One thing I have pondered of late is what I wish to deliberately practice. These thoughts have been stoked by many pieces of writing, but one that has been especially great is Tyler Cowen’s piece on this topic.
One great quote Cowen mentions is the following:
What is it you do to train that is comparable to a pianist practicing scales?
Sadly, I don’t have a great response to this! The area in which this is most applicable is working out. Recently I have begun weight-lifting, and while it’s not a very exciting response, that is quite comparable to a pianist’s scales. When it comes to my work however, I have never found intentional repetition to be an especially effective method to improve my abilities. The greatest difficulty I face in this sort of deliberate practice is that currently, my work is very varied. It’s a mixture of engineering, machine learning, physics, and more recently chemistry. One thing I tried to do last October was commit to reading a different machine learning every week or so, but I found that ineffective at growing my skills. The only effective method I have found as of yet to improving my skills is to simply build projects.
There are areas, however, that I wish to excel in that are not my work. One of these is reading comprehension. A habit I’ve tried to pick up is reading everyday, but I’ve found it difficult to force myself to stick with this. This is mostly with non-fiction, and with fiction I can usually complete it faster, but non-fiction is the category in which I most wish to build my comprehension skills.
A final skill I’ve tried to build is my photography. My approach to this is to take photos, of a consistent subject (geese), almost-daily. I used to try to make a habit of, from these photos, curating and describing and editing them, and making a blog post / X thread out of them, but I found that this put me off of the photography, because the accessory work took a much greater amount of time (often two or three times) the amount of time required to do the actual photography.
That’s all from me!