on how Tyler practices as a knowledge worker. Reading and writing every day are part of it.

📖 The unsinkable potential of autonomous boats - Vox - Autonomous boats have always seemed easier to me than autonomous cars, despite the hype around the latter. And while autonomous cars have a large potential impact, the volume of shipping is much higher than people think. HD Hyundai showed a 7 percent boost in fuel efficiency on one of it's tanker tests, for example; extrapolate that across all of shipping and it's a big impact. Nice little Nova Scotia shoutout in this one too.

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