I am just back from a quick Sydney trip to visit my Mum. Simple as that is, driving north, visiting, driving south, that speedy trip does qualify as a hard thing; at least it is for me. Eight hours in a car, then another six to eight hours over a day and a half visiting my Mum in a care facility and I have not even included living in Sydney normie land for a day or two. The whole situation is way more stressful than paddling across Bass Strait, pioneering a new ski traverse through avalanche terrain in the Purcell Mountains, or putting up new rock routes. Tired but wired describes how I feel. Weirdly tired given I get insufficient exercise, but strung out on stress hormones from crowds and traffic and an altogether foreign environment over which I have no control. Huge kudos, however, to my brother and his wife who put up with a creature from the latest conspiracy theory who drops in and out at odd intervals.
But the whole experience, together with the book I am currently reading - Do Hard Things by Steve Magness - got me thinking about how easy it is in the modern world to let slide a regular practice of doing hard things. Accordingly, I came back from Sydney thinking it would be interesting to try an experiment where I did one hard thing every day for 60 days. Why 60 days, well, I turn 60 this year, 60 is a pretty solid number, and twice 30 which is, in conventional parlance, the amount of time it takes to develop a habit (although anyone that has tried to replace a bad habit with a good habit knows that 30 days does not a habit make).
Keeping such a series going is not my forte. In fact, I pretty much suck at keeping series or streaks going, so I don’t feel entirely confident that I will make 60, let alone a consecutive series of 60 hard things, but, according to conventional parlance (again!), if you don’t start you will never finish, so I can at least try.
This is not a book review, but I am not super excited by the book Do Hard Things. I follow Magness on Twitter and my first impression is that Magness is one of those guys who quotes sociology/psychology studies to construct a narrative. I don’t oppose narratives. Anyone with any nounce should understand that humans understand things through stories, a trait that is likely explained by evoloutionary biology. But, the new trend to quote studies that have never been repeated or that leave most variance unexplained bothers me. The very best sociology/psychology studies in the world explain at most 30% of the variance in human behavior (a fact I am not going to bother bolstering with a study; accept that statement or not, I don’t care) which leaves 70% unexplained. Then there is the ubiquitious bias whereby only positive studies are printed and the lack of replication of most research. When taken together, these narrative stories might be interesting and even helpful but they are far from proven.
If I had to sum up the book, which is popular, it might be to say: “here is a book which claims you can do hard things without doing hard things.” That is not a completely legitimate critique of the book which does include strategies to help people do hard things. The strategies are not new or surprising and I suspect, people who are successful at doing hard things – like Candice Burt for example who is currently on a multi-month (!) ultra-marathon streak – have worked these strategies out for themselves even if they can not state them as eloquently (or with so much supporting data). Essentially the book could be summed up in one sentence: “do hard things but make hard things easy to do.” Certainly, any hard things I have done in my life, have been achieved by using this overarching organisational system although the actual mechanics might vary based on the hard task at hand.
A more interesting but also more challenging read comes from the nonprophet space, an ever shifting place populated by some people who are really good at doing hard things. I always wish I wrote as incisively as Twight, but I don’t, although I frequently recognise myself in his writings. This sentence describes perfectly my current heuristic: “It sucks to admit that this natural reaction that keeps me safe from “candida diets,” magnetic healing, or the trend of wearing a gas mask to train “at altitude” sometimes closes me off to practices that I might benefit from.” Heuristics can be useful but also have their limits.
No comments:
Post a Comment