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Besides startups, it's not enough to find the most important thing you should do. You should also make yourself do it, often at the expense of ignoring everythi

by read 12y ago

Besides startups, it's not enough to find the most important thing you should do. You should also make yourself do it, often at the expense of ignoring everything else. I'm surprised how often I'm able to intellectually tell what the most important thing is and still not bring myself do it. I wish the article offered tips on how to do that. A big problem I have with time is that it seems you need to have some runway of time for your subconscious to mull over things. And you can't force this process. Not only do you get an answer when you least expect it, which you can't predict, but it also seems that forcing yourself to come up with an answer yields a bad one. It's as if you should be forcing yourself to not try hard for an answer. How do you deal with that? Could you get better at this type of ambient thinking? How? Are there exercises for improving, or at least directing, subconscious thought? I suspect the place to look isn't the hard sciences but the arts.

krenoten 12y ago
For hard problems, you can take advantage of (and should embrace) the mind's wild variability by consciously outlining what you know about the problem until you hit a pause in the stream of consciousness, letting your subconscious work it over for a while as you put your conscious mind into a different context, and returning to it every so often to see if you've realized anything new. For me this is sometimes highly productive. And it's not always something glaringly apparent that will be presented to you. Often something up the hierarchy has changed but your conscious representation is left with a bunch of dangling pointers. So it's good to revisit the roots of the problem and reconstruct the problem from there outwards. A good way to get better at it is to deliberately engage in this active context switching. You will pick up on what sorts of frequencies and how far away from the original problem you should context switch as you get more experience with doing this as deliberately as possible.

by read 12y ago

krenoten 12y ago

For hard problems, you can take advantage of (and should embrace) the mind's wild variability by consciously outlining what you know about the problem until you hit a pause in the stream of consciousness, letting your subconscious work it over for a while as you put your conscious mind into a different context, and returning to it every so often to see if you've realized anything new. For me this is sometimes highly productive. And it's not always something glaringly apparent that will be presented to you. Often something up the hierarchy has changed but your conscious representation is left with a bunch of dangling pointers. So it's good to revisit the roots of the problem and reconstruct the problem from there outwards. A good way to get better at it is to deliberately engage in this active context switching. You will pick up on what sorts of frequencies and how far away from the original problem you should context switch as you get more experience with doing this as deliberately as possible.