Two Personal Thoughts

Just a couple of musings I’ve had throughout this Christmas Eve Day:

1. To increase productivity, we need to be self-aware of how our environment affects us, and then control our environment accordingly. At least for me, that second notion is often neglected.

   After four years of college, I’ve become acutely aware of my inability to do any significant amount of work while at home. I’ve simply made the psychological association that home is not for work, and it’s hard to undo that, especially when the rest of your family shares that association. Only this year have I finally begun to take action with respect to that. No longer do I bring schoolwork home to “work on,” I finish it before leaving. Further, I’ve shortened my breaks slightly, since I’ve learned I don’t need that long to recharge.

   I need to take this aspect of myself very seriously when setting up living and working situations post-graduation. Ideally, I won’t spend more than a few weeks at “home” after graduating, and I need to make sure I have the financial pieces in place to allow that to occur.

2. People love incremental improvements and successes. Incremental improvement is nearly guaranteed, very safe, and makes you feel consistently good. We see the effects of this in many places (I should take the time to detail all of them someday). Many video games are based upon this concept of incremental improvement: fight ten more monsters and you’ll get stronger, win another race and you’ll get a faster car to win the next race, etc.

   It’s very similar to the difference between hard and difficult. Hard things parallel incremental improvement. It’s hard to write a history thesis; you have to read many books (incrementally improving your knowledge) before you can coalesce the thoughts into a solid manuscript. It’s difficult to write a math thesis: you usually have to come up with a novel, creative mathematical idea, often without incrementation.

That’s all for now, I hope everyone enjoys their Christmas (or continuation of Hanukkah, or Thursday) tomorrow!

-III